Marketing for Healing Professionals - How To INCREASE TRAFFIC to your WEBSITE

Many healing professionals either don’t have a website or have one that is sitting in cyberspace not getting much, if any, traffic. Those sites that get a lot of visitors are still few and far between. This is because few healing professionals understand how to get people to visit their site. If your website is not getting very much traffic, it is not doing you any good as a marketing tool and it would be wise to do something about it. This article outlines 5 methods that, if implemented properly, can drive more traffic to your website.

1. Have a Great Website

The first way to make sure you get traffic to your site is to have a site that is well designed, easy to navigate, has compelling copy (text), and has the information that your target market wants or needs.  Unless you are a designer, designing your site by yourself is probably going to make your site look amateurish, which will in turn leave the impression that you don’t know, or don’t care about what you are doing. No one wants to buy something from a person who doesn’t seem professional.Your copy should be written with the intent of getting your visitors to take action when they arrive at your site (i.e. sign up for a newsletter, contact you for more information, or buy a product or service from you).  There should be enough copy so that your visitors get a good feel for you, your services or products. It should be clear what you are offering and indicate how you are different from your competition. Most importantly, your copy should be engaging, drawing the reader in so that they keep reading.Even getting a large amount of traffic to your site won’t do you any good unless your site is appealing to your visitors once they arrive. Research shows you only have a few seconds to capture your visitor’s attention when they land at your site. Therefore, your website must grab and hold their attention in those first few seconds or they will click away to the next site.

2. Optimize Your Site for The Search Engines

You will first want to make sure that your site is focused on a narrow enough target market so that it has some chance of coming up in the search results of the major search engines (i.e. Google, MSN, Yahoo). With the billions of web pages on the Internet you have to have a very narrowly defined target market if you have any hope of being found. Furthermore, having a website that attracts targeted visitors will help ensure that people tell others about it and will help increase the number of other sites that link to your site.

Once you have established a focused market, you will then need to determine the keywords that people might put into the search engines in order to find your site.  There are many keyword research tools on the market to help you do this. Each page of your site should be optimized for different keywords. Your keywords should be used on your pages several times—but don’t overdo it so that your page looks like it has been “stuffed” with keywords. Google and the other search engines will penalize your site if they catch you doing this. You will also want to include some of your keywords in the headings and subheadings of your pages.

Having a narrow target market will also help you develop focused “title tags” for your site. Title tags are the words you see at the top of each page of your web browser when you are viewing a webpage and are a key factor in search engine rankings.  Each page of your site should contain a different title tag consisting of about 6-12 of your main keywords for that page, with the most important ones occurring first.

You will likely need to hire someone to help optimize your site unless you spend time researching it so you can do it on your own.

3. Submit Your Website to Internet Directories

While it’s no longer necessary to submit your site to the major search engines as their search spiders or robots will eventually find your site on the web and index it, you can, and should submit your site to directories such as DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) and the Yahoo Directory (www.dir.yahoo.com). Directories are different than search engines in that they are edited by people. Getting your site listed in directories will help get the word out that your site exists and also create a link back to your site which can also help increase your search engine rankings.

There is no guarantee that once you submit to a directory that your site will be listed, and it often can take weeks or months before you will find out. You should submit your site as soon as you can for this reason.

4. Acquire Links from other Sites

In order for your site to show up as high as possible in the rankings of search engines for particular search terms you will have to have what is called a high “link popularity.” Link popularity is determined by the quantity and quality of links leading back to your site. Getting links from just any site won’t help you much and may even hurt you. For example, healing professionals likely wouldn’t want links from an automotive shop. Getting links from sites that don’t have high link popularity is also not going to be very useful to you. Ideally, you want links from other related sites that also have high link popularity.

There are many ways to get your website link on other’s sites. First, just having a good, resourceful site is a sure way to get links. The more useful your site is, the more likely that others will link to it. There are also numerous directories on the web for healing professional services that you might want to list your services in. Some of these are free and some of them you have to pay for. Your professional association or training institute may also have a directory that you can list in.

A very popular way to get links from other sites is to write short, informative articles for article directories that exist on the web. There are hundreds of these directories that you can submit your articles to that will allow you to have a link back to your site in the byline of your article. To find some, search for “article directories” in Google.

5. Write an Informative Ezine

I encourage all my clients to have an ezine (electronic newsletter) as soon as they set up their website. Your newsletter is one of the best ways to build traffic to your site-- if you can write one that includes valuable information that your target market wants and needs. It doesn’t have to be long, but it should be written on a regular basis and it must be interesting and compelling. You will want to publish it once a month at least so that your subscribers don’t forget about you.
A well-written ezine will be forwarded to others gradually increasing traffic to your website as you grow your list of subscribers. You can also list your newsletter in one of the numerous ezine directories on the Internet that will also send visitors to your site.
Although the above 5 points will help you get started on increasing traffic to your site, getting high quality traffic is something that is an ongoing process.  A successful web strategy is regularly tested and tweaked accordingly.

Juliet Austin, MA, a former Counsellor, is a Marketing Coach and Copywriter who assists therapists, coaches and alternative health practitioners in building successful practices. Juliet is the author of the FREE, 22, page report: “67 Surefire Ways To Attract Clients”. Get your FREE copy at http://www.julietaustin.com.  If you want to discover more methods of using your website to attract clients, then also check out Juliet’s “Client-Attracting Websites” series while at her website and her other site: http://marketingaprivatepractice.com.