Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Private Practice Online

JOHN CLARKE

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the show. John Clark here with a private practice workshop. I’m a therapist, group practice owner and business coach, and I’m excited to introduce my guest for today. I’m sitting down with Josh Ramsey.

JOHN CLARKE

He’s the chief marketing officer and marketing consultant. He’s been a Google partner for more than a decade. And during this time, he’s been providing marketing and SEO training across the US, presented as a keynote speaker, written a book on how some SEO companies disguise laziness and hide poor strategies, and has been interviewed and highlighted on numerous podcasts, including his recent interview on the Christian D.

JOHN CLARKE

Evans podcast, which is airing in July, or in this case, has aired in July. Josh, thanks for being here. How are you doing? And what else should people know about you just right off the bat?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, thanks for having me. You know, I mean, I guess, I mean, what to know about me, I always like to start off. I used to do a radio show back in the day, and I used to always say when I let off, no one cares what the girl’s name is.

Josh Ramsey

And what I mean by that is no one cares what your name is, what my name is. What we care about in everything that we do in life is the quality that someone would bring to us, right? Like, what are they going to do for us?

Josh Ramsey

And even if we’re the nicest people, I mean, I talk about my wife throughout all my teachings, all my conferences, and she’s one of the greatest people that anyone ever meets. But at the end of the day, no one cares what her name is.

Josh Ramsey

They just love the way she makes them feel as a friend. And that’s what I always like to start with. Anything that I share is just, you know, what is it that people are looking for? And that’s really where it all kind of starts from, if that makes sense.

JOHN CLARKE

Makes a lot of sense to me. And it’s an interesting point to start with. You know, yesterday, I was sitting down with a therapist, and we were pulling up his website, he was wondering why things aren’t working, or he has traffic, and no one’s inquiring, or clicking through.

JOHN CLARKE

And the entire website was about him, him and his background and all the different methods he uses, and just right off the bat from the very top of his website, it was about him. And there’s a missed opportunity there, right?

JOHN CLARKE

Because like you said, people are trying to get where they’re going. And people that are looking for a solution, you know, to a painful urgent problem in their life, they’re looking to make some sort of purchase to fix that problem.

JOHN CLARKE

Right. And that’s, that’s what their brain is, you know, geared toward doing right in a marketing situation.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, so all we focus on though as business owners and practice is we think about the blood sweat and tears and the time and energy that we put in and that’s what we’re proud of. But what we have to understand is what is the opposite side thinking, the other side of the table, right?

Josh Ramsey

And that’s really where good marketing starts . A marketing mind once said very well, he said, identify what your prospect is thinking. Say that in your marketing and you’re done.

JOHN CLARKE

Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

Like, that’s really what it comes down to. There’s a lot of levels to that, but that’s a big part of it.

JOHN CLARKE

It’s an interesting lead -in for therapists because we deal with thoughts and feelings very intimately every single day. And one exercise is for therapists to sit down or even jot down in session things your clients say or things that they said in a session today.

JOHN CLARKE

Little one-liners that are reflective of their pain points and their wishes. I mean, there’s just some gold to find in our clients’ words.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. You know, you know, in that same vein is, uh, you know, the messaging, I started recently working with a drug trial company and it’s similar worlds to kind of where you’re at. And in their world, one thing that, that we identified very quickly when I started working with them was there, they were running paid ads and the paid ads had a focus of, uh, almost the message was just, if someone was looking for drug trial science, that’s, that’s what the paid ad was for, but they didn’t write any of their messaging or content around people that were clicking on paid ads, but with a different mind of what they were typing into Google.

Josh Ramsey

So we were showing up, but the thought process where there was a huge disconnect there. And I think that’s where you have to kind of understand as like, maybe that second point, number one, they don’t care what your name is.

Josh Ramsey

Number two, are we saying the right thing? Right. And then number three, is it communicating? I’ll, I’ll kind of kick it back over to you, but I’ll say this, a lot of people know who Zig Ziglar was and Zig Ziglar used to say, it’s not how you say it.

Josh Ramsey

It’s or it’s not what you say. It’s how you say it. And I tell people now, it’s not what you say or how you say it. It’s what’s perceived by your audience. And I know that’s a big part of your world, but it’s that reception through the web.

Josh Ramsey

That is one part of it. Now as a fractional CMO, I talk more than that. But when we just talk about the web in that first touch point, a lot of times that’s what we have to start with.

JOHN CLARKE

Let’s talk more about that starting point because number one, we work with therapists in private practice and that’s our audience here, but as a fractional CMO, what does that mean and what’s the starting point when you come into a business where the business leader is saying, yeah, we need more business, we need more clients, our marketing isn’t working or we think it could be better, where do you start with them?

Josh Ramsey

So there’s a lot of ways to start, but the first thing I always like to do is understand where they came from. You know, if you build a website, there’s a lot of infrastructure that can go into a website.

Josh Ramsey

There’s a lot of different elements. When you’re running a business, you may have been around for 20 or 30 years, and the track record of what you’ve done and why you’ve done it matters, because if we can pick up on those little pieces of what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, we can then identify what may work in the future.

Josh Ramsey

There’s not one silver bullet, so to speak, that’s gonna work for everybody. Different marketplaces, different services that you offer, different practices that you have. There’s a lot of different ways to drive interest to what you do.

Josh Ramsey

He is to find multiple streams that all lead in and then track each of those streams. Had a meeting just about an hour ago with a client of mine and the same conversation happened where I said, you’re paying X dollars here and you’re getting this amount of leads, but out of those leads, you’re getting a smaller amount that are converting.

Josh Ramsey

And then on this stream, you’re paying this and you’re getting a larger amount of leads, but a smaller percentage of them are actually turning into sales. When you look at just those two streams, it took the client a little bit of time to understand that they were paying, for instance, 500, 600, 700, but the 700 seemed too high for them to spend on.

Josh Ramsey

They were unhappy, but it was a better qualified lead and at the end of the day, it was a better lead generation for them because they were losing more sales out of it. And I think a lot of times as business owners, that’s where business owners get caught – they don’t look at the big picture.

Josh Ramsey

You’re good, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re good at what you do, but you probably didn’t start doing what you do and listen to this podcast thinking to yourself, I’m a great marketing person.

Josh Ramsey

I’m great at sales, right? In this particular podcast. You’re just thinking I’m good at this and this is how I can help people and this is what I enjoy. The paradigm shift that has to happen for business owners is understanding that at some point in mind, you have to know when to elevate yourself and bring in a new mindset to be able to look at all the little pieces of your marketing that are drawing in interest, engage and set KPIs to know what that KPI should be of what should we expect from any effort we make.

JOHN CLARKE

Yeah, I love that. I mean, not all traffic is created equal, right? If I sit down with a therapist and they say, um, you know, John, I’ve got 1000 visits, 1000 users a month coming to my website, my Google Analytics tells me so.

JOHN CLARKE

But how is your business growing or not growing? Right? People aren’t inquiring. I had a, you know, a therapist recently who had 1000s of new users every single month coming through a certain blog post that was doing no good for her local business, right?

JOHN CLARKE

A local business in Los Angeles, right in a very particular neighborhood. And so that traffic is doing very little for her, right? It’s also about intent, you know, and if people go to Google, and they’re searching for, you know, what is trauma therapy?

JOHN CLARKE

Or how do I know if I have PTSD? That’s a different stage than trauma therapists near me or trauma therapists, San Francisco, or trauma therapists, Noe Valley, San Francisco, or whatever it is, right?

JOHN CLARKE

Or within the realm of trauma therapy, which is, you know, what my own practice does, we do EMDR, it’s a very niche treatment for trauma therapy, right for trauma. If you search EMDR, San Francisco, EMDR therapist, San Francisco, you already know what EMDR is, you know that it’s for trauma, and you have trauma, and you’re looking for trauma in EMDR therapists in your area, very close to our address, right?

JOHN CLARKE

So that traffic, even if it’s 50 people a month, operates, you know, does very different things for my business, you know, than the other than what I was mentioning. So what are your thoughts on that?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, that’s, I mean, great point. There’s a lot to unpack there. Yeah, first thing I want to just kind of go back to and we can go away from it and come back to it later if you want is as a fractional CMO.

Josh Ramsey

The point of working with a fractional CMO is to really understand the bigger picture, not just focusing on the website. Yeah. And I know we’re staying on that right now. And I’m totally good with that.

Josh Ramsey

There’s a lot to unpack and what you just said. But understand one thing that I think a lot of people out there don’t understand about what I do is I own a full stack ad agency. But after running and being in an ad agency world, and before that selling media, multiple different platforms, and then now moving into a CMO role where I have an ad agency that supports me as needed.

Josh Ramsey

But I’m a fractional CMO where people can hire me to run all of their marketing, its messaging, it’s web leads, it’s other other types of leads that may come in. And it’s just a conversation. But just going back to what you said, you know, everyone’s at a different stage when it comes to their web.

Josh Ramsey

So in your example, you said you have 1000 visitors a month. In a scenario of 1000 visitors a month, I would likely lend myself to focus on retention optimization. Some people call it CRO. When you look at CRO in a client retention optimization, you’re looking at influences of when users come to the site, what are they doing?

Josh Ramsey

How are they doing it? How are they reacting? How long are they on your site? What specific pages are they going to? And then through that, I have software packages, another division of one of my companies, where we build software that tracks when users come in, what rate are they coming in from what sources and who we actually track all the way down to who’s converting.

Josh Ramsey

So as a totally different, for instance, but everyone in the world will probably understand this, we have a kitchen design company. And as a kitchen design company, here’s what we found. And everyone has a kitchen, everyone understands what a kitchen is.

Josh Ramsey

That’s why I use the example. But with this, for instance, what we found was if people visited more than two gallery example pages, they filled out our contact form. Our problem, right, was that we didn’t have our gallery profile high enough and visible enough.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, when I started working with the client and identified that problem. So by changing that we increased our click through and contact ratio by 5%. Now if you think 1000 people come visit near 2% and you go to 7%.

JOHN CLARKE

Yeah.

Josh Ramsey

That’s a massive shift, right? So.

JOHN CLARKE

And that number, you know, tends to scale with you, right? So you double your traffic, you know, 7% of 2000, you know, is looking pretty good, right? And on you go.

Josh Ramsey

But on that, if you’ll stick with me for just a minute, here’s what most people don’t understand about SEO, search engine optimization as in where you rank on Google. The more interaction that you have from your website, the longer visitors stay, the more interaction that visitors will take, the higher ranking you will receive.

Josh Ramsey

And people don’t often understand that it does take some time, but there are KPIs that you should expect from your ad agency or web developed team, that if they’re doing SEO for you, you need to know that you have certain KPIs that should be measured to know that you’re getting that traffic and you’re trending the right way.

JOHN CLARKE

…about those, right? Because a lot of therapists, they do hire help, you know, to your point or to the title of your book is quite interesting, because similar to taking your car to a mechanic, if you don’t know, basically how an engine works, you take a car and you know, you might get taken for a ride to speak and no pun intended.

JOHN CLARKE

With an owning a website being like a car, a lot of therapists will spend money and say, Yeah, I’m spending, you know, a few grand a month on my SEO to do my SEO, quote unquote, which is something I hear a lot of therapists saying, and then I say, Oh, great, what are they doing for you?

JOHN CLARKE

I don’t know, keywords, or whatever, you know, and they just sometimes their understanding of it ends there. So how do you? Yeah, let’s drill into some of those KPIs, and what business owners should be looking at.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, I mean, that’s a loaded question. But let’s try to unpack that as much as we can in a short amount of time. The first thing I would say is a free resource that I offer is on my main website. And you can list that later.

Josh Ramsey

It’s jrcmo.com. But under education, there’s a full, it’s the largest SEO library in the world. And it’s under education, SEO tools. And it is every element of SEO that you could ever imagine that’s out there.

Josh Ramsey

And I keep that updated several times a year just to make sure we’re up on trends and we’re updating information, you can cross check that by going to Google once you look at the library and they go to Google and type it in, and you’ll see that it matches.

Josh Ramsey

So that’s one free resource for people. As far as, you know, what we need to be doing and how we set KPIs, I think it really comes down to having a better line of communication and understanding your goals internally of what’s a realistic request of somebody and then can they meet it?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, sometimes that’s ambiguous. And it’s hard to know. But I think that you should definitely ask your agency, can you do this? Is it feasible to think that we’re going to have more visitors or ask them, what should I expect in three months?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, and hold them to it. I will give you one quick common problem that agencies do. Sure. Report only the good news and the good news changes every single month. So month one, they talk about bounce rate.

Josh Ramsey

Oh, we’ve improved in the past 30 days of bounce rate. Okay, then month two, they’re like, hey, conversion rate, and they don’t talk about balance. You should be saying, what about the bounce rate last month?

Josh Ramsey

Now you’re talking conversion, next month, organic over the last quarter to this quarter. So a lot of times, it’s just about setting those KPIs and knowing when you ask people, what should I expect? And then as a business owner, if you’re not working with a consultant, a coach, a CMO, it’s saying to them, like, what should we do?

Josh Ramsey

Now, let me maybe set a stage that this is going to help a lot of people, because I’ve dealt with this next scenario quite a bit. A company came to me and hired me and said, hey, Josh, what should we do?

Josh Ramsey

How should we do it? So I sat down and they had an ad agency and they were paying several thousand dollars, a decent amount of money to this agency. When I sat with the agency, the first question I asked them was, hey, what is your keyword list for this client?

Josh Ramsey

What’s your keyword list? They didn’t have one. I just, it blew my mind. Yeah. Like, what keywords are you expecting to go after? And what is the ranking strategy? Each keyword page has a set amount of keywords that you can have within it.

Josh Ramsey

So understanding that is one part of it. And again, I mean, I don’t want to go off a deep end of too much info here, but yeah.

JOHN CLARKE

No, that’s what we’re here for. I mean, yeah, we, you know, if there’s one topic we hit on the most on this show, it’s marketing, you know, I, I myself used to run a Google ads agency for therapists, we used to also build websites, do SEO, things like that.

JOHN CLARKE

And we eventually packaged it into a program called fully booked to kind of teach therapists the five steps to, to marketing on our end, which is really, yeah, website, paid traffic, organic traffic content, and email marketing.

JOHN CLARKE

But no, I think it’s great. I mean, you know, strategy has so much to do with it. And a lot of times therapists will hire someone who might be a pretty capable per SEO person technically, but they have no idea the strategy, the therapist doesn’t have a clear brand, a clear idea of who they help, or how they’re going to stand out, or whatever it might be.

JOHN CLARKE

And if you go to, you know, the SEO person say, I have a brand new website, I want it to rank for San Francisco therapists, you know, if you tell someone to do that, they might do it for you, you know, they might plug in those keywords and say, cool, I did your SEO, and I did what you asked.

JOHN CLARKE

You know, when I sat down with my agency for who does our SEO for my practice here in San Francisco, we spent a long time looking at, you know, who are we? What is our brand? What do we offer? How are we different in the market?

JOHN CLARKE

And then when we start digging into the keywords, we’re looking for opportunities that are realistic for us, right? And one of those opportunities is not San Francisco therapists, right?

JOHN CLARKE

Because the people who have those top positions have been there for 1015 years in that position or whatever. And if I’m looking to grow meaningfully in the next six, 12 months, and beyond, you know, we’re looking for those green pastures, so to speak, right?

JOHN CLARKE

And that strategy piece is huge.

Josh Ramsey

So a little piece right there that you’re talking about, there’s two elements that I would share with you and others to consider. One of them is an underutilized strategy that most people don’t even know exists.

Josh Ramsey

It’s called keyword gap marketing. So we’ll call it something a little bit different here and there, but keyword gap marketing is essentially a strategy that takes some, you gotta be smart to do it. I’m not gonna beat around the bush.

Josh Ramsey

You gotta know your stuff, so to speak, and you gotta be on point, and you can’t be a joke, and it takes a little bit of work, so it’ll cost a little bit of money. But keyword gap marketing essentially looks at the gaps in the holes in the marketplace of what users are looking for and what their searches are, along with what your competitors and you are going after, and it looks for that gap of those three, right?

Josh Ramsey

So if you’re in the triangle, it looks right through that hole, and it goes, that’s where we wanna go. And that’s the content we need to write about. So if you take that and then you think about how you write and you think about the other things we’ve already talked about on this podcast, that’s where you have to take things as a whole.

Josh Ramsey

It all has to evolve around each other. So when people look at my, I do something called a digital marketing plan, and there’s give or take about 30 or 40 elements of SEO that we look at when we grade a website.

Josh Ramsey

And if you look at those, they each have a priority score because you have the core of just general speed, the core of like general errors, meta descriptions, meta titles, this is all basic, easy stuff.

Josh Ramsey

But then you get down to the nitty gritty, which carries less weight, but it’s just as relevant as the other pieces. So you just have to pull all of that together, but understanding that that keyword gap marketing is what you wanna go after if you’re trying to rank, because then it all goes back through what I talked about, user engagement, how long on site, what’s the bounce rate and so on and so forth, all matters.

Josh Ramsey

But it’s getting that first engagement from them too.

JOHN CLARKE

No, that’s great. That’s great. And it’s a, you know, something new for me to learn about. I think part of it, you’re going back to what is the role of the business owner, right, is what I say is to know enough to be dangerous or to know enough to not get ripped off, you know, again, just like owning a car.

JOHN CLARKE

And I don’t need to be as skilled as you know, a specialized mechanic who only works on cars like mine or whatever. But you have to know enough, right, you have to take interest in this stuff. And sometimes there is a door or you need to be in lockstep with, you know, someone like you who can say, Yeah, I’ll take that, that marketing leadership position in your company, and report to the CEO with key metrics, how things are going, how we’ve grown, challenges we’re facing, right, things like that.

JOHN CLARKE

And then the CEO can make decisions based on, you know, that input. You know, that’s the way I think is a good way to visualize it. A lot of our therapists, you know, they’re either small, they could be a solo practitioner, they could be a small group practice owner, you know, five to 10 therapists.

JOHN CLARKE

And so they might not have a huge leadership team, right, they might just, they’ve come from that place of doing everything myself, because that’s how I started. And how do I work myself out of that, that insanity.

JOHN CLARKE

But those who do grow a bit bigger and are starting to develop a leadership team, whether it’s internally and or you know, fractional, right, in your case, fractional CMO, CFO, I think is another great role to add you into small business.

JOHN CLARKE

So yeah, I don’t have a conclusion to that. But you can take it and run with it.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, I mean, I think it just, that becomes, you know, you know, I think you’ve alluded to a business coaching, and I think in business coaching, you have to be able to know your steps. And I think one of the things you said is, you know, knowing enough to not get ripped off.

Josh Ramsey

So knowing your steps, knowing enough not to get ripped off. And I think that’s becomes, you know, that’s such a hard thing, because, ultimately, if I were to boil that down, and not be able to talk to someone like you and I are talking right now, I guess the only thing I could really say is, you know, knowing your steps would really be, what is it that you want to get to?

Josh Ramsey

It’s a lot like business coaching. But just in the marketing world and the growth, sales and marketing. So in marketing, what are we going to do? And how much are we going to spend? And what should be the return on investment?

Josh Ramsey

What should we expect as an outcome? Set that benchmark. If I spend X dollars on this item, what’s the outcome I want? Now, you may not have a realistic view. But if you’re doing this yourself, start with that.

Josh Ramsey

You know, I’m going to spend this much on doing this item, ad words, an event, whatever else, then create a measurement tracking or know how you’re going to track it. I talk to this many people, and I close this many people.

Josh Ramsey

Whatever that tracking is, that’s where you want to start. I created something a long time ago that I share with quite a few people. And I call it the “Crystal Ball of Marketing.” Because “Crystal Ball of Marketing” essentially really does exist.

Josh Ramsey

You remember back in the day when we went, man, I wish I could just, I would know the results of something before I did it. You know, well, I created that. And I actually have that. And what it is, is it is an algorithm of math, along with the common knowledge of a marketing guy along with a business owner.

Josh Ramsey

Because what I know as a marketing person is that if I go spend X amount of dollars on say, radio, television, ad words, whatever that is, I can tell you how many eyeballs are going to see it.

Josh Ramsey

And then we run certain laws in the marketing world. If you know, a lot of times it’s called the laws of thirds. A law of third would be 3000 people see it, and then a third of them contact you and then a third of them engage with you and then a third of them become an actual lead versus sale, right?

Josh Ramsey

It breaks down. And that’s kind of your logic. So there’s a lot of ways to do that. And in every industry, it is slightly different. But it is setting those expectations and then marking them and benchmarking them.

Josh Ramsey

So as you grow, and you bring a CMO on or another executive, you can look back at those benchmarks. And that’s very, very important. That’s probably one of the top things that I do with every client in every industry is identifying those benchmarks and just trying to set them up.

JOHN CLARKE

Yeah, that’s great. I mean, some of the ones we look at in my business and in the work we do with therapists, if we’re looking at, you know, website visitors or users for Google Analytics, out of those, how many resulted in an inquiry, right?

JOHN CLARKE

And what’s that percentage? And then out of those inquiries, how many did you or your intake coordinator convert into a new customer? And what’s the lifetime value of your customer or your client, as we call them?

JOHN CLARKE

You know, I would just say 80% of therapists don’t know those numbers. So it’s really hard to know what’s working or not working, right? You have to, you have to drill down a little bit and know those key metrics.

JOHN CLARKE

Those are like the vital signs of your business, you know, we’re going to answer. If you’re up for it, Josh, with the time we have left, we have some live questions here. I’ll pull up one by one if you’re up for it.

JOHN CLARKE

And before we do that, take a really quick second to thank our sponsor, Jane, you learn a lot about a company when you talk to their customer service team. And with Jane, you’ll learn quickly that calls live chats and emails always end with a solution and a smile.

JOHN CLARKE

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JOHN CLARKE

Learn more by heading to Jane.app/mental health and book a demo. You can mention the code PPW1MO as in one month at sign up for a one month grace period applied to your new account. So thanks again to Jane for being part of our show.

JOHN CLARKE

And again, Jane.app/mental health. If you want to give it a spin. Here’s a question. This is coming from Faith here live on YouTube. And she says what marketing resources are recommended in starting a private practice?

JOHN CLARKE

And here’s another great question. You know, if you Josh, when should a practitioner know before I mean, what should they know before outsourcing without wasting their time or money?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, great question. I got to think here for a second and make sure I answer it perfectly because there’s two questions there to answer. Yeah. So marketing resources that are recommended in starting a private practice.

Josh Ramsey

So the first thing is, I guess I’d go back to the keyword marketing, right? Identify what keywords that you want to go after, then look for the search volume of each of those keywords. When you identify the search volume, there’s what they call keyword difficulty and the search volume.

Josh Ramsey

Your volume could be really high and your keyword difficulty, medium to low, those are the ones you want because other people are not paying attention to those words. And that goes back into the keyword gap, the gap marketing, right?

Josh Ramsey

So that’s kind of the first thing that I would say, if I try to keep this conversation short, I can screw it deeper, but that’s that part. The second question, what should a practitioner know before outsourcing or wasting their money?

Josh Ramsey

This is such a difficult question because what do you consider wasting? If you consider wasting right off the bat, then don’t do it. If you feel at all that it’s wasting, don’t do it. You know, one thing that I offer is a two hour free consultation.

Josh Ramsey

And I suggest that you do multiple consultations with people. And I feel like a 20 minute just becomes more of a pitch. So if you feel like you’re getting pitched, walk away. You should be looking for a marketing consultant.

Josh Ramsey

And there’s so many out there. You should be looking for a marketing company or marketing resource, a marketing agency that you’re going to outsource to that is going to give you enough viable data that you can feel like this is what they’re going to do.

Josh Ramsey

And here’s why they’re going to do it. And what I would tell you to do is as a free resource, go download my book at jrcmo .com. You can go on and find it under education and ebook. And all the chapters are listed.

Josh Ramsey

And my first chapter is basically how to choose the right ad agency, what to expect from them, what to ask them. So that’s the very first chapter.

JOHN CLARKE

Great stuff. I don’t know if it’s you or me, Josh, someone froze for a minute, but I think we’re back. We’re back. I’m back. I’m here. Sorry. No worries. We’re good. Yeah. And I just put a link to those chapters that Josh was talking about here in the chat on YouTube.

JOHN CLARKE

We’ll also add it in the episode description once this is up, wherever you’re consuming this. So yeah, I mean, this is great stuff. And to Josh’s point, it’s whoever said it, either I win or I learned.

JOHN CLARKE

So there’s some fear of wasting money and certainly you don’t want to get ripped off. And yet sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know until you’ve started to learn the game and learn how this stuff works and learn what you’re willing to pay for and learn what you want to do yourself.

JOHN CLARKE

Ultimately, again, depending on the size of your organization, your revenue, many things, how much help can you afford? And also how much can you afford to not make money this year? So a lot of other questions there.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, on that on that same thought though, I would share and encourage people to think You set KPIs to look for your ROI So your KPI is a key point indicator meaning this is what we’re going to do and we do it or we don’t and I’m Simplifying this but here’s your KPI.

Josh Ramsey

I want to do this So you hire an agency you outsource and you hire an agency. I want them to build me a website. Okay. Well if they did it don’t expect that SEO is going to happen unless that’s part of your contract, right?

Josh Ramsey

So set your KPIs properly and make sure that you bullet point out all those KPIs But your KPIs should lead to ROI ROIs return on investment So your KPIs should be I built a website and it launched therefore my ROI is I have a website But if you do SEO your ROI you need to set different metrics of your ROI that you’re tracking Which is I don’t just expect SEO but what within SEO which would be?

Josh Ramsey

Ultimately keyword rankings and then you look at things like contact forms. How many times people are clicking? Is it organic or direct adwords driven on and on and on so understanding the variable and the large amount of?

Josh Ramsey

ROIs to track inside of your main KPI, but they should always be tied together of an ROI to KPI.

JOHN CLARKE

I think what’s interesting, Josh, in measuring ROI, you know, if, if I have a website and I just launched it today, and I have zero traffic paid or organic, and I say, okay, well, the fastest way to get traffic is to start running some ads.

JOHN CLARKE

And let’s say, in the case of a therapist, it’s Google ads, right, which are getting more and more expensive by the day, in our case, because we have a lot of these companies like better help and talk space that are getting into our industry, and they’re spending money that they haven’t made yet, you know, they’re spending someone else’s money.

JOHN CLARKE

And so they can afford to spend more to acquire a customer, right, then then we can that that’s, that’s one way to, to get traffic, though, and let’s say you can do it and be profitable in month over month, you spend x amount of dollars, and it’s generated, at least that or more than that, when you look at lifetime value of your client, right?

JOHN CLARKE

In the case of SEO, I think it can be harder to measure that ROI, especially if I’m at ground zero, I have no traffic at all, and I hire an SEO, you know, agency to take over, and then pay them a monthly retainer.

JOHN CLARKE

It takes time, you know, to get organic traffic. And let’s say we’re just focusing on organic traffic. So if that’s the case, I mean, how do you measure success, you know, and measure ROI if it could be six months before I’m ranking on page one in San Francisco.

JOHN CLARKE

In our case, it was, you know, well over a year for some keywords. Yeah, thoughts.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, I mean, it’s a fantastic, phenomenal, top notch question, top notch. And here is the honest, blunt truth about it. Agencies will come tell you it takes three to six months for you to see anything happen.

Josh Ramsey

And I’m here to tell you that’s a total crap of beep. I don’t know if you have a beep or not, jokes, but you probably have picked that up from me yet, but I’m kind of a guy that throws dad jokes around, you know, like it.

Josh Ramsey

But yeah, it’s a total crock of interesting. Here’s what I mean by that. There should be if you’re hiring an agency, there should be KPIs that are done and exactly knowing what they’re going to do and when they’re going to do it.

Josh Ramsey

And then they should tell you what the result should be. And that right there in itself, if you were to just literally drop the microphone right now, that’s it. Yeah. And you should be able to see from that what to expect.

Josh Ramsey

Now, let me explain. I have a global company that came to me and they do concrete infrastructures. In short, I’m going to paraphrase this entirety of what they do because they’re a massive, massive company.

Josh Ramsey

But they work on global level infrastructures like the Hoover Dam. And they came to me and they said, hey, we’re not ranking well for this phrase, this keyword. But they had a dedicated page, multiple pages for that phrase.

Josh Ramsey

So I came in and said, here are the 15 or 30 things that are actually I think my actual number was 26. I came up with a list of 26 things that we were going to do just on that page. Now, we had to do about 15 other things on their entire website because their entire website needed help.

Josh Ramsey

So logically speaking, your body is just like a website. Your name is your name. Your host is different than your name. I can go change my name at the courthouse. My host is different because it’s hosting my body.

Josh Ramsey

Right. But I can hurt my pinky and it doesn’t break my arm. Right. It’s different than my head, my neck, my shoulders. So if my whole body has a virus, right, then I have a problem. So logically speaking, your website has to be in good health as a whole.

Josh Ramsey

Then you go, hey, I really want to have a strong arm. So you go, OK, I’m going to start pumping iron to make a strong arm. So in this scenario, we looked at that one section and we created 26 bullet points of what needed to be done on that page.

Josh Ramsey

Within three months, we went from ranking for zero key words to ranking for 36 key words on the top 50 in Google. And we had 18 on page one on page one. That’s huge. Now, they came to me different than what you talked about of, hey, I just launched a site.

Josh Ramsey

What do I expect? Blah, blah, blah. They have that. So there’s different levels of building up your core. Like if anyone knows anything about working out, they always the trainers always tell you to work on your core first.

Josh Ramsey

Right. Make sure that you have a strong core, then work on other things. The Web is kind of the same way you work on your core. How many pages do you have? How often are you publishing content? Does it have the right keywords?

Josh Ramsey

Are you fast? Are you caching? Again, all these little things matter. And I publish those online as well that people can look at. That’s on my agency website. But we post that information for free as well, where people can know these are the things I need to do.

Josh Ramsey

So if they want to find a cheaper route, they’re welcome to. So yeah.

JOHN CLARKE

That’s great. That helps a lot. The selfish part of me doing this show is, I get to think about both my consulting clients, the therapists that I coach, and also my own business and learning from people like you.

JOHN CLARKE

So I’m making mental notes on both sides of my brain, both of my businesses. In my case, this was actually the first time I had ever outsourced to a marketing agency for my SEO because it was just so darn difficult this time around in San Francisco, starting this new practice about two and a half years ago.

JOHN CLARKE

I also just didn’t want to do it myself, so I wanted them to take that heavy lifting over. They represent some bigger national brands and that’s kind of what I wanted. I also decided because ads are so expensive and just continuing that way, that I would kind of go all in on organic.

JOHN CLARKE

I have to say, I love organic traffic. It’s just my favorite type of traffic if I had to compare it to Google ads. In many cases, we will teach therapists to do both and early on to run ads. And then as your organic traffic ramps up, you can keep running ads, you can taper down your ads, and all of a sudden, you can get to a place where your marketing budget is going down and your revenue is going up.

JOHN CLARKE

Once you have some good positions with Google, if you’re doing the right things, like you said, your website’s healthy, you’re creating new content, your website’s not broken and things like that, it loads fast, all the right things, then you should be able to maintain those positions pretty well.

JOHN CLARKE

And that can be huge for your business. It’s kind of this compounding growth that once you get it and you get in those good graces of Google, it tends to be pretty sticky, right?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, I’d like to share two things on what you just said, if that’s okay. Yeah. So the first one is, I would, I would really encourage people to think about this. The first thing is, when you talk about hiring an agency, like you, you said that you did and a lot of people have hired agencies, I always maybe this is a little bit like self righteous to a level.

Josh Ramsey

I don’t know if that’s the right term. But, but I look at it and say, wouldn’t it be worth you spending an extra $800 a month to hire a guy like me to watch your ad agency and give you unbiased, unfiltered, honest feedback on Yeah, are they doing their full job?

Josh Ramsey

Are we getting the most from them? I mean, because what if I could push them an extra 20% that I look at and I go, really didn’t do enough this month, in my opinion, and then I have that conversation with them with you sitting on the phone and you realize, wow, I mean, I don’t want to spend an extra $800 with this guy.

Josh Ramsey

And I have $3000, $4000, $5000 with this agency. Yeah. And everyone spends something different. But if you spend a little bit more money, sometimes by bringing in a fractional CMO, at least this is how I work.

Josh Ramsey

I don’t, I can’t speak to others but I won’t right now. Most of them don’t do that because they don’t have that knowledge. But think about that part. So that’s part one, part two, a huge encouragement is that if you’re using AdWords right now, or have been, you need to be applying all of your AdWords spend and all of the education you get from AdWords over to your organic site.

Josh Ramsey

And if you’re not, you are completely missing out on a massive part of organic growth. Because AdWords, I mean, I could literally stand on a soapbox right now and preach to you, true education of how Google makes their money, through AdWords, why analytics paired with Search Console, Search Console and analytics equals Google AdWords, they just put it all together on the paid side.

Josh Ramsey

Organically, they make you work for a little bit more because you really want to make money. So I mean, I could walk you through the complexities of Google. But in short, if you can at least rewatch what I just said and like really think about it, you’ll pick up what I’m laying down.

JOHN CLARKE

No, it’s great. I mean, having to really think about how Google thinks, I mean, I’ll have to have you back. We’ll do another episode just on that because it’s all kind of words, you know, schedule an hour or more.

JOHN CLARKE

Yeah, it’s like it…

Josh Ramsey

When you see it, when you see it and you hear me paint the picture, all of a sudden light bulbs go off when I do conferences. And I do conferences all over the country. I mean, I’m in LA in September.

Josh Ramsey

And conference, like people just, like light bulbs go off and they tell me that all the time. Because they’re like, wow, this actually makes sense. And I’m like, yeah, it does. It’s logic. So Google’s smart, but you can understand it.

JOHN CLARKE

Yeah, it’s ultimately a business and they’re trying to make money as well. And you know, if you can understand kind of how Google thinks it places a lot less pressure on, well, a lot of people when they’re new to it, they just dive right into the technicalities of things are like, Oh, my gosh, I don’t have, you know, I didn’t change the file names of all my images.

JOHN CLARKE

So I’m going to do that right now. You know, that’s like learning about SEO. And so I think it’s kind of like, you know, in the amount here in San Francisco, in the tech world, they would say top down versus bottom up approach to, to, you know, to something but um, yeah, we’re here almost at time, Josh, I just want to thank you so much for, for being here.

JOHN CLARKE

It’s been really informative and really top notch stuff in terms of deepening our knowledge of working with the CMO and really getting deeper on organic. Or organic marketing. So I’m a big, big fan of everything you’re talking about.

JOHN CLARKE

Maybe let us know again, how people can get in touch. And we’ll of course, clearly include links to this stuff in the description.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. I mean, I have a ton of free resources. I believe one of the things that we didn’t really touch on too much, but you alluded to is I believe in business owners understanding five inches of water being able to swim five inches deep while I’m swimming 50 feet deep.

Josh Ramsey

They need to understand at least a little bit. So that’s why I create a lot of free resources on my website. So my website you can post a link is jr stands for Josh Ramsey and then CMO dot com. So Josh Ramsey, chief marketing officer dot com.

Josh Ramsey

I do a two hour free consultation. So they go online. There’s a big button on there that says get your free consultation. You fill out a short business evaluation. I review that. I do some research and then we schedule a time to talk and we jump on the phone and we talk through.

Josh Ramsey

What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What does it look like? How can you adjust? And then from there, if there’s more work that wants to be done, I have different packages or I just say, look verbally, here’s your plan.

Josh Ramsey

Here’s what you should do. Here’s why I see it the way I see it. Go run with it. You know, some people love to send me some emails and say, here’s the report I get from my ad agency. So I read through that and then give them feedback right there.

Josh Ramsey

So I offer that as a free resource because just like everyone, we’re all trying to do better. If we’re really good people, which I believe I am, I try to put my money where my mouth is and really put myself out there and help as much as I can, as many people as I can.

Josh Ramsey

And that has always done me well. I’ve been able to grow year over year over year just by doing that same thing. So that’s what I do and why I do it.

JOHN CLARKE

It’s great stuff. Josh, thank you again for being here. And for for, for the rest of everyone. You know, what’s happening right now at Private Practice Workshop. I’ve been talking about a lot the past few weeks – the doors to our business Made Human Mastermind are open.

JOHN CLARKE

They open just twice a year. It’s a weekly mastermind where you’re going to meet with me and a small group of like-minded peers. We’re really helping you design a business around your vision for your business and life and giving you strategic coaching and accountability along the way for six months.

JOHN CLARKE

Also includes unlimited coaching with me through our biweekly office hours. So if you’re interested in that, we have a group for solo practitioners, and we have a group for group practice owners, privatepracticeworkshop.com.

JOHN CLARKE

Just click on Business Made Human to book a call with me. And yeah, those slots are filling fast. It’ll be full and enclosed again in probably less than two weeks. So thanks again to Spruce for sponsoring the show as always.

JOHN CLARKE

And thanks again to Josh. So yeah, thanks again, Josh. And yeah, we really appreciate your time.

Josh Ramsey

Thanks for having me.

JOHN CLARKE

Cheers.