The Practice of Therapy

Unknown Speaker
Hello, I'm

Jessica Tappana
Jessica panna, I am a clinician of private practice owner. And also, I run simplified SEO consulting where we help therapists with their search engine optimization. I'm so excited to be back on the practice of therapy with Gordon today talking about life in general and running a practice and the role that our website can play in that.

Gordon Brewer
Well, hello, everyone, and welcome again to the practice of therapy podcast. And I'm so glad to have back with me, my good friend, Jessica tapana. Jessica, welcome.

Jessica Tappana
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to have a good excuse to chat with you.

Gordon Brewer
Yes, Yes, I was. One of the things that's been great about this year is, first of all, we're moving out of COVID. It seems like but the other thing is, is that I've been able to reconnect with Jessica and our good friend, Whitney Owens, and Uriah Guilford. And we're in a mastermind group together. And it's just been such a wonderful experience of just holding each other accountable and bouncing ideas off of each other. And so it's just been great to reconnect with you, Jessica, in that way, as well. So, yeah, so as I said, I was gonna say, as soon as I start with everyone, why don't you tell folks a little bit about your private practice journey, and just kind of how you've landed where you've landed?

Jessica Tappana
Um, good. Well, like most people, I, you know, had a couple of jobs where I had the privilege and honor of working with people in different settings, starting in the state hospital, in a school and providing therapy in those in those spaces. And then when I was pregnant with my daughter, I just decided it was time for a change of pace, opened my private practice, did a lot of the legwork for it, you know, the paperwork and all that on my maternity leave and went back finished up my previous job and started my private practice in 2017. Thinking solely me, I thought I'd work about 10 hours a week see, we'll see about 10 clients a week, you know, work very part time. And what I found is that there was such a need that even though I was private pay quickly, I had 30 clients a week and started to expand into a group practice less than a year in. And at that point, I taught myself search engine optimization so that people weren't always just calling for Jessica, they were calling for a spire and we could work with getting them into see my clinicians that I was bringing on. And from there, it's grown to the size that I wanted it to be. And then we're a nice, tight knit group of about seven private pay therapists at this point. And actually, you know, to be honest, I think it was not too far in my journey that I added simplified SEO consulting, because it was it my own efforts to optimize my website were so effective, that friends started asking me for help. And I joke that that's the accidental business practice was the purposeful one. Yeah. But that's grown now too. And I have a team of about six people. They're most everybody has some sort of mental health background, at least a bachelor's degree in social work or psychology and several working on master's degree or with a master's degree. And so then we hang out over there. So now I'm really fortunate that I have this opportunity to to serve clinicians serve clients and, and hang out with really fun people all day every day. Yeah,

Gordon Brewer
yeah, that's, that's a that is fun. And you've had just a lot of just phenomenal growth. I know since I've known Jessica, Jessica and I've known each other for a while and we were what's been two years now but other than if you count the virtual killin it camp, we had, we had had contact with each other and talked and all that sort of thing before that, but finally got to meet each other in person out in Colorado two years ago. And we were just talking before we started recording, hoping to be able to get together again this year, if all goes well. But one of the things you know, also that Jessica, you and I had talked about, before we started recording, it's just all this life balance stuff. And I know for you and for me, you've got two kids and doing the mom thing doing, you know the family stuff plus running two businesses. How do you do it and what have you learned about all of that? You know, I

Jessica Tappana
think that was my favorite thing about our mastermind is that we all have two businesses plus people that we care about at home and It is hard and it is a daily struggle. I've, you know, I learned pretty early in my practice to tell my clients that like, this is my schedule for this semester. But just so you know, in my family needs change. And so I to tell clients, you know, from day one, okay, your time slots gonna be four o'clock in the afternoon on Tuesdays, I, I'm going to tell you, I'll hold that for you for a semester, but at the end of every semester, my schedule tends to be tweaked a little bit. And so I've always just given myself that space. But I think this year, you know, the question, the term that keeps coming up, in my mind, I talked about what clients do is values, what are my values? And how are those playing out? In where I'm putting my time does my time reflect what I see is my core values. And, and I think that's a struggle, because sometimes, you know, two things family's really important, and maybe my kid has a, you know, a sick that day, and I value being there for my kids, when they're sick. But then also, you know, there's this client that I really need to help or there's no support that one of my employees that either business needs. And so I value that as well, providing them support and providing them, you know, with everything they need. And so I think it's just a constant question. And what I find really helpful is just naming the two things that are that seem to be competing and say, Okay, these are both important. Which one, right and this minute needs to needs to kind of take the, you know, take the top place for this particular moment in time, because this particular moment might be different than tomorrow or whatnot. But it's a it's a constant question, and I, and then I thought I had it and then COVID happened, and my husband's a nurse, and so he's a nurse at the hospital. So when COVID happened, we had I had months where everybody else was complaining about being bored and the lockdown, and I'm like, I'm trying to educate to children don't meet the needs of all my clients still meet the needs of my team. And by golly, it's important for my husband to go to work every day and be there every day. And so I think that it was a bit of a reset, and, and we're still recent, you know, it's been a slow comeback from COVID, right. And I think I'm really excited because this summer, my kids are gonna be my kids are gonna be in summer camp from nine to four, five days a week, and I'm like, wow, I'm

Unknown Speaker
gonna have the most normal schedule

Jessica Tappana
I've had in ages and right. I love it. I'm gonna, I've been homeschooling my son, so I'm gonna miss that. But it will be nice to have a steady normal, quote unquote.

Gordon Brewer
Right? Right. What What have you found that has helped you manage your time because I would think he, you know, time management would just be totally important for you. And just the the schedule that you keep? Yeah,

Jessica Tappana
I think, um, accepting my imperfections and accepting the reality, I always had this thought that you could just go go go, like, if something else needs to be squeezed in, I could just squeeze it in and find a way. And I think that that worked for me for for an amount of time that I was, you know, the type of person that yeah, if I just needed to squeeze in the ninth client of the day, I just squeeze in the ninth client of the day. And I have reached a point where I've just accepted that, that's not always practical, that I can do better, I can be better for everybody, if I do accept my limitations. And so I've had people complain, you know, trying to schedule time to meet with me that I sometimes have to schedule it weeks out even. And, you know, that's not always people aren't always a big fan. And I used to be the type I'd be like, Oh, look, let's meet at night, I literally met with clients at like nine o'clock at night, I had a couple of times, where if my last month finished at 845, and somebody was having an emergency, I do whatever it took. And now I've learned this year that really drawing those boundaries, I think has made me more present in everything that I've done. But it's been really critical with everything going on just to say, you know, the all my openings are, you can see my openings. And these are what they are my VA is actually I'll be like, Okay, this time is open. So anybody that calls that fit for me if they can't do that time, unfortunately, right? Don't even tell me about the issues. And say, like, but there's this person and they sound perfect for you. And then I'd cave and I'd be like, okay, we'll make it work. Yeah. Well, you're just more ruthless. ruthless. Don't tell me they exist, or I will cave? Yeah. Yeah.

Gordon Brewer
There's so many parallels for Jessica. Yeah, there's just the same kind of thing. And you bring up a good point in that, the importance of being able to outsource things, particularly like with a VA and scheduling and that sort of thing. I think for us as therapists we just generally, we generally want to help people and so we, you know, we we hear from people and they're really kind of desperate to get help and we just like you said, We cave for So it's always better, I think, just to hand that off to our, our virtual assistants or our intake coordinators or whoever, how have you phrase that? Because they can look at your schedule and say, Okay, this is, this is it and there's no negotiating now. And that's a, that's a, that's a tough one to add, I've gone through the same thing, where, like you, we talked about Jessica, where I've really cut my schedule back, I'm only seeing clients three days a week. And I've really cut back the number of slots, I mean, I've just have afternoon slots. And that's, that's it. And so really sticking to that is, is important and like with, with family stuff, and I've shared with folks just, you know, caring for my wife, who is disabled, there's a lot of things that just come up, and you have to change and juggle your schedule, but I think you're right, setting those boundaries. And sticking to them is real important piece, and just being able to manage all the things that we want to do.

Jessica Tappana
And I found that people generally respect that, you know, if I'm setting boundaries with my clinicians, I tend to put them first in a lot of ways and my clients, but you know, I know that like if one of my clinicians has a clinical question, like that's really important that they have that space. And so I'll generally drop everything to talk to them. But I recently took a week off actually last week. And I told them ahead of time, I'm like, Look, if there's a clinical question, I need you guys to reach out first to one another. Obviously, if it's life or death, and you've tried talking to people, and you really need to talk to me, that's great. Call me but I really need you first. And that was a really hard boundary for me to take. But it was so important to me that I give my family that undivided attention. And at the end of the week, my son looked up and he's seven, he was Mommy, you haven't worked all week. And of course, in my mind, I'm like, and I totally checked emails a couple times, he doesn't know. But it meant so much to them in this week. You know, my kids have gotten great reports from school, like they've had just a good week. And I'm like, that's because they had my undivided attention. And how much better than I've been bringing excite, like I was ready to get back to work. And you know, Monday, I couldn't believe how much I accomplished because I'd taken that time and drawn that boundary that when a couple people had texted me, I literally said call somebody else, you know, I don't draw those boundaries. But it made Yeah, it was in everybody's best interest. Right.

Gordon Brewer
Right. And I think I think for those of us in group practice, one of the things that I know I've had to learn to do better is Yeah, like you're mentioning set, setting boundaries with your team. I mean, you know, what I had, we had a staff meeting or Stafford, kind of an online staff retreat. This past weekend, one of the things I told them is just this, you know, don't bring me menial problems. If we're out of toilet paper, I don't need to know about that. Just somebody go get the toilet paper. And then you can, if you need to be reimbursed, I can reimburse you, but just don't bother me with those things. And I think that's what you have to really be when you're in the positions that we're in, as leaders and being able to run, you know, juggle several things. It's so important to delegate and to hand things off. And I know that's something I'm still working on for me just my is learning how to do that better.

Jessica Tappana
I had a big one this year. I haven't done this with my private practice both simplified I had some I started getting some help with my managing my email inbox. Now there's still a ton that I need to respond to personally. And so we have you know, they, they go into a folder and so I try not to check all the other folders it you know, very on a regular basis. Because what I had found was I put this incredible pressure on myself to respond to emails within 24 hours, you know, in the corporate, not corporate in like the agency setting. That was always why I was told as emails must be responded to in 24 hours, but between my two businesses, and everything I was getting, you know, well over 100 emails a day and to weed through them was too much. And so actually, our friend Uriah, I'm going through his seven day email series about this, I'm like, He's right, you've got to delete stuff. You've got to you've got to automate. And so we've put rules in my inbox right now I'm back to personally checking it all, but like there's some rules. So some things go to folders that like I don't need to see all of the automatic, somebody paid for some things or whatnot. But I think it makes I just think it makes a difference. And I you know, I've started asking myself on like, is this really something I have to do? Or is there someone else that can do it and you know, even with moving offices, I told you earlier that I'm getting a new office for my practice today. And I'm so excited. But my you're like, Oh, yeah, furniture, where are you getting furniture from? And I'm like, my VA is taking care of it because I sat there. And she's amazing. For the record. She just is finishing up her degree in psychology. And she has been with us for years. So she knows my practice really well. And we sat down, and we just talked about, like, what do we need? We may create a vision board, she sends me texts for approval on some stuff. But you know, I would love that that is a project that would be fun for me, I set up our last office. But does it have to be me that does it? You know? Probably not.

Gordon Brewer
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a, that's a hard one, I think for people to let go of sometimes is just being thinking that we, we have to do it all. But really, that's, that's what moves you from being, you know, kind of a solo entrepreneur or solo business owner, into a group or as this other owner, or, as I've heard it put to is moving from just a business owner to being a CEO. And that's, that's an important piece to remember. And I've, you mentioned your is seven day course. And Uriah is he's probably as we're recording this, he will have one of his episodes will have come out before this one, but we'll put a link in the show summary. That's all my to do list is to do his the seven day email thing. And so that's they can I'm glad to hear you're having success with it. I'm

Jessica Tappana
excited for it, because it's great. He needs the SEO juice from backlinks.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah, there we go. There we go. Yeah, so well, you know, to switch gears, Jessica, tell folks a little bit about simplified SEO and just kind of that part of your business and how you got started with that. Yeah. So

Jessica Tappana
as we were talking about outsourcing, I was thinking, you know, my not so secret dirty little secret is I actually outsource a lot of my own private practice SEO. Now even though I know how to do it. I've literally trained all the staff at simplified to do their job. But at this point, even I'm like, in my private practice, do I really need to be the one to optimize all of my own blog posts? Probably not. And so I even outsource, from my private practice to simplified but yeah, no simplified. Started out really slow with I was trying to learn to optimize my own website. I liked my website, but nobody was seeing it. You know, I would watch Google Analytics, and I even had people test it. I remember one day having my brother in law across the room, I'm like, get on, get on my website. Let me see if this even works. Because it says nobody's going to my website, and I don't believe it. I saw I could see even what page he was on on Google Analytics. If you've never looked at that stuff, right? Right. You're creepy, but okay, it's working. But nobody's finding it. And so, you know, I did all my marketing at midnight early on, because I had a newborn, it was up at weird hours. And so you know, midnight, I could listen to this podcast and read this book. And I read, I don't know how many books and just totally taught myself this. But what I found is applying it to our field is unique. You know, they talk people talk a lot about getting reviews, I can't go ask my clients ethically for reviews as a social worker. And so I figured a lot of it out along the way, and then had friends that were like, Hey, can you help and you know, the amount I've learned Gordon, the amount that SEO has changed, even in the last few years is incredible Google updates, our field has gotten more competitive, more and more therapists are hearing about SEO. And so it used to be I could give you three tips, you could go do them. And you'd get you know, at least to the second page, and now it definitely is more work. But it's fun. It's just this puzzle. And so my team, we have I think there's about six of us all together. Several are part time right now. And I have a director of SEO Services. She's the tech she wears the techie hat she's actually an MSW herself. She has her master's in social social work. And so she has them in she ran our rape and sexual violence prevention center locally for a while so she she gets the that piece of it, but she also just as much more technical, she's actually built websites I have but don't look at them. She actually knows what and you know, all these techie stuff, she can figure it out and she can solve any techie problem I'm more of a big picture person and under it, but between the two of us we stay on top of stuff and every single week we're talking we're training our staff and we have developed over the years this really cool system where like one person will do the first level of work on on a site then a second person will view it and then third person will take it you know and make more changes and try to push the envelope further and get them even closer. And then a third person will take a look and be like, Man, you still can't get them ranking for this, okay, recommend that they do this or let's try this or things. You know, we get multiple, multiple eyes on every page. You I just think that our results have gotten better and better, even though it has gotten more competitive. And we've had to add more and more things that we do here and there. But SEO is fun. It's a puzzle, I like to say it's non life threatening.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah,

Jessica Tappana
a lot of suicidal clients a lot. I did a lot of DBT until about a year and a half ago. And, you know, it's kind of nice sometimes to work on your website and know that if I mess this up, the absolute worst case scenario is a website goes down for a little while, but I've never had one down for more than, you know, a very short period of time with oil. stuff. So

Gordon Brewer
yeah, well, I know. Yeah. And it's just amazing what you have learned. And I think, what what I love about what you're doing, which is, again, similar, kind of parallel paths that we're on is you've taken all the stuff that you have learned in, in building your practice, and particularly around this specific thing. SEO, Search Engine Optimization, and are teaching other people how to do that, because you've learned all the hard way. And that doesn't have to be that way for them. And so if you were to, if you were to maybe give some people some quick fixes, or with their SEO, just maybe a few tips on that, what would they be?

Jessica Tappana
content first, Google has to know what your website is about,

we're always worried about, about right writing thing Oh, one complaint I hear a lot from people is, you know, I'm afraid if I write a bunch of words on my website, nobody's going to read them all. That's why I recommend breaking it up with subheadings. Because we make our pages scannable. so that people can quickly get to the information they want. But you have to have enough information on that website for Google to actually know what it is you're really good at. And you know, a really if I if I say I do. And again, this comes to niching, too, which I know a lot of people talk about. But if I say I do I work with everybody. I just provide counselling for everything. And I give you this list of 50 different possible diagnoses or social emotional issues that I might treat, then Google's like, wow, okay, you can spell depression, that's cool. But if I really niche down and I write a whole page about depression, and then I write a couple of blog posts on like, how to you know how to combat depression, or best tips for dealing with depression, then suddenly, Google starts to see like, Oh, this website really has really knows that stuff about depression, and it sends people there. You know, personally, I think of that content, not just as serving to get me in front of my potential clients from an SEO perspective, but also in just sharing some of what I know, with the world. And the more that I share what I know, through blogging, the better. Not only will I rank on Google, but the impact that I can make on people who will never walk through my doors as a client. And the people who do walk through my doors, they've heard my voice, you know, we've had multiple times where somebody has called and requested the specific therapist that wrote a blog that appealed to them. So sorry, this blogging is dude, Gordon, we can talk for hours.

Gordon Brewer
Oh, yeah.

Jessica Tappana
And on your website is one of the big ones. Another big one is make sure that your website is a represents you really well, because it sounds weird to me as an SEO person saying that I don't build websites. I'm not trying to sell website building services, please do not come to me for website building. But having a website that you like that works? Well, you'll want to show it off if you have a website that speaks to your ideal client. So I think that that's another big mistake that I see people make sometimes is they just throw something up, which we've all done, I've done it, I launched a new website, they just kind of thrown up so to speak. But I'm going back and changing it over time, because the more it represents you The more you want to promote it and do these things. And then another quick tip, think about backlinks think about getting other people to link to your site. I love guest blog, you know, doing guest blog post, some people don't getting directory listings can be really good directory listings, you have what's called your nap information on them your name, address, and phone number. And so when your contact information is listed on these directories, and they link to your site, that's really good for your SEO. That's why I told you, I'm like give Make sure to list your ideas in here because that will have a link from practice therapy to right to his website. So there are lots of different ways to get backlinks. But just thinking about that, you know, if you're a couple's counselor, is there a divorce attorney in town that has a resource list on their website should be listed on that sort of thing? I think that's one of the most powerful things that you can do right there is working on getting backlinks to your site.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Take it as much as much as anything you want to. At least what I've learned. And what seems to work for for me is you want to kind of establish yourself. No, it just we repeat it over and over again in a particular niche as an expert in a particular area of what we do, but also in just in your writing. Not to make your writing just all this clinical gobble gobbledygook. Just make it every day normal, regular conversational kinds of stuff. And I think part of it is is that you know, graduate school we were, we were trying to write these formal papers. And blogging isn't at all like that. In fact, if you're writing it that way, nobody's going to read it because I didn't like reading all that stuff, either. or writing research papers and stuff. So but yeah, so those are great tips, Jessica, and we're gonna have, I want to be respectful of your time. And I know, we've got a mastermind group today as we're recording this. So I'm looking forward to that. But Jessica, tell folks how they can get in touch with you and find out more about simplified SEO and, and just contacting you.

Jessica Tappana
Yeah, our website is simplified SEO, consulting calm or people are welcome to email me at Jessica at simplified SEO consulting. com.

Unknown Speaker
I love it when

Jessica Tappana
I get people, you know, giving, asking me questions that give me ideas for new blog posts, we can write, or wanting a quick tip or whatever. But I will say, like I mentioned, I'm not no longer putting the pressure on myself to respond within 24 hours. So I can sometimes be the person that takes a couple days to respond. And I just decided that I don't like that. But where I am right now in the world. That's okay, because I do get back to people and I do love talking about SEO and websites and private practice building and all the things.

Gordon Brewer
Yeah, yeah. Well, Jessica, I'm so glad that we're in our group together. And I'm so glad you're on the podcast with me and we'll do it again. I know for sure. And we'll have links here in the show summary. That's good old backlinks here in the show summary in the show notes to Jessica stuff, and so you can find out more about her and connect with her. She's a lot of fun. So anyway, thanks, Jessica.

Jessica Tappana
Thank you so much for having me, Gordon.