In this case study, we profile the work we did with Dr. Karen Finn. Karen is a divorce coach in Texas and as you’ll see, we were able to help her create a practice that not only drives lots of interest to her business but one that provides her with a level of ease around how clients find her. Today, Karen channels most of her energy on working with clients now that this important foundational work is completed.
As you well know, most therapists, coaches and healing professionals know they need a website for their practice. And Dr. Karen Finn was no different. As a newly trained divorce coach, in 2011 Karen knew she needed to get the word out about her practice so it could grow.
She launched her first divorce coaching website functionaldivorce.com in September of 2011.
Growth was slow as it often is with new websites. Traffic averaged 162 visits per month over the first two years.
To try and grow, it was suggested that she launch a newsletter. Karen wrote articles weekly that she posted to her website and sent to her newsletter subscribers.
Of course, she started her subscriber list with friends and family, but by July 2013 her subscriber list had only grown to 138.
This date is important because this is when YourTango found her website. And what we saw in her vision and business model was a diamond in the rough.
That was all it took for us to reach out to her. We knew we could help Karen get her message out to the world.
On our initial phone call, we shared our vision with Karen and Karen asked a lot of questions. After spending a few days thinking things over, she decided to become a YourTango Expert.
This is when Karen’s business really started to change.
So, let’s talk about the growth Karen saw and how it all happened.
Before joining YourTango, Karen’s first website had an average of 162 visits per month.
After becoming an Expert, the average number of people who visited her website more than doubled to 374.
The only thing that changed was that Karen was consistently writing articles for YourTango. Many of the articles were syndicated to sites like Huffington Post, Yahoo! Parenting, PsychCentral, eHarmony, and Prevention. It was the additional exposure her work received that drove more people to visit her website.
In addition to writing, Karen took advantage of every program and perk we offer, including our free weekly business coaching sessions (called Office Hours) and she became a PR member, giving her some additional writing coaching to help integrate all she was learning.
Yet even with all the knowledge, her business just wasn’t growing as fast as she wanted.
With her regular attendance at Office Hours, she heard Melanie mention business coaching and eventually, she reached out and became a business coaching client in 2015.
This is when things got really interesting.
As we took a detailed look at her business, we recognized that a few things had to change if Karen was to achieve the growth she desired. Karen needed to rebrand, update her website, and develop a complete content marketing plan based on SEO (search engine optimization) so people could find her.
So, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work.
The first thing we tackled was rebranding.
Karen’s first site was called FunctionalDivorce – not a great name. It sounded confusing to the readers. Was she talking about functioning through your divorce? Achieving a “functional” end to a marriage? OR something else?
To simplify her site, we rebranded her as DrKarenFinn. This allowed Karen to begin building brand recognition and her name started to matter.
Her website also needed a facelift and a navigation (links at the top of the page) that would easily tell visitors where to go and how to find the information they were looking for.
We found a company to help build her new site that fit within Karen’s budget and set to work on re-working the entire site. Pages that were good-enough stayed and those that needed a re-write or to be created were added to the list.
Karen released her site in August 2015. And as soon as she reached this milestone, we started to tackle her SEO.
The big question we wrestled with was how do people look for help for getting through divorce? What do they actually search for? Are their questions “buying questions?” or questions that people ask Google as they really explore getting actual paid-help?
From these questions (and many others) we came up with a powerful SEO strategy for her website that targeted her ideal clients along with a reasonable path for growth given the size of her website. The plans we implemented applied not only to every page of her new website but also to every article she wrote for her blog.
Once the basic SEO was finished for each page of her new website, her next task was writing. Consistently and persistently.
Karen decided to write 2 articles a week, which was quite a bit of work, but ultimately, the path forward that would allow her business to stand on its own.
It meant that Karen would NOT have to buy ads to sustain her business in the future; that her website would bring in traffic that led to sales for the foreseeable future.
Yes, it did require learning HOW to write good articles and learning what clients actually want to read. And yes, it required doing the work.
But the truth, as you’ll see, is that her efforts have definitely paid off.
Here’s a look at her results:
When Karen first released her new website the number of people visiting her site each month was very small – only 236. But after only 10 months of consistent blogging on her new website, 5,000 people visited her site in June 2016. And now at the end of January 2018, nearly 1,000 people visit her site every single day. That’s a 12,000% increase in visitors in only 2 1/2 years!
As we looked into what was behind the dramatic increase of visitors to her site, we discovered that Google was assigning more and more divorce-related keywords to her site. Most of these terms built on the ones we had identified in her SEO strategy and helped us to see how well her writing was supporting her client’s journey to search for help.
As Google discovered that the visitors to Karen’s site liked what they found there, it began associating her blog posts and web pages with related keywords. As Google assigned more keywords to her site, more people found it.
This is exactly what a solid SEO content marketing strategy will do for you.
When you look at arrow 1 in the image below, you can see that in November 2015, just 4 months after implementing her blogging strategy, her site ranked for 172 keywords. And that the number of keywords has increased month after month (except for April 2017) since then.
Today, her site ranks for 5,500 keywords (arrow 2 and arrow 3) which bring in 7,400 visitors a month. If Karen had bought Google Ads to generate this traffic, she would have paid $12,200 (arrow 4)! (Data generated from SEMR, March 2018)
A user-friendly brand, an easy-to-use website, a powerful SEO strategy and well-written content completely changed Karen’s business. As the traffic to her website grew, so did her revenue. Since the release of her rebranded website, her gross revenue has increased by 300%!
And it keeps growing…
From here, Karen plans to continue growing her coaching business in new and exciting ways for her clients and herself.
It’s important as a takeaway here to recognize that Karen did some amazing work over the past few years. Her efforts to discover what her clients needed along with a plan that she executed on allowed her to achieve this level of success.
Karen is one of many clients we have worked with who have achieved this level of success. It’s not magic and it is do-able as you can see here.
If you want to know how a plan like this can come together for you, all you have to do is ask.
Curious how another YourTango client, Kelly Rudolph grew her practice, here’s how we help her gain 98% of her ongoing clients.
Are you ready to grow your website traffic and sales too?
If you’re a therapist, coach or healer and you want the kind of growth for your practice that Karen experienced, we can help you. Please send us a note to schedule a confidential meeting or send a private email to Melanie@yourtango.com to explore working together.