Having a website is vital to any business.
But most practice owners don't have a background in website design or creation. And even if you do, is it the best use of your time?
Join me as I chat with digital business consultant, Daniel Fava, about how to get a great website. Click to listen now!
In This Episode, You'll Learn:
The 5 benefits of outsourcing your website:
- Saves you time
- Cost effectiveness
- Expertise & experience
- Peace of mind
- Scaleability
Resources Mentioned In This Episode:
Private Practice Elevation
5 Tips For Choosing A Therapy Practice Website Designer
Uriah
Hi, Daniel, welcome to the podcast!
Daniel
Hey, Uriah, thanks so much for having me! I'm excited to chat today.
Uriah
Of course! I can't believe I got THE Daniel Fava on the podcast.
Daniel
Oh, stop! I can't believe I'm on Uriah Guilford's podcast. This is awesome.
Uriah
We're both a really big deal, actually.
Daniel
We'll see how this goes!
Uriah
Hopefully, fingers crossed! Yeah. I love the topic that we're covering today. I know that when you and I chat, whether it's, well, we met once in person or online, we always go in all kinds of fun, different directions because we have some mutual similar interests, right? Yeah.
Daniel
We can geek out easily on a lot of similar things, which is fun. It makes this just a lot of fun to chat with you. Always a pleasure.
Uriah
Definitely. Today we are talking about the five benefits of outsourcing your website and just generally around the idea of outsourcing your website. I know you've got some tips on that, but I thought maybe it might be helpful, or at least I would like to hear what you have to say about the downsides to not outsourcing your website, i. E. Therapist in a private practice or starting a private practice and bootstrapping and wanting to just save some money and save some... Well, they're not going to save time and do it themselves. It's easier than ever to build a website, but what are the potential downsides to doing that?
Daniel
If..yeah. Actually, I've got five benefits. I was throwing this around in my mind this week. So the benefits of outsourcing, you can just flip those and it could be the five downsides of not outsourcing. I think it probably makes sense that we just start going through these tips if that works because we can, on each one, even how I explain how I'm thinking about this, you will hear the downsides. Should we just launch right into it? Absolutely. Okay, cool. Well, you know the first benefit, and you even just mentioned it already, the first benefit of outsourcing website design and development is going to be time saving. And I want to preface this with, I understand everyone is at a different place in their practice building journey. So you might find yourself where time is all you have, and that's okay. You might be just starting out. You know you need a website, you have to get something up and running so you have a place that you could send potential clients, that you could start sending referral sources, that thing. So I totally get that. That was where my wife found herself when she first started in private practice because she had me. I built her website, but she also did a lot of blog writing and content writing because she didn't have those clients yet. So I just want to preface it with that, where if you do have a ton of time on your hands because of where you're at in your journey, it might make sense to dive in and get something at least to have a representation of your business online. So with that being said, out of the way, really probably one of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your website is going to be the time saving. It's really like a personal time saving because if you don't enjoy building a website, if you don't enjoy the technical pieces, the design pieces, all of the stuff that goes into it, you're going to find yourself in a lot of rabbit holes. Because if you're not familiar with those things, as you get into the process, you're going to start uncovering things. If you're working with somebody who does have a process, they've done this before. They've got a step by step, and that's what we have. At private practice elevation, we've got a whole step formula that we go through to make sure we hit all the points. But if you don't have that, you're going to find yourself going, Oh, I need to write copy. Well, how do I write copy for an About page? How do I write copy for a homepage? What should go on my service page? And there's a rabbit hole. You're like, Okay, I've got my content written. Okay, what platform should I build this thing on? What's the benefits of using Squarespace? What's the benefit of using WordPress? There's another rabbit hole where you're just spending a ton of time on Google or YouTube trying to figure that out. I want to just remind people to just think in terms of your hourly rate and what you are worth. Because likely everyone has that already established, you have your hourly rate. One thing I did in preparation for this chat is I took a look at four of our most recent projects and how much time my developer spent on just a typical private practice website. So that's like 10 to 15 pages, not like a huge group practice, just like an average website. And so the average of those four projects, my developer spent about 69 hours. And so that is just on development. And we're using WordPress, so it's a little more nuanced and there's more customization. They're also professionals, so they might be putting more into these projects than your standard private practice owner might be doing. But just to give a sense of what it could take. And that's just, like I said, the development. So not design, not the copywriting, not planning the content, not then optimizing the website. So you just got to be aware, it is a big job, so you have to be prepared to sink a lot of hours into it. So if you outsource that, even if the project, in a sense, takes a while, it might not be time saving in that I'm going to launch my website in a weekend, but you are going to be able to focus on what you love to do, focus on your clients, your team building, the things that only you can do.
Uriah
If you had asked me to guess how many hours it takes to build a 10 page website, I would have guessed way lower than 69. That's incredible.
Daniel
Yeah. Well, sometimes it is a lot less, and it really depends on the complexity of the client and the practice. But yeah, but some of those larger group practice websites that we do, we're well over 120 hours.
Uriah
That makes sense. I would say that there's a really high chance that a therapist who's starting or growing a private practice should not build their own website just for that one point alone, because it's going to take you a lot of time, it might not be the best use of your time, which I think is what your point is there, right?
Daniel
Right. And while I said you might want to just get something up quickly, it could mean if you really feel like you're going to sink so much time into it, it's definitely not something you love or excited to do. Get a psychology today profile up and then maybe start networking and your communities start just letting people know you're there. Your time might be better spent. You might have a better ROI with those sorts of things, getting your networking going and stuff like that, rather than spending time on your website.
Uriah
So if it's okay with you, I was thinking it might be fun to use somebody as an example as we go through these tips. Sure. I'm going to send this podcast episode to him. Okay, awesome. Jim is a guy who used to work for me for about six years. Amazing therapist, amazing guy. And last year, he launched his own private practice. I helped him. We just decided the quickest thing to do for him, he's not the guy that would want to build a website, really. And so we actually set up a simple practice website, professional website, because it was included in the cost of simple practice, and it was super easy. And at least he had something to go along with, like psychology today. But here we are about a year later, and that simple practice site is still there. Not saying anything negative about simple practice professional websites, but you can't find it. It's not easy to find. It's a one page site that really doesn't have excellent SEO. So as we're talking through these things, I'm thinking about Jim, who really probably would benefit from... Now, probably he would benefit from having a professionally designed website, and he's not likely going to spend the time to do it and he shouldn't.
Daniel
Right. Yeah. I see that a lot. And I consulted with a few people in the same boat. They needed something up, simple practice was there. They make it really easy to get that up. And that's great when you're just starting out. And again, you need a place to send people. But long term, you're going to hit that point where, okay, my business is I've got some clients coming in and it's growing, so it's time to invest and get to the next level of being found of reaching more of your ideal client. And by that time, you hopefully know a little bit more about those ideal clients. When you go to create that website, you'll have content ideas, you'll have services because you've nailed those down. So all that works for the next iteration of your website and marketing.
Uriah
Good point. So the first benefit to outsourcing your website is time saving. What's the second one?
Daniel
So the second one is definitely related is cost effectiveness. So we go back to that example of 69 hours for developing a website, and I had to do math is not my forte, but I had to do a little math here. So just like an example, so if your hourly rate is $125, let's just be conservative, then you have to realize if you spent 69 hours building your website over the course of six months or whatever it is, you just paid $8,625 to build your website, which is average for what we charge our private practice elevation. But that includes design, that includes copy. My 69 hours was really just for the developing of the website. You are potentially going to be paying yourself, if you think in that term, much more than $8,000. With that, you could have hired a freelancer who maybe has a much lower rate than $125 an hour. You can hire an agency, private practice elevation, maybe work out. Sometimes we'll do payment plans that is stretched out over six months. So it's not $8,000 upfront, and then you're just trying to work to get it all back. But if you're able to get that website up and continue with this example and estimate, okay, maybe that website goes live and it brings in just one client, let's be really conservative, brings in one client a month for six months. And I don't know, each person is different how long their clients stick around. But I like to be conservative with the estimations. But so maybe they stick around four times, four sessions. So 6 times 4, 24 sessions times 125 hours. $125 an hour is $3,000 right there. So that's just for one client each month. So then if you start to then run ads to your new website or invest in some SEO or nail down the SEO as you're building that website, maybe it means two clients coming in. And so that's 6,000. And so you're starting to see how the ROI works. It's definitely going to be an investment, but it is going to pay back. If done right, it should pay back and get those clients get that revenue coming back in. And then you also have to think about too, what happens if you don't do it right? And when we're thinking about cost effectiveness, if your website isn't done right and it's not found or the messaging is off, it's not reaching people, then you might be losing clients. And so that's the downside of when you do it yourself, if it's not done right and then no one can find it in Google, it's not working, it doesn't convert, there's technical issues, stuff like that. Then the opposite happens. You'd be losing clients and you'll be losing money. That's the cost effectiveness piece of the equation here.
Uriah
That makes a lot of sense. A professional website that is built and optimized well is a huge referral and revenue generator. I remember back in the day, and it's still the case, when I would review our referrals and I would say, Okay, well, who are our top referral sources? From local professionals to maybe other websites, the top referr was always our website, right? Yeah, exactly. And so then that always motivated me to go back and just keep on making the website better because it has always performed very well for us. You're going to save time and save money if you have somebody else do it. That makes sense.
Daniel
Yeah, absolutely. I love that term and I've been using that with our clients lately. It's another referral source. I was just talking with a new client this week who they're like, Our team is not totally full time. Everyone's pretty full and schools are referring to us. They do child therapy. Pediatricians are referring to us. Then we get to the website, Well, how's the website doing? Oh, no one can find it. We get no clients from the website. The only people coming to the website are people who are referred. If you get the website right, and these are the types of projects I love because I know people are already showing up to the website. Then if we level up that website, make it so it's really clear, so people connect with the services and they know exactly what to do, we can increase conversions of those referral people, but then we can also turn on that new source of referral, and that's the SEO, the organic people coming from search engines.
Uriah
Huge opportunity. Yeah.
Daniel
Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
Uriah
What's number three?
Daniel
Number three is expertise and experience. That's what we touched on. That's where you can really get held back is most therapists didn't go to school to be developers or designers. Like I said, most don't enjoy it. Some people do, and that's totally fine. But most of the people that I consult with are just like, I put this thing together and it doesn't look like how I want it to look. It's not doing what I want it to do. There's so much of it I don't understand. I don't know if it's working. If you outsource, you can find somebody who has that experience. They've likely done projects before and they know the technical ins and outs and all the things that, yes, you can get a website up, but what about the structure? Is it optimized to load quickly? Are you using the right format for images? A lot of this geeky stuff that can go on in the background that if it's not done right, then down the road, you're going to be looking to redesign your website anyway. For me, I like to see people who are willing to just invest in the future of the practice now because they have a vision, they have an idea of what they want it to be, rather than spend all this time and money and miss out in the meantime, and not having a good website. Then they get something up and they're just, Oh, this doesn't fit my brand. It's not what I want it to look like, and it also doesn't work correctly. Now I have to go and redesign it again anyway. When you outsource and you find somebody that you trust and has experience, they will take care of all that stuff for you. They'll know all the technical aspects. They'll likely know design and color theory and what colors work together, what fonts work together for that look. But then there's also the technical piece of making sure that the website functions correctly as well. I think.
Uriah
When people look at purchasing a website, they look at the sticker price, so to speak, and they go, Oh, my goodness, I could probably do this on my own for much less. But what they're not taking into account is the 10,000 or 20,000 hours that you put into learning all these things.
Daniel
They're.
Uriah
Not inconsequential because the things that you know that you apply to web design can actually make all the difference to whether that actually brings in clients and actually communicates and performs like they want it to. Yeah, absolutely. It is a good investment. I talk about sometimes the things that are worth spending money on. I would put good shoes on that list, a good mattress, because you spend a lot of time sleeping. And for a business, a good website, a really good website is a worthwhile investment. And for the most part, correct me if I'm wrong on this one, but most of the cost is up front. And then you do that once, and maybe you redesign it years down the road, but it's a fixed cost that's mostly up front, right?
Daniel
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the ongoing cost of a website might just be the maintenance of it. If you're using WordPress, you got to keep things up to date. And if you don't want to be the one doing that, you'll want some help with that. But that just keeps things running smoothly and make sure that it's free from malware and stuff like that that happens. But then as you continue to grow and your practice continues to grow, you might want to add more to it. And then once you've gotten the website established, then you can start to do all the other fun marketing stuff like getting into the SEO and making sure that's correct. You might want to run ads to the website. You start looking at the data, the Google Analytics, like which pages are the most popular. Oh, this one. I'm getting a lot of people to this specific blog post. What can I do in this blog post to then make that convert better and lead people towards my free consultation button? Stuff like that. But yeah, like you said, the biggest chunk is up front. But then there's those ongoing things you might want to invest in. But now you've got that foundation in place where you can start layering on the different marketing strategies.
Uriah
Are you trying to infer that SEO is fun? Did I hear you say that?
Daniel
It is! I enjoy SEO. It's fun. It's hard to get hard to explain. I think what I like about online marketing is that with SEO, it's like math. It's like there are certain things that you can do that will yield results. But where it's not like math is that there's all the competition and all the different things. But the data is there. It's like, okay, I added these keywords through a certain page and this is what happened. After a month, I can look at that data. So I think that's cool in a geeky way.
Uriah
I didn't know anything about that for a long time, and I just got lucky by just consistently blogging for years. I had a couple of blog posts that were... This is not a strategy by any means, but they just took off. They were both about teenagers smoking weed and parents wanting to find help with that.
Daniel
Yeah, it's a big question that I'm sure many parents run into.
Uriah
I had to take one off my site because I think the title of this post was Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa teach drug education or something like that. I thought it was a really clever post. I hope this is on topic, but I thought it was a clever post because it was deconstructing this particular hip hop song and these messages about drugs and adolescents. Then I got tons and tons of comments on that post from people that were not in favor of my messaging. Yeah, I bet. I took that one down. I took that one down.
Daniel
Yeah. They had a similar story. When I first started freelancing, doing private practice websites, it was just me. I was the one building the websites. I started a blog called createmytherapistwebsite.com, and it was lots of DIY tips, how do you optimize a blog post and things about design and stuff. I just for two years, it was every week, a new blog post, a new blog post. I knew a little bit about SEO, but not that much at the time. But the consistency really paid off because it still gets lots of traffic each month. It's just sitting there, but it's bringing people into my world. So that's cool.
Uriah
That's good. I like it. Okay, so we got one, two, and three. What is tip number four?
Daniel
So the fourth one is it has to do a lot with something that I see a lot when I talk to and consult with people. And it is related to the expertise and experience, but it's more on the personal side is the peace of mind. So when you when you DIY your website without a lot of knowledge about content marketing, SEO design, all those best practices and stuff, you're probably left with that feeling of, did I do this right? And so I speak with a lot of folks each week consulting with new clients, old clients, and I hear it so many times that, Oh, I just put this website together. I don't know if it's doing anything. I don't know how people are finding it. I don't know if it's done correctly. I have no idea how the analytics work. And that's okay not to know that stuff. But just think of how great it would feel to know, Okay, I invested in this for an expert to do it, and it's done right because I could see that people are showing up. I could see in my Google Analytics now that I know how that works and I can review those reports, I know people are showing up and I know that this has become an asset in my business. And so I think it really can be your website can be a huge asset in your business. We already talked about that organic referral source. So just that piece of mind, I think, is a huge part of it that a lot of people don't tend to think about.
Uriah
That is huge because you don't know what you don't know. And that's right of everybody with certain things. For some reason, I thought about the example of recently I had an artificial lawn installed, and it seems like a simple job. In fact, my neighbor did it, and he did a pretty good job. But when I watched the professional that I hired to install the artificial lawn, I was like, Wow, there's a lot that goes into making this and doing it correctly. I was like, Thank goodness I hired somebody else.
Daniel
Yeah, absolutely.
Uriah
It applies to websites, too, because that piece of mind of hiring the right person who's a competent professional, and you can step back and then just see the results of that. It's good.
Daniel
Yeah, absolutely. Even for myself, this came to mind when I was thinking about these benefits. I used to be the one building the websites, but I'm so glad that now I've got a team of developers that I work with because they know even so much more than I do. They're much more on top of the coding languages and new formats for images and stuff like that. Even for myself, there's things that even I don't know. I do this every day and I work in this world every day. So if you're not someone who keeps up with those things, then there's even more stuff that you're likely to miss just because, like you said, you don't know what you don't know.
Uriah
For sure. I like that. And there's one more benefit, too.
Daniel
Yeah, the next benefit is scalability. So we touched on this a little bit. As your practice grows, your website is going to, likely, and it should grow with you. You might be needing to add new services, or if you start to grow into a group practice, you want to add information about all the therapists on your team, create bio landing pages for those folks. Who knows, maybe you're launching groups or selling digital courses or something like that. You want to start to sell things on your website, have that functionality and grow with you all the different things that you're going to do. So if you are outsourcing your website, you can start to think about some of those things. And even if it's not happening right now, you can talk to an expert and say, okay, someday I want to be able to have an online shop on my website to sell journals that I create or just something like that. And so consulting with somebody to see a little bit into the future, you can plan for those things and see how those things are going to fit into your website in the future. And then hopefully, if you have a great relationship with the person you work with, they can help you with the website to grow that over time, to add that functionality when it makes sense for your business and for your website. But if you find yourself in a place where you're going to DIY your website and you're like, I don't know how to add that to it. I don't know how to add a blog to my website. I heard blogging is good for SEO, like we just spoke about. I don't know how to add that to it. So if you have somebody that you can go and say, Hey, we're thinking about adding a blog to the website, we're thinking about adding this new functionality, is that possible? How can we do it? And then you'll have somebody that you can lean on to help you do those things and go back to our whole list of benefits, save you time as somebody else is setting up this new functionality, have peace of mind that it's done right by an expert, all that good stuff.
Uriah
Yeah, that's so important because a lot of us as entrepreneurial therapists, we have lots of ideas, but we shouldn't always be the ones to implement those ideas, right? Whether it's any of those things that you mentioned, building a course or selling a journal or whatever it is, to be able to have somebody you can go to and say, Hey, I have this idea and I want to use my website to make this happen, can you help me do that? Then that therapist doesn't have to go and do a bunch of research, spend a couple of hours figuring out how to make it work. They can trust the person that they outsource to. Yeah, that's brilliant. Absolutely. I think this is connected to that, but I was working with somebody recently and she joined my coaching program. I sent her a video of a website review, some recommendations and changes along the lines of optimizing her website. And then I sent that to her and literally the next day she emailed me back and said that she already had her web developer make a bunch of the changes that I suggested. Great. And then I got a message from the web developer with this long message about, Thanks for the suggestions, and here's the data why we didn't do this. And it was really cool. That's great. The thing that I reflected on was, and I've sent these website reviews to many therapists, and usually what happens is nothing because they don't know how to do it or they don't have the time. But this person had somebody already, quote unquote, on her team, and then it got done really quickly. So I thought that was the thing.
Daniel
Yeah. It's always so wonderful, even in my own business when I can send off an email and somebody who is going to do it much quicker than me just hops straight on it and it gets done - it's addicting. Outsourcing is addicting. Even if it's just a project like this to just encourage people, dip your toe in the water. If there are even other things outside of the website stuff, if you can outsource some stuff, get some stuff off your plate, it's great. It really opens you up to just focus on the things that only you can do.
Uriah
So true. So we don't need to get into this topic right now, but I'll put a link in the show notes to the blog post that you wrote for productivetherapist.com, which is titled, Five Tips for Choosing a website designer. Because I think once you decide, Hey, I need a new website, or I need refresh, or whatever the case might be, once you decide to outsource your website, then the next step is finding the person to do that, the person or the agency. I'll link to that so people can check that out. Obviously, tell us where people can find you and your services, too. Yeah, sure.
Daniel
You can find everything at private practiceelevation.com. We do website design development as well as SEO and some coaching stuff as well and WordPress Care plans. So just head over there and you'll find all the resource we have. And you can also find me on Instagram just under @Daniel.Fava.
Uriah
That's awesome. I might need to talk to you at some point about the WordPress Care plans because I'm currently the WordPress Care Plan person. It's not that much. Every time I log into my site, I got to update plugins and do all kinds of stuff.
Daniel
Yeah, we do. I might need your help on that. Take all that stuff off of your plate. Yeah, weekly, just taking care of all those little updates. Then when those little hiccups come along or you need to make content changes, then you've got a support desk for you. That's so cool.
Uriah
I love what you're doing. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing all this.
Daniel
Yeah, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
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