Getting More New Patients

Hi, this is Dave Kats with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

We talked last week, that there was only four ways to build your practice and that is get more new patients, get more patient visits, provide more services or do a better job with collections. Today, I'd like to talk to you about number one, and that is getting more new patients. Now, we're careful not to promote any product. I doubt that most of you know even what we do for a living or what we provide for therapists, how we do our coaching with therapists or anything like that, because we want to make it strictly for you. We never go into that field of promoting ourselves.

In this case, this one week, I'm going to promote ourselves because we're going to talk about how to get new patients. I think the best way to get new patients is by having an online presence. As you know, more and more and more, your patients are coming from the internet. It's going to continue as far as into the future as we can see. We put together a program and I think it's the best program out there, that's why I'm using it as an example. When clients join us, when therapists join us, this is what we do for them as far as your internet presence is concerned.

The first thing we do is we have them fill out a questionnaire that has all their name and address and everything like that and we get it so it's exactly right. Then we submit it to every search engine, basically every major search engine in the United States, probably 60 or 70 of them. Especially with Google, Bing, Yelp and Yahoo, because for search engines to list you high, they have to know that they have the right information. When you have the right information all over the internet, then they know they're right, they'll list you higher. The first thing we do is we get you listed on all the search engines exactly the same way.

The second thing we do is we go through your Psychology Today, we rearrange that and put it in good character and good form so that your new patients increase off Psychology Today. The next thing we do is we look at your website. We don't create a new website for you. We tell your designers exactly what to do, we tell you what to do, you can tell your designers. We go through step by step by step by step through every portion of your website and tell you what things you can do differently to make it more effectively. There's a lot of changes that can take place.

Then the next thing we do is we get you listed as a listing on all the search engines, especially Google, Bing, Yelp and Yahoo. We get you listed so that there's more than just a basic information about you, so that people can see what you're like and what your business is about. The next thing we do is we get you on all the major social media sites. We make sure that you have a Facebook for Business account, we make sure that you have an Instagram account, very important, and make sure that you're on the other social media sites too. Then every month we put an original article, your article is totally original, you won't see it anywhere else in the United States before, after or ever.

We write an article for you every month and we have you put that on your website. Then we on social media and on Instagram, every week we put an article that references the article we just put on your website, so it drives people to your website. Then we keep looking, we keep checking that, to make sure there's no decay, information decay, which means things have changed and you don't know it. We check that and the results are really great. Now I want to caution you, if you do something like this on your own or with us, if you do something like this, you got to make sure that you give yourself three to six months before you start seeing the changes. It's slow, it takes time to get to the top.

We also show you lots of other things, I could go into lots of other things. You need to have, if you want to get more new patients, you have to have a good internet presence. Now I don't care if you do it through us or through someone else. I just want to give this as an example. You have to get started on your internet program. The best time to do it is right now, actually the best time was yesterday or yesteryear. The next best time is right now. I know that sometimes it's hard to say, "I have no Facebook following and the other therapists have Facebook following. I have none and it's just hard to get started." The sooner you get started, the better off you're going to be.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.