Recently I had a client ask, “should therapists have a blog?” The answer is an unequivocal yes.
Put yourself in the shoes of a client who is searching the web for a therapist…
They are perusing sites for a therapist who is a good fit, probably checking out quite a few different therapists. This is an important decision, and they want to choose a therapist who not only speaks to their particular problems, but also one who is competent and an expert at what they do.
After visiting several standard brochure type sites with 5 pages or so, their eyes widen when they land on a site that includes a wealth of commentary on timely events – on other therapist’s posts as well as relevant news stories. “Wow” they think to themselves, “this therapist is writing about the latest research and is well connected with other professionals, they must be an expert.”
One of the advantages of writing small news summaries is that it shows visitors that you are up on the latest trends in the field. It also provides easy content for your site, there is a continuous stream of recent news items on the web that you can summarize and comment on whenever you please.
Additionally, by summarizing and commenting on posts by other experts in the field, it provides an association for the visitor between you and those other experts, which can leverage your status.
One way that we like to present these news summaries is by using a scrolling news bar – this captures the user’s interest by presenting news posts in a dynamic way. There are several wordpress plugins you can use to accomplish this, we recommend news ticker for wordpress for horizontal scrolling and vertical scroll recent post for vertical scrolling
For examples, please see http://www.expandingsextherapy.com and http://www.couplestherapistboulder.com/blog/.
We all know that sites with more content perform better in the search engines and provide a better user experience. However, consistently writing long articles can take a lot of thought and editing.
A news summary can be written fairly quickly, and still adds a lot of value to your site. Visitors see you as an expert in the field, and google sees your site as providing expert content to your visitors, which in turn helps your ranking.
Becky