← Abundant Practice Podcast
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Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Alison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy filled private practices, just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support. Go to abundance practice building.com Links all right, onto the show
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so I've talked
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about therapy notes on here for years. I could talk about the features and the benefits in my sleep. But there are a couple things I want you to know about therapy notes that doesn't typically make it into an ad script. First is that they actually care if you like their platform. They don't only make themselves available on the phone to troubleshoot so you don't pull your hair out when you get stuck. They also take member suggestions and implement those that there's client demand for, like Therapy Search, an included listing service that helps clients find you internal and external secure messaging Clinical outcome measures to keep an eye on how your clients are progressing. A super smooth super bill process Real time eligibility to check on your client's insurance. In my conversations with the employees there at all levels, they all really believe in their product and they want you to love it too. Second, they are proudly independently owned. Why should you care about that? Because as soon as venture capital becomes involved, the focus shifts from making customers happy to making investors happy. Prices go way up. Innovation plateaus. Making more money with as little output as possible becomes the number one focus. With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free@therapynotes.com with the coupon code. Abundant Therapists whose practices are full Is this actually the practice you want? If you're secretly stuck, you're cramming in evening sessions, glued to insurance panels, unable to raise rates. Limitless practice is your way out. Over 12 weeks, you'll make the changes you've been thinking about making for months so that you can work fewer hours while making more money. You'll design a schedule that actually fits your life and you'll say yes to only the clients you love. Together, we'll release you from your golden handcuffs. We're capping the cohort at 10 people because I'm personally running every individual, every group call, and every accountability check in. People on the wait list will get first dibs on those spots and then the opportunity to sign up will go out to the rest of my audience. So join the wait list now. I'm going to put the link in the show notes and I look forward to helping you get your practice exactly where you want it. Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Allison Perire, founder of Abundance Practice Building. I'm here with Amber Lyta, who I've known for years and years and years and years. And I'm very excited about this conversation because a lot of you are confused about how to get found on AI. Like, if somebody is talking to chat GPT about their problems and asking who they should see, which a lot of people are doing, how to make sure Chad Beat can find you. So Amber has been nerding out hardcore for months and months to learn this and it's not like there's some clear playbook out there. Like, she's been cobbling together information to make it make sense for therapists. So, Amber, thank you so much for giving us the rundown. You're going to give us a 30 minute rundown today and then you're going to do a nice deep dive with us in the Abundance party this month. So. Yay. Hi.
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A
Hello. Good to see you.
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You too. Yeah. So, okay, you and I were talking before we started recording that people listening to this may be all over the place with how they feel about AI. So should we kind of frame the conversation some?
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I think that's a great idea.
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Awesome.
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You do not have to use AI or like AI to get recommended by AI.
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Yes.
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So if you're thinking, I don't want to contribute to, you know, all of the ills of AI, if you see ills there, you don't have to. You just need to manipulate your website just a little tiny bit so that AI can find you. Because your clients are looking to AI to find their recommendations for therapists. They just are.
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B
Yeah. Yeah. And can we talk a little bit about stats? Because I think a lot of people are probably like, well, not my clients.
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A
Yeah, your clients. Your clients for sure. Just if you don't use AI, just know this. A lot of people out there have naturally found that AI gives better recommendations than Google. Google gives you lists and lists and lists of things that you then have to go click, explore, compare, choose. But when you look in AI and I just did this recently to have somebody fix my car, I was like, who is good at fixing sprinter vans that have been converted into camper vans? Right. Like, it's a very specific request. I Don't want to have to go through five pages of Google Notes. And it immediately gave me three to five people. Not lists and lists of people. And these people matched very specifically to the criteria that I put in. It's just not something traditional search can do. And so people are naturally gravitating to AI because it saves them time. And it's, whether we like it or not, a little bit of a parasocial relationship. They talk to their AI a lot. I use it for recipes. I'll take a picture of what's in my fridge and be like, yo, what can I cook for dinner? And it's giving me good answers, so I trust it more. It's actually the stats on this are really interesting. It's 85%, if I'm remembering correctly, of people in the United States are willing to or have already been using AI of some kind to find providers, healthcare providers. So they're going to the place where you need the most trust. Like, I want to find a gynecologist. And they're not searching Google, they're searching AI.
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Right.
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It's pretty exciting, really. It's an opportunity for us. You know, this is an opportunity in a time of history where it feels like a lot is out of our control. There's something that's in our control.
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B
And for those of us who really like to exert control, I mean, not me, not me at all. Never me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So. And I love this caveat that they don't have to love AI. They don't have to use AI to be found by AI. And if they are AI users, you do kind of have maybe your own experiences searching for providers or information or recipes or whatever. So you know how it works a little bit. You know, the importance of a prompt, you know, these things. Can you talk to us about how AI understands our websites and other marketing strategies that we are using?
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A
Yes, yes. Well, so when we think about our websites, what's always kind of frustrated me is in teaching marketing is we're having to speak to two audiences. Historically, we're having to speak to traditional search in Google. You know, our header ones and our header twos and our alt text all has to say things that people are googling in order for Google to recommend our website to them. And then we also have to write copy that sounds good to our ideal client. So much so, especially if you're private pay that they're going to be like, that's my sole therapist. Those things are hard to accomplish because the way Google likes to hear Things and the way humans like to hear things are pretty different. Yeah. Then enter AI And AI wants to hear things even a little bit more different than that. So this becomes a little bit of a challenge of how the heck am I going to speak to three audiences at once? So if you know how AI chooses whether to recommend you or not, and it's not recommending your website, it's recommending you a specialty page about you, it becomes a little bit easier to please all three of the audiences that you have to please. My personal feeling is just create a freaking separate page to please AI. It's just way easier. It also pleases psychiatrists because it's super clear, it's boring and anybody that doesn't want to read through fluff. But to understand how AI is looking, it is not ranking you the way that Google ranks you. And Google's ranking depends on a whole lot of stuff like domain authority, how long your site has been up. Have you written 20 bajillion blog posts to demonstrate that you know what you're talking about? And over time, the things that Google valued became so hard to achieve that only companies like venture capital companies for example, can put the money in to creating all of the content necessary to rank. So then therapists are like, how do I win at ranking with Google? So you have to get hyper niched so that there are fewer people competing. You know, you're not just doing therapy for anxiety, you're doing therapy for panic attacks that happen when I go out to dinner. Right. And then still we can't compete. And so then we're like therapy that happens for pan attacks when you go to dinner in Houston, Texas. Right. Like it had to get tighter and tighter. AI is not working that way. AI instead of ranking based on content is first thinking I need to eliminate anybody that I could get sued over for having recommended. They do not want to be sued. So they're thinking they need your license on your website somewhere. They need the states that you're licensed to practice in. It will not recommend you if it does not say somewhere on your site that you're a licensed whatever practicing in this state because it wants to be sure that you're a valid person to recommend. So the first part is all about elimination. If you're not clearly able to be seeing those people licensed in that state, it's not recommending it. It's also looking for, and this is great because I know you teach this, who the heck do you serve and how do you help them if you don't have A clearly quotable statement somewhere on your specialty page, for example, of I help women in perimenopause. You know, in Vero Beach, Florida, for example, if you don't have that level of specificity, it's not going to list you. And then the third piece is if you don't say who you don't treat because it wants to know that you have a clear scope.
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Right?
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And if you're not saying, like, hey, if you're in psychosis, if you're actively at risk, if you're, you know, whatever the heck it happens to be for you, if you're looking for cbt, if you're looking to phone a friend, if you don't list those things, it's like, yeah, I'm not super sure you know, who you see, so I'm not going to put you in front of them. Step one is all about elimination.
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B
I love that. Okay, questions about this. Does having good SEO help with AI optimization?
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Yeah, that's a good question. So the structure that SEO is built on does help.
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Okay.
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The extras that we do to. So basically the structure being, be freaking clear. Who do you help? How do you help them put it at least up in the top third of each page? You know, the stuff that we generally do for SEO, right. Your H1s and H2s don't matter all that much. So you can leave the. In fact, please leave those as is. If you've been accumulating SEO, please don't go and change your headers and subheaders. And then suddenly, you know, you're mad at us because your SEO is starting all over again. You can just build this into the BO body of the text. That's totally fine. But the extra bells and whistles that SEO requires, like a billion blogs, for example, don't matter. You don't have to do that.
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B
Okay, and then the page that we create for AI, does that need to be a menu item? Or can it be kind of like some of the SEO blogs that people write that aren't in a menu anywhere, they're just kind of tucked away?
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Yeah, Right now. And this is evolving, Right? So right now it's important that it is a clickable link and it should be listed at least in a dropdown. So you know how we sometimes have that dropdown of like, all the extra stuff that just doesn't fit a cut, have it there and also connect it to your specialty pages. That just gives it a little extra va voomp. And you don't have to jump straight to having a Separate page. You can easily just do these few steps now with what you've got and iterate over time.
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Okay, sounds good. What next? What else do we need to be thinking about?
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So we've eliminated people like, you know, they're gone and now we're looking to group similar types of providers. So let's say one of my coaching clients does a lot of work with women who have chronic pain, pelvic floor, chronic pain. Well, there's not a whole lot of other people out there doing what she does. So when it goes to collect all the people who might be a resource, it's then going to look at the few people left and think, okay, which one of these is the best match? This part is so cool because in terms of collecting people, it's like, okay, we've eliminated these folks. Okay, these are people with similar specialties. It prioritizes empirically supported treatments. So if you do cbt, this is a time to list CBT again, they don't want to get sued. This does not mean you don't get to do what you want to do. But if you happen to be trained in an empirically supportive modality, not a bad idea to put it on there. And then it's just going to see who's the best fit. And the way that we're looking for this is some clients are going to log in, they're going to be like, I need a therapist who helps with blah blah, blah issue, who's not just going to nod their head and be silent. I don't want a neutral therapist. They don't put this in Google, but they put this in AI And AI is going to be scrolling through your whole website looking for do you say anything about that? Do you say you're directive? Do you say that like you give your opinion, it wants to know that it's contextual and it will base match on those kind of qualities.
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B
That's interesting. I love that because yeah, like you said, people are so much more descriptive to AI. They are telling them their exact problems. It's not like when they're going in Google and like how to stop a panic attack. You know, they're like, I had a panic today, panic attack today at work and it was mortifying and I've got to make it stop. And I don't like I've done these seven things and none of them have worked. And I think it's time for therapy. Who should I see?
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Exactly, Exactly. And now I don't know if you saw the news recently, but we'd already seen AI shift from giving all the health advice in the world, including mental health advice, to limiting how much it would give, and now it's limiting even more by law. So it's much less likely to engage in a whole lot of chatter about mental health issues and more likely to say, at this point, it would be helpful for you to find a therapist. So, yeah, prompting them. It's like a referral coordinator is really how it functions. A really good referral coordinator.
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B
Yeah. Okay, cool. So we're eliminating people.
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We've eliminated grouping.
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Yeah, we are grouping. What else can we be doing?
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And then we're matching. So those are the three steps. Eliminate, group, match, match. So the eliminate, you know, you know what to do there so that you. At least that's if you do nothing else. After this podcast, just make sure you don't get eliminated. Take those few steps to list the things. I also have a freeb that I'm giving you guys with the five steps you need to do to not get eliminated. We covered three.
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Okay, we'll put those in the show notes, y'.
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All.
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Yeah.
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And then if you think about the more specific you can get, just like we talk about with copywriting, when you're trying to get private pay clients, the more specificity, the more you're speaking to their soul, the better your chances are at getting that client. And AI works very similarly. It wants to know as much specific information as possible, so it doesn't want to hear vague things like, I help people who are feeling overwhelmed. Okay? There's like, a gajillion people out there saying that. And that's probably not all that your client is putting into chatbots or perplexity or whatever they're using. They're probably saying, like, I'm laying in bed at night and I cannot stop going over the day. And I'm ruminating about whether I pissed off my boss, whether I hurt my daughter's feelings, whether, you know, my husband's mad because I didn't do X, Y, Z, whatever the heck. The more examples you have on your website of what your ideal client might be going through on a daily basis, the better the chances you're going to have at rocking with AI and landing that client.
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Right. And I love this because, I mean, this is the folks who've been in the party. Like, I've been teaching this since 2017. You need to have, like, their daily lived experience laid out. What are the things they're thinking? You know, with eating disorders, they change clothes 12 times before they leave the house, and they still feel like a whale. You know, you put that level of specificity and somebody is like, holy shit, does she have cameras in my house? You know, Exactly. How do you know? And so basically what I'm hearing is with this one, what works for great marketing. It doesn't just market to the human beings we're trying to get, but it also helps AI know we know what we're talking about and that we know the clients that are asking them questions.
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A
Exactly, exactly. And then the little caveat I would give to that is, you know, we can sometimes get a little poetic when we're really like in the down and dirty about like their lived experience, right? So have the lived experience. And I would say like three to five examples of pain points that they're experiencing. Three to five examples of the way they wish things would be, or their hope points. Remind me to talk about bridge copy in a second. And then above each of those lists, make sure you have a very clear summary sentence. Like, I help people like you who are struggling with anxious, ruminating thoughts. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Clear. And the lived experience examples, because AI works like humans work in terms of specificity, but sometimes humans like it to be a little bit more zhuzhed up copywriting. And AI is like, what are we even saying? Just give it to me straight, like, what exactly are we talking about here, please?
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Right?
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Think about it, you know, like a slightly on the spectrum psychiatrist, right? The psychiatrist does not want a ton of mushiness, right? Like just, what's. What do you do? Like, tell me what you do. So those two elements really, really rock. And then the other piece, the bridge copy. So I call it bridge copy. I don't know what other people call it. But how do you help? What do you do? It's not going to be enough to see. Say something like, you know, I. I hold a sacred space and, you know, it's safe here to open up and I'm non judg mental. That's not gonna do it. That's not gonna do it. Because anybody without a license can say those exact same things, right? So you can have some of that in there, but you need to be even more clear. So, for example, if your whole life you couldn't do anything just right for your parents, and no matter how hard you tried, you always felt like they were slightly disappointed. It's gonna make sense that in your adult life you're also feeling like you can never quite get it just right. Our past impacts our present. And in therapy together, we're going to help you understand how the things that you learned growing up are showing up in your life right now. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Like, we're just outlining our therapeutic model in normal people speak.
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B
And I would imagine, like, it would also be helpful and tell me if I'm right or wrong, but, like, to build credibility in a warm way there.
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Exactly right.
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Like, I've spent 20 years helping, like, as a therapist. I spent 20 years as a therapist helping people do this thing that they want to do. Right. That AI would probably be like, ding.
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A
Exactly right. Right. So you're pointing out credibility. And AI loves credibility. So this is one of the reasons we have a bit of an advantage over big platforms. They can't get specific enough. They can't claim licenses. So AI tends not to recommend big companies. I won't name names, but you know who I'm talking about.
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B
Neither of us want one of those cease and desist letters. They like to know the big therapy tech. We know. Right? Y'.
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A
All. Right. If you know, you know, we all know it won't recommend them yet. And I'm hoping that that stays the same. I just got excited about that, so I totally lost my train of thought. Bring me back Bridge copy. Yes. How you help then? Credibility. So listing how long you've been in practice for a while. We were like, don't do that. Because people aren't into into like that part anymore. They're not into credentials. AI is into credentials. It wants to know, where'd you go to university? It wants to know, you know, how many years were you trained? If you have an affiliation with any big institution, like, let's say you went to University of Florida. List that somewhere on your website because it likes it. It's like, oh, okay, you're fancy pants. All right, that gives us some credibility. You can think about it. Here's a shortcut. If you think you picked up a client, they came to you through AI and something horrible happens with that person, and the family sues AI. AI wants to be able to be like, listen, they said that they did this treatment. That's the treatment they're supposed to do. They said they were licensed. They said they were licensed in that state. They said that they practiced 20 years. It wants to be able to defend the recommendations that it's giving. So if you hold that in your mind, it starts to tell you what kind of things to have on the website.
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B
So you were saying you can put it all on one page. Does it still suit to have Those things woven in on an about page.
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100%.
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Okay.
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Yeah. It really likes it to. If you have one page, it just makes it easier to hit all of the things that you need to hit without like gobbledygooking up the rest of your website. But it does look for consistency across your website, across social media. Just a little bit of a pain in the butt if you have like a side hustle and a practice. But there are workarounds, right? There are workarounds, but it wants to see, you know, if you have that one statement of these are the sort of people that I help and this is how I help them. And you have a Facebook business page, copy and paste, have that same statement or something very similar on that social media account. It wants consistency across.
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B
And that's a really different thing than SEO, which will ding you for having the same exact copy.
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Yep.
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Fun. Yep.
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We get to fight between these two things. Yeah. Yeah.
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B
Okay. What else do we need to think about that we haven't talked about yet? I mean, I know there are a million things that we're not going to be able to go over in 30
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minutes, but yeah, I think if I would just urge you guys to take action now. Really sweet window of opportunity. And I think like any kind of search engine, things will eventually get monetized because that's how our particular culture works right now. That's not how AI is working. There aren't ads there yet that we're competing with. Big tech can't beat us there. We have this opportunity and I would get in while we can because AI and human referrals are basically where we can win right now.
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B
Yes. So focus your time, Continue to win. I mean, the human referrals, you and I have talked about this, that's going to be our lifeblood as an industry, I think.
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A
Yep, absolutely.
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I know, for instance, my private Practice clients are 100% talking to AI. Like they're talking to their business coaches and their business owning friends and AI. They're not going to Google search for a therapist.
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A
No.
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B
Like that's just not going to be a thing. They're not going to go on Psych Today to try to find a therapist.
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No. And speaking of Psych Today. Yeah, I know, like there's a lot of chatter about I'm not getting clients from Psych Today and Psych Today sold out and da, da, da. Yes, yes. And they are seen as a credibility source when it comes to both SEO and AI search. So that 30 bucks a month, or however much it is it's the one directory that actually has very high organic SEO and paid for SEO and your name attached to it. Helps you even if the clients aren't coming directly through there. Yep.
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B
I created a psych today for my practice for the first time in years for AI.
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A
Right, right.
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B
Like I was like, I'm, I. Nobody's going to go on psych to. None of my people are going on there. Like I know that. But they are telling a lot of things to Claude or Chat or Perplexity. So.
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A
Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely. You and I talked in text about one more little sneaky tip. This is a high level tip.
- [25:24]
B
I'm still confused.
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A
Yeah, well, I think we're at that stage where there are a few things we know for sure and then there are things we're starting to think like, okay, maybe we're going to have to feel this out. This is going to evolve over time. But blogs have been fantastic for SEO for a long, long time. And we've been wondering about, well, what about AI? Does AI like us to blog? And anything that generally moves your SEO up is also going to move your AI search up. But the unfortunate thing about blogs is AI is so good at reading and summarizing that while it's helping your overall findability, it's unlikely to be like, you know what, you should see this therapist because read this blog and send them to your blog. No, it's going to summarize a blog. It's probably not going to give you credit for it unless somebody asks. So this isn't to say don't do them, it's just to say, maybe consider making a little video based on the blog and put that video on YouTube because that helps both with your SEO, both with AI search. And it will link to a video even if it won't link to a blog.
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B
Okay, got it, Got it.
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A
Little high tier hack.
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B
But it's not, from what I understand, because I was actually having a conversation with AI, trying to understand it. It's not like it's reading the content of the video, but it's reading the captions that you create the title. Those kinds of things.
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A
Yes, yes. So that's how it's deciding to send somebody there to watch it, but it can't summarize the video the way that it would summarize a blog so far.
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B
Got it.
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A
Okay, maybe next month, right?
- [27:02]
B
I mean, it's so fast. It's ongoing. Super fast.
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A
Super fast.
- [27:05]
B
Yeah. Amazing. Okay, so we get to dig in more in the Abundance party this month. And I Am so psyched to learn more because, like, what you told us today, everybody could literally do this today. This is not something that's going to take a week to get done. People can just hop on their website, devote an hour to knock it out.
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A
Yep. Literally an hour. Literally an hour. Take the little worksheet, check the things, and you're done.
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B
Yeah. There's so little in our practice that will move the needle like this. I mean, this is like getting in TikTok or doing SEO 15 years ago. Like, this is like, now is the time, y'. All.
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A
Now is the time.
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B
And that's another question. I'm so full of questions with you. I'm so glad. I love it. But I think about the people who built really great SEO 15 years ago, and those guys are still top of the. Well, except for Psych today, but they're still top of the list for independent practices for the most part, even if they've not continued blogging every week for years. Is getting in early. Do we think that's going to have the same kind of advantage with AI that's, like, lasting, or is AI changing?
- [28:19]
A
That's my gut feeling, but I don't know. For me.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Why waste this opportunity? You know, it's here. We know it's going to help you now. Seems likely, based on history, that it will continue to help you in the future. Just like getting in early with TikTok or SEO helped you. So hopefully it's not a clubhouse where people jumped in there and it just went away, but. So I don't think so.
- [28:44]
B
Amazing. Okay. Thank you so much, Amber.
- [28:47]
A
You're welcome.
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B
I really appreciate it. And thanks for that freebie. I'm sure that's get done.
- [28:52]
A
I'm excited to go deeper in your program as well. For sure. Got a lot of cool stuff. Yay.
- [28:58]
B
Awesome. Well, I will talk with you soon.
- [29:00]
A
All right. Bye, friends.
- [29:01]
B
Bye. If you're ready for a much easier practice, TherapyNotes is the way to go. Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code abundant for two months. Free. If you're listening, you probably need some support building your practice. If you're a super newbie, grab our free checklist using the link in the show notes. I'd love for you to follow rate and review, but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they.