History of Elizabeth Doherty Thomas

Elizabeth Doherty Thomas is the daughter of a nationally respected licensed psychologist and licensed marriage and family therapist, Dr. Bill Doherty.  4 years ago she left corporate America to join her father and a colleague of his (Kathleen Wenger, LMFT) to start up a unique website, Marriage Friendly Therapists.  A year later she and her father started a "wedding planning meetings premarital counseling" website, The First Dance.

From frustration or ignorance we learn

They say to throw money into advertising and "see what sticks." After spending thousands of dollars and not getting very far I knew it was time to take things into my own hands. I was tired of spending money and not seeing the results on The First Dance. (The marriage therapy website was established with much media flurry so it was holding its own for a while. We put a lot of money into paid Google and Yahoo ads which we believed was the only way we would draw the web traffic. Now I groan realizing how much money we wasted both in the raw dollars but also the ignorance in how we set up our paid ads.)

What is this "Search engine optimization" stuff doing to help me?

I no longer feel a need to throw marketing money at typical "ads" and where we do spend money is more for networking and spreading our message through people - not ads. I can even say I rank as high or higher than a 68 million dollar website for the area of my speciality (premarital counseling.) For $120 a MONTH they gave me 10 visitors a month to my average of over 300-500 visitors a DAY today.

I just want to show you a small example of how this year has grown for one of my sites, The First Dance. I've been averaging a 30% growth rate every month and I am far from "done" with optimizing my site. I am always tinkering, adding new content, rearranging and having fun! I never would have thought a website could be "fun" four years ago.