If you have your own website for your practice, odds are you've heard of the term SEO (search engine optimisation). This is a huge field with a number of variables, one of which being keywords.
Keywords are the words that people may use to search for your services e.g. occupational therapist Toowoomba, naturopath Toowoomba. The idea is that you use the keywords in your content so that Google knows that you are the answer to someone's search query.
But how do you know what people are actually searching for?
You can probably make a good guess, but there's actually a way that you can find out what search terms people have used to find your website. It's called Google Search Console.
Setting up Google Search Console for your allied health and wellness business
Setting up Google Search Console is a little bit techy, but only needs to be done once. Basically you need to prove that you own the domain that you are trying to get insights for (so you can't sticky beak at someone else's insights).
To get yourself prepared, you'll need to have your login details to your domain name provider handy (e.g. GoDaddy, VentraIP) and you'll also need to know where your DNS records are managed.
Don't worry, this isn't as scary as it sounds.
Your domain name provider is the place that you purchased your website address from, it may be the same as where your website is hosted or separate.
The DNS records are usually either managed by your domain name provider or your website host (e.g. for me, I have my domain with GoDaddy, but my website host Wix has my DNS settings).
The easy way
If your DNS records are with your domain name provider then you'll just be able to go to Google Search Console, enter your domain name and follow the prompts to log in to your domain name provider and viola!
The slightly harder way
If your DNS records are with your website host, or your domain name provider isn't on the list, then you'll be prompted to copy some code to add to the TXT section of your DNS records.
For my Wix website, I logged into my Wix site and went to "settings." In settings there is the option to "manage domain" and from there to "manage DNS records." If you're having trouble finding that, you can just search for "manage DNS" in the help section.
From there you'll see a lot of stuff that looks a bit scary and like gobbledegook. Scroll down until you see TXT as the heading, then click on add and you be able to paste in the code you copied from Google Search Console.
Then you'll go back to the GS Console screen and complete the verification.
Using Google Search Console to find keywords
Once you're in to the console, you'll see all sorts of stats that make a stats nerd feel like a pig in mud.
If you want to get straight to the good part, then you'll select "Performance" and scroll down a little bit to "queries" and this is where you'll see the list of queries (aka keywords), the number of clicks (when people clicked on your website) and impressions (when you showed up on the Google search results page).
What next?
Using this information you can see what people are searching for and add content or blogs accordingly.
Obviously SEO is a super huge area, and this is only a small part, but I hope this helps getting you started and equipped with data to assess and improve your website and online presence.
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If you're looking for help using those keywords for blog writing or other social content, get in touch and I can send you through my social media management and blog writing packages.
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