A growth plan for Alder Behavioral Health

Alder Behavioral Health is a two-clinician counseling practice in Ashford, Oregon, a town of about 31,000 in the Willamette Valley. Dana Whitfield has practiced there for nine years, Sam Orozco joined in 2023, and between them they hold roughly twelve open session slots a week they would like to fill. Nearly every current client arrived by word of mouth or physician referral. That is a compliment to the clinical work and a warning about everything else.

The website went up in 2020 on a page builder and has not changed since. It loads slowly, describes seven services on one long page, and asks a prospective client to print a PDF to request an appointment. The practice's Google Business Profile has never been claimed. Three competing practices appear in the map results for the searches Ashford residents actually type; Alder does not.

None of this requires a rebuild, an ad budget, or a subscription. It requires about twenty hours of careful repair and launch work over ninety days, in three published, fixed-price pieces: a $500 audit (this document, credited forward), two $2,000 phases, and $400 a month of upkeep you can cancel anytime. Total through day 90: $4,400. Section 4 shows the arithmetic on why that number is small next to what an open session slot costs the practice every week it stays empty.

There is a second path: rebuilding the site on my own engine so the plumbing problems stop existing instead of getting patched. It costs $2,000 more and it is not the default recommendation for a practice this size, but you asked the ownership question, so it gets a full answer rather than a footnote: part two, the build plan. Everything below stands on its own either way.

Everything in section 3 traces back to something I looked at directly. No estimates from third-party SEO dashboards, no scores from tools I could not verify by hand. Specifically, I went through:

• The site, at source level. All nine pages: markup, title tags, metadata, image weights, and every link. I read the code the page builder generates, not just the page it renders.
• Performance on a real phone connection. Each page loaded over a throttled mobile connection, the way a client on the edge of town would meet it.
• Structured data. Every page run through schema validation to see what machines can read about the practice. The answer, currently: nothing.
• The map and the listings. The unclaimed Google Business Profile, plus nine directory listings: Psychology Today, Yelp, Healthgrades, the Ashford Chamber of Commerce, and five smaller ones, checked name by name and address by address.
• The competition. Who actually appears, and where, when someone in Ashford searches counselor near me, therapist ashford oregon, and couples counseling ashford.
• The booking path, end to end. I followed every route a new client can take, from search result to scheduled appointment, including a test message through the contact form.

What I did not audit: clinical anything. I have no opinion on how Alder practices therapy, and this plan never touches it.

Working in your favor already

An honest audit names the good first, because the good is why the rest is worth fixing. The practice's reputation is real: 4.8 stars everywhere it has been reviewed. Dana's Psychology Today profile is complete and well written. The site's copy, whatever its structure, sounds like actual people rather than a template. And Ashford's market is small enough that fixing the basics wins it: the competitors in the map are ordinary, not entrenched.

Site health

Search visibility

Booking flow

I am not going to hand you a percentage from a study I cannot stand behind. Marketing proposals lean on those numbers because they sound like evidence. Here is the arithmetic instead, built from Alder's own figures.

A session at Alder is $140 and a new client averages fourteen sessions over their course of care. So one new client represents roughly $1,960 to the practice. The full ninety-day plan costs $4,400. If the work produces two and a half new clients across the quarter, against twelve open weekly slots, it has paid for itself. That is the floor I am asking you to bet on, not a projection of what it will actually do.

Fix by fix, the reasoning:

• The map. On a phone, the map block sits above every ordinary search result. Three competitors are in it and Alder is not, which means for the highest-intent searches in town, Alder cannot be chosen because it is not on the list being chosen from. Claiming and building the Business Profile is the only way onto that screen, and it costs nothing but the work.
• The booking path. The people most likely to convert are the ones searching at night, past the point of deciding. Today they hit a PDF. The portal that would let them book is already paid for; linking it is the cheapest fix in this document with the most direct line to revenue.
• The address cleanup. Four listings pointing at an office Alder left in 2024 do two kinds of damage: they lower Google's confidence in every other fact about the practice, and occasionally they send an anxious first-time client to the wrong suite. Both are fixable in an afternoon.
• Reviews. Alder has six. The practice winning the Ashford map has forty-one. Nobody needs a research citation to know which listing a stranger trusts; the fix is a polite, steady ask built into the visit flow the practice already runs, not a burst campaign.
• Service pages. When someone searches couples counseling ashford, Google wants to send them to a page about couples counseling in Ashford. Alder does not have one; it has one paragraph on a page about seven things. Pages that answer one question each are how the organic results get won.
• Measurement. Search Console, analytics, and call tracking cost nothing and settle every future argument. From day 90 onward, no claim in this plan gets to hide. You will see the same numbers I do.

Every fix, ordered by priority, with my effort estimate and the impact it buys. The hours are how I size the price; they are not a meter. If an item runs long, that is my problem, not your bill.

Each column of hours rounds to one Starting Blocks phase at the published $2,000. The price is fixed to the list above, not to the clock.

The plan runs like a relay: four legs, each with a clear handoff, each finished before the next starts. "Done" always means observed working, never reported working.

These are not sample numbers. They are the published, deliverable-based tiers at ulric.studio/pricing, the same for every client, mapped to this plan.

The arithmetic, spelled out: the audit was $500 and is credited against the phases, so the two phases bill $3,500 rather than $4,000. Add the first Tempo month at $400 and the whole quarter comes to $4,400. Tempo has two larger levels ($800 adds a substantial monthly content piece, $1,200 adds link building and ad management), and I am recommending neither yet. Section 9 says why.

Everything. That is the short version, and it is the part most agencies structure their contracts to avoid. The long version:

• The accounts. The Google Business Profile, Search Console, analytics, and call tracking all live under logins registered to the practice. I hold access while I work; you hold ownership always.
• The pages and every word on them. The three new pages, the rewritten titles and descriptions, the review-ask copy: written for Alder, owned by Alder.
• The schema and the fixed listings. Structural work that keeps working whether or not we ever speak again.
• The review engine. It runs inside the SimplePractice account the practice already pays for. Nothing rides on my infrastructure.
• The scorecard format and the baseline. If you replace me at month four, your next person inherits clean measurement instead of a cold start.
• A walkthrough video covering every account and every recurring task, so the practice can run all of it without me.

No retainers required, no proprietary platform, no login I keep that you lack. Tempo exists for practices that would rather hand the upkeep off, not for practices that have to.

A plan is also a list of refusals. These are the things a hungrier proposal would have included, and why this one leaves them out.

• Google Ads. Ads pour traffic into whatever funnel exists. Alder's funnel is currently a slow site and a PDF; paying for clicks into that would burn money to prove a point. If open slots persist after the map presence and booking path have had a full quarter, ads become a conversation, and the location page from fix 8 is already built to receive them.
• The bigger Tempo levels. The $800 and $1,200 tiers buy content and link building. Alder should not buy either until the first scorecards show what the repaired foundation does on its own. Start at the floor; upgrade when a number, not a mood, says to.
• A Relay or Marathon build. Multiuser roles, a CRM, a trained assistant: real tools, wrong practice. Two clinicians with a shared calendar do not need an $8,000 system, and I would rather tell you that here than have you discover it on an invoice.
• Social video. Neither clinician wants to be on camera, and forced clinical video reads exactly like what it is. Alder's next dozen clients are already searching with intent; capture them first. If the appetite ever arrives, the service pages make natural scripts.
• A rebrand. The alder-leaf mark from 2020 is modest and fine. Nothing in the findings is a brand problem, so no dollar in this plan pretends otherwise.

Every one of these can be revisited at day 90, with a quarter of real numbers on the table instead of my say-so.

Three steps, none of them a commitment to all of it:

1. Read this with both clinicians. The plan only works if Dana and Sam both want it; the review asks and the new pages carry their names.
2. A thirty-minute call. We walk the findings, you push on anything that seems off, and I answer plainly. Included in the audit fee, no pitch attached. If the ownership question from our first conversation still nags, read part two before the call; it covers both paths side by side.
3. If it goes ahead, you get the repair-phase agreement: the exact deliverable list from table 5.1, the timeline, and the first invoice ($1,000, with the audit credit applied to the balance). Work starts when it is signed, and you approve every public-facing word before it ships.

And if it does not go ahead: the document is yours. The fix list stands on its own, and any competent web person can execute it. An audit that only makes sense if you hire the auditor is a sales letter, and this is not one.