Starting a Behavioral Health Practice has Challenges with Big Rewards
Written by Jennifer Bennett, Posted on , in Section Teens & Tweens
You’ve rented office space, hired staff, and set up your office. You’re set, right? As a new behavioral health practitioner, the stress of paying for years of schooling, insurance, and starting without a patient can be frightening. You hear a voice, and it says, “If you built it, they will come.” It’s a nice thought, but it’s not reality.
Prepare
To be successful in the medical field today, you need to prepare for your clients. Preparing is more than just signing up with a few insurance companies as a provider. You need an online presence, and it needs to look like you’re established and knowledgeable in your field. This is where medical directories come in to play. Medical directories help new practitioners in a number of ways. Finding the right one for you is imperative in creating a large clientele who look to you for their needs.
Be Accessible
You and I Google everything when we have a question. How do I get directions to the store? How do I find the phone number to the library? Everything our society does now is online. You need more than a website. You need a web presence of a well established professional. Medical directories help patients find medical professionals who meet their needs in their area of their preference. These are clients who are searching for you and without the directory it makes it nearly impossible for a new practitioner to round up clients. Clients don’t know who you are or your name—a directory is there to help both the practitioner and client make a connection.
Move To The Top
Besides making the very important connection between you and your client, directories also do a few other things for you as a practitioner. A big one is increasing your rankings online and attracting new customers within the results from all the top search engines.
The average person doesn’t understand how SEO works, but when people do online searches, the highest ranking practitioners (through Google) come up before others. These are practitioners who have a strong SEO and web presence. The higher the ranking, the higher to the top of the list you show up in the search. This is a big deal if you’re looking for customers and want to be found. This gives you an innovative edge over those who don’t utilize this mind blowing tool to grow a business.
It’s easy to see how the internet controls and drives profits in any industry. As someone establishing a new practice, it’s one thing you can’t overlook. Look into medical directories and see what each one offers. Prices range in the $30.00 a month range, and some companies offer yearly rates as incentives with discounts.
