SEO for Doulas ~ Webinar

With Patty Brennan, author of The Doula Business Guide

“Build it and they will come” (from the movie, Field of Dreams). Well, no, actually it doesn’t work that way. It’s not enough to create and launch your website. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a great accomplishment for a new business owner! Next, the task is to get your site ranking with the search engines. This is known as SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In this webinar, Patty Brennan shares tips for doula business owners. Even if you are just starting to think about creating a website, this webinar will help you to be strategic in how you approach the project. If you are a seasoned doula business owner who would like to improve your ranking in search results, see what you are doing right and how you might improve.

1. Create and Launch a Website.

You need a website. This is your first step and it should be done as soon as you can. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Longevity matters to the search engines. So get something going asap and know that you can upgrade your site once your business is making enough money to enable you to do that (if lack of money is what is holding you back). If you can afford to pay, consider hiring a professional to design a website for you.

Understand that the more traffic you can drive to your website, the higher you will rank in results. In other words, more traffic = more traffic. This takes time so start now!

2. SEO for Doulas ~ How to optimize the site

Measuring your success

How does one optimize a website? As a first step, install Google Analytics on your website. This is a free plugin, which means it’s just a piece of software that gets added on the back end of your website. It will start collecting data right away, such as how people find your business online. Installing Google Analytics up front will establish a baseline against which you can measure the success of your efforts.

You will receive monthly reports on the number of visitors who come to your website. You will learn the keywords visitors are searching, how you are ranking for those keywords, whether you are getting any referral traffic from other websites (e.g., online doula directories), whether your social media campaigns are generating results, and more. Without a means of measuring your results, you are just making stuff up rather than analyzing the return on your investment (ROI) and then making reasoned decisions based on data.

Keywords and Search Engine Optimization Strategies

A discussion on keywords is included and a number of questions are answered:

• What is a keyword or keyword phrase?
• Where do you find your keywords?
• How does Google “see” keywords?
• Where should keywords be embedded?

We show a tool (Yoast SEO plugin) that can be used with WordPress websites (recommended blogging software). The tool analyzes your page or blog post for SEO and makes recommendations to improve your visibility. It’s super easy to use, however, beware the tyranny of the plugin! Writing for keywords is unnatural and makes for a poor user experience when done in a heavy-handed manner, such as obvious stacking and repetition of keywords on the page.

It’s all about engagement!

The average visitor spends 15 seconds or less on a website. Our goal is to keep them on our website for at least a minute. That means we need to engage our visitors with content relevant to their needs. Pictures, videos, quizzes, and surveys are all possibilities. It is important to refresh the content on your website regularly. Add a blog that publishes to your homepage, or have an events calendar, or community resources. All of these provide a reason to come back to your website and spend a little time there.

Driving traffic online

When it comes to SEO for doulas, I recommend that you follow the path of least resistance and begin to do what you can most easily accomplish first. Here are some ways to drive traffic online:

• Podcast
• Blog
• Social Media
• E-Newsletter
• Directory listings on others’ websites