When working with a team, it’s important to consider how best to showcase everyone on your website. Many practitioners running group practices fall into a trap. They put all of their team members’ bios on one page and call it done.
We’re here to tell you that’s not the way to do it.
At least, not if you want to rank. You want to make your website easy for Google to read. That’s what gets the SEO juices flowing and gives you a successful website that converts visitors into clients.
Make An “Our Team” Page
Creating a page on your website that spotlights your whole team is a great way to give potential clients a shopping window view of who’s available to help them navigate their therapy journey. But the trick is to make sure it’s visitor-friendly and Google-friendly.
Here’s something we don’t recommend.
Can you see the trap we’re talking about? The team page is dedicated to showing off a great team of therapists. That’s good! All of their bios are on the same page.
That’s bad.
Google can’t read this as easily, it sees it as a cluttered page, and your SEO ranking suffers because of that. It’s also overwhelming for someone visiting the site and looking for quick bite-sized bits of information.
Here’s the recommended fix (Counseling Wise approved!)…
Create Individual Pages For Each Clinician
Creating the “Our Team” page is a great starting point. But the follow-through is to have individual bio pages for each clinician. Then, you can set up your Our Team page with links that direct visitors to the bio page for the individual practitioner. It looks a little like this.
Here’s another team page from the Relationship Counseling Center of Austin. They’re giving their rockstar team a great stage, a bit like an opening act. A potential client can peruse the page, and find the clinician who’s right for them.
Think about it from the standpoint of a potential client: I’ve located a practice I think will be a good fit. I’ve found a clinician who talks about and works with my specific pain point.
Now, I can click on their profile picture, get an even better and more detailed view of their philosophy, their modalities, and their specialties, and start building a connection with them. All before I even make a phone call!
Google-Friendly Clinician Pages
There are a couple of tricks of the trade that help practitioner profiles rank with Google. For each individual bio page, you need two things:
- The clinician’s name should be an H1 tag on the page.
- The URL slug should reflect the clinician’s name. For example sitename.com/firstname-lastname
It might seem a bit odd to consider setting up a website this way. But again, we’re setting this up for user experience and Google-readability.
Here’s an example situation that might help the setup make sense:
Let’s say you’ve received a call from someone, and they’re interested in a very specific kind of treatment—EMDR, for example. Maybe you’re not certified in EMDR, but you remember Jane Doe from school, and you’re pretty sure that she did get certified for EMDR recently. How do you find Jane Doe?
Chances are you Google her. And how does Google know where Jane Doe is? Because the website’s SEO is set up to take you exactly where you want to be. Jane Doe’s name is an H1, she has her very own bio page on her website, and the URL slug makes it even easier for Google to say, “Hey! Jane Doe’s right here!”
Still skeptical? Here’s a pro tip: Google yourself. You might be surprised by what shows up! (or what doesn’t!)
