Almost of all of us search for what we need by using search engines like Google. We all know this. If it’s Friday and I want pizza, I go to Google and search “pizza near me”, and Google shows me every pizza parlor near my home address.
But why do those particular pizza parlors show up in my results?
Because they’re optimized for SEO.
Private Practices are no different: potential clients search the same way I search for pizza.
For instance, every month there are approximately 7,100 searches for the term “anxiety therapy”, across the country. And that’s just one way they’re searching for mental health professionals: therapists, counselors, and private practices. they also might search “depression therapist”, or “couples counselor”, or “equine therapy”.
No wonder why Google, and other search engines, have become the go-to tool for connecting therapists and potential clients.
In this guide, we’re showing you how you can optimize your website for SEO, so that it connects you with your potential clients.
Table of Contents
What Exactly Is SEO?
Broadly defined, “SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it encompasses the best practices, techniques, and technical know-how to construct websites in such a way so that they appear near the top of the search results—most typically on Google.
In other words, SEO for private practices means… how to make sure your website is seen by your potential clients.
Put that way, “SEO” is a very broad term. And in practice, SEO applies to almost every aspect of your website. But if we break SEO down to the essentials what we’re really talking about is…
- How Google sees a website and ranks it on the search results.
- What keywords to choose for your Private Practice: the ones your potential clients are searching.
- And… how you write your posts and pages in light of those keywords.
- How easy it is to navigate your website (this includes technical aspects like image optimization).
- Backlinks, or what other websites link to your website.
- How you represent yourself off your site: especially through your Google Business Profile.
We’ll break down the above, and use it as a guide to illustrate SEO as it applies to Private Practices. (Otherwise, if we talked about SEO as broadly as possible, this post might become as long as a book!)
What's Needed First... Is A Website
(We Can Build You One!)
All of the above means to say… SEO only works if you have a well-constructed website. Otherwise, how is someone going to find you online?
Now, you might be thinking… “What about my Facebook profile?”
Social media, individual directories, substacks, don’t rank for the keywords that potential clients search. Which is why a website is paramount.
If you don’t have a website yet we can create a professionally written website for you, in a week.
How Does Google See A Therapist's Websites?
Google is an index. All that means is that the search engine’s bots scan websites and then, based on how SEO-optimized those websites are, choose where to show them on the search results.
Again, if you search “pizza near me”, the reason why the #1 result shows up is because Google scanned that website and determined that it was optimized enough to belong at #1*.
In other words…. Google determined that it’s the website I want to see when I search “pizza near me”. Google is always trying to guess what you want to see. If it could, Google would scan your brain and show you what you wanted before you knew you wanted to search for it.
(Luckily, we don’t live in that dystopia yet.)
The above applies to “anxiety therapy” or “depression counseling” or any other term Private Practices might pursue. The reason why the #1 result is the #1 result is because Google thinks it’s the result a potential client is most likely to click.
The best practices in SEO tell us know how to organize a website so that it’s your website that gets clicked (or as close to #1 as we can get). And there are hundreds upon hundreds of variables that work together to determine how to construct a website for best practices in SEO.
*It’s worth noting here that the vast majority of clicks go to the first few search results on Google. Very few people will click a link outside of the first 10 results. And the #1 result tends to take 25% or more of all clicks—while the tenth result only gets 2.5% of all clicks.
Using Keywords To Connect With Potential Clients
Whenever somebody searches something, what they type into the search box is called a keyword. The word “keyword” just means a word, or phrase, that returns a result on Google.
Technically, any word or phrase is a keyword. But people—being more alike than they like to think—tend to search similar keywords to find similar results. So in SEO, the word “keyword” tends to refer to words or phrases that many people search.
Different Types of Keywords for Different Types of Websites
The keywords that therapists and counselors want to rank for are local keywords, as opposed to national keywords.
Local keywords are keywords that return local results. This means that Google’s algorithm thinks that the searcher’s intent is to find something near them, within their zip code, whether it be a restaurant, grocery store, barber shop, therapist, etc.
Whereas national keywords return results from the entire country (or world, depending on the keyword).
A good way to test if a keyword is local is if that keyword returns a Google Business Profile listing. If I search “therapist near me”, no matter where I am, I almost always get a local result:
Google Business Profile listings only return for local keywords.
Therapists want not only to show in the first ten results for a local keyword, they also want their website to display within the Google Business Profile listing, also known as the 3-Pack.
To do so, therapists and counselors need an optimized website that targets local keywords, along with a well set-up Google Business Profile.
We also offer Google Business Profile optimization.
Keyword Research: The Bread and Butter of SEO For Therapists
We’ve discussed keywords a bit already. Now we want to focus in. What keywords should you choose for your website?
Well, each of your offerings is called a Specialy Page. For example, if you offer anxiety therapy, you should have page on your website called “Anxiety Therapy,” or whatever related keyword for anxiety therapy is most searched by potential clients in your area (e.g. “Anxiety Counseling”.)
This is called a primary keyword.
A primary keyword is—to borrow from high-school English—the main idea of the page. For example, the primary keyword, or main idea, of this article is, “SEO for therapists”. All of the information on this page is about “SEO for therapists”.
Not only that, but the primary keyword was chosen because it has a high search volume on Google. Typically, the primary keyword will have the highest search volume.
Whereas, secondary keywords are offshoots of the main idea; they support the primary keyword by expanding upon it.
A secondary keyword for this article might be, “keywords for therapists”.
One way to think of keywords is to say that the primary keyword is the tree trunk and the secondary keywords are the branches. The trunk and branches are both necessary for the tree to live and thrive.
An Example of Primary and Secondary Keywords
Let’s say one of a therapist’s specialties is depression treatment. That means they’ll want to find a primary keyword related to depression treatment, and the secondary keywords related to the primary keyword.
For the sake of example, a primary keyword might simply be “depression treatment,” and then a list of secondary keywords might look like…
- depression therapy,
- depression counseling,
- treatment for depression,
- how to deal with depression,
- treatments for depression,
- treating depression,
- treatment of depression,
- symptoms of depression,
- dealing with depression,
- coping with depression,
- help with depression,
- signs of depression,
- postpartum depression,
- clinical depression,
- help for depression,
- how to treat depression,
- how to overcome depression,
- do I have depression,
- depression help,
- depression and anxiety,
- overcoming depression
(A therapists or SEO professional would use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs to compile a list like the above.)
These keywords would then be used to write a great Specialty Page.
The Specialty Page is all about the particular therapist’s approach to “depression treatment”. It will likely include some secondary keywords, and other secondary keywords may be used to then write blogs that support the Specialty Page.
A List Of Primary Keywords For Therapist Specialties
In our experience there are some staple keywords for Specialties. They tend to have the highest volume. The key word (ha!) is tendency. This may not hold for your particular locality, but, odds are, it will.
So in general Specialty Page keywords tend to be:
- Anxiety Therapy
- Depression Therapy
- Child Counseling
- Couples Counseling
- Trauma Therapy
- PTSD Treatment
- ADHD Treatment
- Eating Disorder Treatment
- Sex Therapy
- Teen Counseling
- Counseling For Women
The list is not exhaustive. This is just a general selection.
How To Write Specialty Pages
Each Specialty Page should have a captivating headline that immediately addresses your client’s concerns. You want to structure your copy with headlines to guide readers through the page. Most readers scan a page first to make sure it’s relevant to them, and then they go back and read thoroughly.
Make sure your pages are between 900-1200 words. I know that’s a lot more than most therapist write, but hitting that length will help you rank well in Google.
The good news is that you’re already gifted in being able to talk to people about what they’re going through. There’s a lot of people out there who cannot imagine how other people are feeling or how to reach them. But you know how to do this. You’ve made a career of this! The entire time you’re writing your message, imagine someone is coming in for a consult, and talk to them as if they are sitting right in front of you.
You don’t want these messages to sound like a sales pitch. You want to address your potential clients’ needs personally.
7 Easy Steps To Ensure You’re Writing Quality Specialties
At Counseling Wise, we’ve created a 7-step marketing message structure to help you write impactful website copy.
Problem
- Although all questions are helpful, the questions you want to spend the most time are:–What keeps them awake at night, worrying, in pain of just frustrated, lying in bed, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Take you to that place where you’re the fly on the wall, watching them.–What is their single biggest problem related to what you offer that causes them the most pain or frustration.–What do they secretly, privately desire most? Become your potential client and finish this sentence, “If I could just ______.”
Solution
- You want to give your potential client hope that healing is possible. This is not about how you work, your modalities or your philosophy, but rather a place for you to introduce the benefits of therapy and to express confidence that healing is possible.
Explanation
- Normalize your client’s experience so that they know they aren’t alone. This is also a place for you to agitate the problem and provide trust. This is your opportunity to say, “Hey, I know what you’re going through and help is available.”
Identify and answer objections
- Bringing up your potential clients’ resistance, fears and objections makes you seem more credible and relatable. You want to consider the top three objections your client population has or could express about receiving therapy services. Name them, and address them.
Proof
- Offering your clients social proof i.e. testimonials from other professionals, other clients, etc. increases trust and credibility
Uniqueness
- Now that your potential client has read your page and they understand the benefit of therapy, tell them what makes you unique. What’s your experience in this field? Do you have life history as it pertains to this issue? What’s your demeanor? Will you laugh along with your clients, cry with them? Show them who you are.
Call to action
- Now that your client has read through your page, tell them exactly what to do next. Encourage them to call for a free consultation, or direct them to a page where they can schedule an appointment, e.g. your Contact Page. You don’t want them to read through your entire page and then leave.
Counseling Wise Writes Specialty Pages
We can, of course, write Specialty Pages for you. Even if you have already created a website in a week with us, we can add new Specialties, or refine the text that’s already on your website. We’ve probably written thousands of Specialty Pages by this point, and our marketing message succeeds at connecting Private Practices with their potential clients.
And our writing goes beyond just Specialties too. We write About Pages, Welcome/Home messages, Directory Profiles, Blogs, and more, all with careful attention to your voice and your practice (and the best practices in SEO).
Our writing services for therapists perfects your message.
The On, Off, And Technical of SEO
What websites show up on Google when a particular keyword is searched, show up because they’re optimized with the best SEO practices.
And they’re optimized in three different ways:
- On-Page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Off-Page SEO
That’s because, in practice, far from a checklist, SEO is really about every aspect of a website and how the parts of a website work together. It requires constant monitoring too, like the engine of a boat.
On-Page SEO
Most of the time when someone talks about optimizing a website, or page, or post, they’re talking about On-Page SEO. These are all the ways that a site can be tuned visibly: the stuff that both therapists and their potential clients see on their site, such as the text on the front page.
The Meta Title Tag
The title tag is one of the most important signals therapists can send Google to let them know what your article is about.
If you are using WordPress and have installed and configured Yoast’s SEO plugin most of the heavy lifting is done for you: WordPress will take the title of the article and move it to the title tag.
*If you are not using this plugin the title tag is located in the head section of your website, and is enclosed by the tags.
Best practice is to use the keywords you are trying to rank for in the title tag, but make sure they fit in with the title of the site. It should feel like a natural title.
Here is an example for the keyword “Chicago Therapist”
- Good Title: Overcoming Public Speaking Anxiety – 5 tips from a Chicago Therapist.
Specific titles seem easy to read and naturally uses the primary keyword.
A bad title is generally better than no title at all so be sure to utilize the title tag on every page and post. And use a different title for each page. Using the same title tag for all pages doesn’t tell Google a thing about what makes this content different from other content on your site.
3 Tips for Writing a Good Meta Title
- Your Meta Title needs to be 70 characters or less. 70 characters is the max amount of characters that will appear in a Google search.
- Your Meta Title needs to describe your page. Instead of having a generic Meta Title that has your business name and your location, you want to actually include information about the page itself. When someone is searching for Google and you have a good Meta Title, they can actually see what the page is about and Google knows what your page is about as well.
- In your Meta Title, include the focus keyword of the page, your location if it fits, and your business name if that fits as well. For example, if your page is about couples therapy, you want to have “couples therapy” in the beginning of the Meta Title, followed by your location, then your business name if it fits.
The Description Tag
The description tag is another meta tag (tag in the head portion of a webpage) that’s important for on-page optimization. This is the text that shows up in search engine results under the title tag. You can leave it blank, and Google will decide what to put there, or you can fill it in with a few captivating sentences to show visitors that the link is the best one.
Your page description should be one to two sentences that briefly describe the gist of your post, using different language than the page itself.
3 Tips for Writing a Good Meta Description
- Keep your Meta Description to 155 character or less. 155 characters is the amount of characters can appear on Google, so you want to make sure that when you’re writing a Meta Description, it falls within those parameters. If you go over 155 characters, they won’t appear in a Google search.
- The Meta Description summarizes your page. You want your Meta Description to be a short summary of what is on the page itself, rather than something general like information about your practice, your location, your credential … etc.
- Your Meta Description invites readers to click, so you want to really write for the reader and not for Google. Write your Meta Description in a compelling way that makes the reader want to click and learn more about your services and what you can do to help them with their specific issues.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO might as well mean staying on top of all of the technical requirements a website needs to meet in order to rank. It starts with Google’s ability to find a therapist’s website, and ends with continual tweaks to a site to ensure it’s up to snuff.
Easy Architecture
Good websites are easily navigable. Visitors should be able to find any post or page on a site in only a few clicks.
This is part of Web Design, but while Web Design tends to refer to an aesthetically pleasing layout, Architecture refers to the site’s structure: it’s the skeleton, while the site’s theme is its dress.
This aspect of technical SEO ideally begins before the therapist’s website is built. That way then the foundation is laid out clearly. Tuning an already live site’s architecture can be quite difficult.
Indexed
For therapists’ websites to work at all Google has to be able to find them. Obvious, no?
An easy way to see if a therapist’s website is indexed is to simply enter the website’s URL in Google.
If it URL up in the search results… then that URL is indexed!
If the URL doesn’t show up, then there’s an issue, clearly. (Keep in mind that newly created websites take some time to be indexed on Google, typically no more than a few days.)
There are a few reasons a site may not be indexed:
- Duplicate content across the site.
- A site is blocked in robots.txt.
- The site doesn’t have a sitemap.xml.
- Crawl errors.
Therapists can ask Google to crawl and index their website through Google Search Console if it’s not displaying. I’ve also talked about how Google crawls and indexes therapy websites in another post, for curious readers.
Also, Search Console is a good place to check to see if there are any crawl errors which need to be addressed.
URL Structure
URLs should be simple.
If we look at the URL for this post, it’s https://www.counselingwise.com/seo-for-therapy-websites/.
It follows the basic structure of, [sitename].com/[name of the post or page].
Therapists should make sure that their own posts and pages follow a similar structure for both ease of navigation and the slight boost good titles add to SEO.
Issues only arise when web owners don’t pay attention to their URL structure. Default URLs are often messy and include numbers and symbols rather than the strict title, unless otherwise set up.
But once a URL is set, and indexed, is best to leave it alone rather than changing the URL.
Page Speed:
Page speed is extremely important for therapists to rank well.
Websites that don’t load, don’t rank.
And faster websites tend to rank higher than slower websites. Page speed is like a race. The faster the acceleration, the quicker therapists get to the finish line compared to the competition.
Therapists can check their site speed by going to Google’s Pagespeed Insights and plugging in their URL.
If a website is slow it may be due to a number of factors:
- Images that are too large.
- Excessive plugins.
- Theme bloat.
To actually improve site speed therapists may want to consult a developer, as tuning the nuts and bolts of a website for speed can be tricky.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is all the things therapists can do apart from their website to improve their rankings.
For the sake of brevity, we’ll hone in on the most important aspect: link building.
Link Building
The main means of thinking about Off-Page SEO is link building.
Websites work on a system of trust, and trust is built with links. Typically, the more links pointing at a website, the more trustworthy Google views that site, and the more highly Google will rank said site on search.
How do therapists get links to their website?
Besides writing great content, and naturally accruing links, therapists can actively build links by…
- Listing their website on local directories (this one is probably the most important! List yourself wherever you can whether it be Yelp, a Chamber of Commerce directory, a local paper, etc.)
- Listing their website on national directories (like Psychology Today).
- Writing Guest Posts for other websites.
Building links takes time. It’s best to do in small bursts so that therapists don’t become overwhelmed.
The nuts and bolts of SEO can seem overwhelming. But therapists shouldn’t stress too much. Like anything new, much of implementing SEO is learning from mistakes.
It takes time, but done properly the benefits prove themselves: Good SEO connects therapists and their potential clients.
To learn more about the essentials of building a quality therapy site, check out our blog The 7 Essentials Of Effective Therapy Sites or therapists can visit Our Offerings if they want to learn how we build SEO-optimized websites.