Therapists offer an important service to their clients that helps them and their loved ones live happier, more fulfilling lives. However, while therapy modalities can bring a lot of balance and purpose to various individuals, they first need to know where they can turn for help.
If you own a therapy practice, online visibility is an important component of letting others know about your services. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the most effective ways to help you do this, helping your website reach more potential clients while giving them a clear understanding of the range of services you offer.
Below, we’ve put together a comprehensive guide to SEO for therapist practices that will give you step-by-step guidance on how you can quickly improve your website’s visibility on search engines.
Getting Started with SEO: The Basics
Most practicing therapists don’t add “digital marketing” to their list of professional accolades. This is why, for most mental health professionals who own their own practice, the concept of SEO can feel quite foreign or even intimidating. However, the basic concept of SEO is relatively easy to understand and can successfully be executed in a number of different ways.
The core concept of SEO is all about taking a website or blog and optimizing it so that it is “search-engine friendly.” If you think about the last time you searched for something online, you undoubtedly used a search engine like Google and skimmed through the results that were offered.
SEO is about helping your website be one of the first ones users see when they start navigating these search results. Businesses that are able to secure these free advertising slots can quickly bring in a large amount of web traffic, helping them acquire new leads or convert customers.
The way search engines classify websites when deciding on whether or not to give them a higher “ranking” on these pages all has to do with the user’s search intent and whether or not a webpage directly addresses this need.
You can think of SEO as being able to contribute to a meaningful conversation. When someone asks you a question, Google will review whether or not the answers you’re providing contribute to the conversation in a helpful way or if they are irrelevant or distracting for the user.
The Importance of Your Keyword Choices
The way you choose your words on your website can significantly impact how relevant search engines consider your brand to certain topics or niches. This is why it’s important to be deliberate in the type of information you provide and how you deliver it.
Some steps you can take to make the keyword you choose more impactful include:
Thinking about the specific terms people use when searching for different types of therapy.
Focusing on specific modalities or specialties your practice offers.
Considering the common problems clients face and research before deciding to go to therapy.
Using a good mix of broad and more specific keyword phrases.
Researching other therapy practices in your niche that achieve a higher ranking on search results pages.
When it comes to incorporating keywords into your website content, the important thing to remember is balance. Even though keywords can be important when helping your website rank higher in search engines, you never want to overstuff your content in an attempt to look relevant to a user’s search intent. In this case, Google may decide to penalize your website and rank your content even further down the line or not at all.
Keyword Research: The Key Element of SEO
While there are several different elements when building your SEO strategy, the keywords you identify will become the building blocks you use for many of the strategies you use. This is why taking the time necessary to thoroughly research your target market and understand how they search for your services is so important.
Finding the Keywords Your Clients Actually Use
Just like with any online business, knowing your target market is so important when it comes to marketing to them effectively. However, while this process can be one of the longer and more important elements of your SEO campaign, it can be approached in a few different ways depending on how you want to budget this initiative.
The first (and free) step you should take is simply putting yourself in your client’s shoes. Ask yourself:
What led your current clients to contact you?
Were they looking for a therapist or just needing information about their condition?
Are there misunderstandings about therapy practices many new clients have?
Will your clients need to meet in person, or are there effective remote therapy sessions that can work?
Thinking about how a potential client might journey from researching informational content about their condition(s) to deciding to work with a therapist will reveal a lot of helpful information that you can use to help you format your content strategies.
The great thing is that even if you’re coming up short when it comes to visualizing your client’s search habits, there are so many tools available that you can use to help you with this process. These include:
Keyword Research Tools - There are a variety of free and paid keyword research tools that you can use to help narrow down relevant keyword options for your website. These solutions are great at helping you not only find keywords that your potential are likely to use when searching for therapy services but also the relative search volume these terms see month to month.
Online Forums and Communities - It can be really helpful to join relevant online forums or well-known resource sites where your clients are likely to be. These websites can be a great reference for you on popular topics your clients are likely to be interested in. They might be helpful tips for managing stress or anxiety or even important medical updates regarding specific mental health conditions.
Competitor Analysis - There can be a lot to learn from other well-established therapy practices when it comes to SEO tactics. Many of the larger competitors in your industry will have already gone through deep research analysis to locate relevant keywords that can be used to market to your audience. You can see the topics they’re focusing on and use this to help point you in the right direction.
Understanding the Difference Between Local and National Keyword Focus
While there may be a broad range of keywords that are relevant to various types of clientele, it’s important that you identify whether or not you’re looking for a local or national audience.
In most cases, therapy practices will want to focus on attracting clients in their own local area unless the service they offer can be experienced remotely. In this case, you’ll want to make sure that you’re addressing local intent when deciding on the keywords you target.
For example, when someone is experiencing a mental health crisis and has decided they need professional help, in most cases, they’ll look for specific services in their own area. Instead of making search queries like “help for panic attacks,” your potential clients are more likely to search for terms like “panic attack therapy in [Your City].”
By looking for more opportunities to focus on these local search terms, you’re more likely to receive highly qualified traffic to your site that will more than likely contain warm leads close to making a decision on where they would like to receive therapy treatments.
On-Page SEO: Optimizing Your Website Content
Once you’ve been able to create a good list of keywords or phrases you want to start focusing on, the next step you’ll want to take is to start optimizing your content.
On-page SEO refers to any changes you’re able to make to the forward-facing components of your website to improve the relevance of your content to what your users are looking for. This can include anything from the titles of your pages and their content to important coding elements that can help make your website easier for search engines to crawl.
Creating Great Titles and Descriptions
The first impressions of your website’s content happen before a user even click on the Google search result. Your page titles and descriptions are an important part of SEO since it gives both your visitors and search engines the context needed to decide if visiting the page is necessary.
Title tags are the clickable headlines that people see when a search engine like Google gives them a list of results to choose from. It’s important that whenever possible, you include your target keyword(s) into the page title name while restricting its length to around 50-60 characters.
The description of your page is also equally important since it will provide a short summary of what the page is about. This description will appear below the search result and will be the attention grabber you need to bring in more visitors.
Good Use of Header Tags
When constructing the content of your web pages, the structure that you choose can be just as important as the information you’re providing. Search engines want to make sure that the user experience is the best it can be when providing query results. A big part of improving a user’s experience is by being exposed to content that its well-written and follows a smart, easy-to-follow format.
A great way to support this is by making sure your content is categorized using header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.). These special coding tags don’t just change the font and size of content sections and subsections - they also help to prioritize main points and break down broader topics into more digestible portions.
Using Keywords in Your Content to Improve the User Experience
With your page titles and content layout structure optimized, you’ll want to now focus on creating or updating content so that it provides real value to readers. Your primary goal should be to add as much unique perspective and professional guidance as you can when drafting this content.
Although your keyword choices should be something you consider when building out your information, it’s important not to be overly focused on word selection. The important thing to prioritize is clearly answering the questions your visitors came to your site to find out.
Technical SEO: Establishing a Strong Site Foundation
Not all important elements of SEO begin and end with forward-facing features. Search engines look for many different factors when deciding whether or not to rank certain sites for keywords and phrases. Many of these factors are actually below the surface and related to the functionality and performance of the website itself.
Technical SEO focuses specifically on addressing these various factors, optimizing different site elements so that they are structured in a way that meets certain benchmarks established by popular search engines like Google.
Some of the key elements of technical SEO include:
Site Speed - How fast your website loads images or different site elements can make a significant difference in whether or not visitors choose to stay on the page. This is why making sure your website performs the way ti should can be important to how your pages are ranked.
Mobile-Friendliness - Most people use their mobile devices and tablets to look for information online. Because of this, websites that have mobile responsive designs and ensure the user has the same visiting experience as they would with a desktop will typically see better rankings than websites that don’t have mobile-friendly designs.
Navigation Ease - It really doesn’t matter what type of website you have - the site’s navigation needs to be clear and make sense for visitors and search engine crawlers. Search engines will favor more websites that have a well-organized hierarchy when indexing their content.
Website Security - The Internet is filled with malicious websites that are designed to look like sites belonging to reputable businesses, including therapy practices. An important differentiator for many of these sites is having an unsecured platform that’s lacking in security certificates. Making sure your website has trusted SSL certificates, identified by “HTTPS” and the locking symbol in your address bar is another ranking factor to consider.
Configured XML Sitemaps - Search engines use their crawler to go through literally hundreds of thousands of pages of content a day. To make this process easier, they rely on website owners to provide an easy-to-follow roadmap for their sites. An XML sitemap does just that and can help search engines to more easily understand the structure of your site and help it get indexed faster.
Local SEO: Connecting with Local Clients
For therapy practices, establishing a local presence in the community is often one of the most effective ways to bring in new business. Local SEO focuses on optimizing your web presence so it’s easier to find for individuals who are looking for solutions in their area.
Optimizing your local SEO can be a great way to reduce the likelihood of gaining leads that are unlikely to convert because they’re located out of state or country. By making the right tweaks to your content structure and using relevant keywords, you can become one of the top search results on Google’s local business search pages.
One important way to start attracting local clients to your therapy practice is to take advantage of a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business). This is a free tool that all businesses can use to claim ownership over their own business profile and control how it appears on Google search results and Google Maps.
In order to benefit from establishing a Google Business Profile, you’ll want to make sure your profile is updated with accurate information regarding your practice, including its name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and description of your services. It can also be beneficial to upload photos of your practice to help showcase your professionalism to potential clients.
You can also establish profiles on other business sites, including Yelp or Trustpilot. These websites are commonly visited by potential clients or customers who look for reviews from others before visiting. This can be a great way to quickly market your services if you’re able to get a few positive reviews for your practice in a short amount of time.
Another common way to attract more of a local audience is to create content that specifically focuses on different cities or other locations close to your practice. This could be in the format of learning pages for different areas, highlighting mental health statistics or other relevant factors for the audience you’re looking to target.
This helps search engines to see you as a source of helpful information for various topics in your area and can help you rank for more location-specific search results.
Content Marketing: Engaging Your Audience
Content marketing can be a great way to leverage the content you create on your site to help you draw in more qualified leads. It can also have long-term positive effects on your SEO efforts as your content becomes more distributed and referred to by other organizations in your niche.
Below are a few of the comment formats you can use to help provide helpful content and market it to your audience:
Blog Posts
Creating blogs is a great way to pad your website with helpful content that can be optimized to help you establish more keyword relevance for search engines. Blogs are a great way to offer helpful information on all sorts of topics that are relevant to your therapy practice. They could be about your business specifically or be centered around more broad mental health topics that might appeal to your current and potential clientele.
Videos
Video sharing has become one of the fastest-growing forms of content marketing today. The reason for this has to do with convenience and much more digestible formats to take in new information.
Most people today have low attention spans, and multiple pages of written text can become overwhelming for most. Videos are a great way to explain the same information in less time and can be used in a variety of different ways - explainer videos, testimonials, mission statements, and more.
There are also a number of online platforms you can use to both distribute content and advertise. This makes videos a great multi-use tool for your practice to use to both inform your audience and play an important part in your lead funnel.
E-books and Whitepapers
Various therapy modalities touch on relatively complex mental health topics that aren’t always easy to discuss comprehensively in a short blog or video. This is where e-books and whitepapers can be a great addition to your marketing toolbelt.
E-books and whitepapers are digital assets that provide your audience with more in-depth information on certain topics. The great thing about putting these into a digital format is that they can create linkable assets that other organizations will want to link out to.
Because of how helpful many e-books and whitepapers can be, they are often helpful resources to point your audience to. When other organizations haven’t had the time or resources to cover certain topics, they’ll look for other companies (like yours) to link to these assets to provide their own website visitors with a better user experience.
This can lead to a large amount of referral traffic and be another great way to grow your visibility.
Following Google’s E-E-A-T Principles
Regardless of the type of content format you decide to focus on, an important way to show Google that it is worth directing visitors to is by following its E-E-A-T principles. These principles of Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness help weight your content compared to other brands' content when publishing and distributing similar pieces.
E-E-A-T Principles Explained:
Expertise - As a relatively new addition to Google’s ranking factors for content relevancy, expertise helps to demonstrate a website owner’s depth of knowledge on specific topics. This helps to route out content that doesn’t really have much backing and instead prioritizes content that’s written with added perspective and a unique form of delivery.
Experience - As a professional therapist, the experience you bring to the table when creating your content plays an important part in differentiating it from competitors. This means that when you author specific content pages, you’ll want to include facts about your education or certifications as well as the years of experience you have. This adds credibility to your content and helps to improve rankings.
Authoritativeness - Authoritativeness is something that builds over time and is what associates your website with other helpful resources available online. This can be built up by publishing your content in reputable journals, digital magazines, or directories in your niche.
Trustworthiness - Trust is critical to Google when pointing users to helpful information. It’s especially important for anyone in a medical or related field, as it can lead people to make important decisions in their lives that can affect their overall health. It’s important for therapy practices to be completely honest and transparent in all of their content and never make claims that are unsubstantiated and not supported by evidence.
Off-Page SEO: Building Your Online Presence
SEO isn’t just about what you do on your website. It’s also about how you use and leverage other websites to help strengthen your brand's reputation and credibility online.
Off-page SEO can be looked at as a form of digital networking that uses a variety of strategies to get other authoritative brands and resources to help you spread your visibility and bring in referral traffic to your site.
One of the foundational elements of a strong off-page SEO strategy is building and maintaining a healthy backlink profile. Links pointing back to your site are an important ranking factor for search engines like Google since they signal to them that other pre-vetted websites view you as trustworthy enough to refer their own visitors to it.
The more quality backlinks you’re able to gain for your website, the more authority your site will gain. While this isn’t the sole factor that search engines use to rank websites in search results pages, it does have a large impact.
Common Backlinking Strategies to Improve Off-Page SEO
Getting backlinks from reputable websites can happen organically without your involvement. However, there are much more effective ways to get backlinks to your website than hoping something discovers your content and wants to link back to it.
Below are some common backlinking strategies that can be especially effective for new therapy practices looking to get noticed:
Guest Blogging
Managing a blog can be time-consuming for many companies. That’s why many businesses welcome guest bloggers to help provide their customers with content that will be useful to their readers.
In exchange for this service, many companies will allow content authors to provide a link back to their own website when meeting certain criteria. This can be very beneficial when you’re able to become a guest blogger on high-authority websites and send link authority over to your own site.
Social Media Engagement
Social networks are another platform that can help you connect with your audience but can also help you acquire additional backlinks. Whether you share your posts across your social feed or create backlinks to your site from your brand profile, engaging on social media platforms is a great way to easily add more reputable links to your site.
Local Citations
Since a therapy practice can be a great source of helpful information regarding mental health, you can also explore a variety of local business directories or medical resource guides for your business. These directories can help you support the relevance of other business directories you’re part of, like your Google Business Profile, and help search engines see consistency in branding across multiple platforms.
Influencer Outreach
When you think of an influencer, you probably immediately think of someone reviewing new products and giving their opinions to their large follower audience. However, there are influencers in literally every type of niche - including mental health fields.
Reaching out to relevant influencers through networking events or when getting connected with other professionals in your field, you can establish some great partnerships that can help bring in more quality links to your site and a large amount of referred traffic.
Putting Everything Together
Now that you have a clear understanding of the primary components of SEO, it's time to translate that knowledge into action. You should put a comprehensive plan in place that effectively prioritizes each stage of your SEO and starts executing it.
Many times, companies will get into the habit of only focusing on optimizing their content or neglecting to improve the performance of their site. However, in order to get the most benefit, it’s important to have an SEO plan that will allow you to address all areas evenly.
Depending on your goals, it may be a good idea to work with SEO specialists who can help design a plan that makes the most sense for your business. They also have teams of individuals who can help you manage some of the more time-consuming elements of your SEO strategy, such as content generation and acquiring new backlinks.
Start Building an Effective SEO Strategy for Your Business
SEO is a powerful tool for therapists who want to grow their practice and reach more clients. By continuously learning, evolving your strategies, and staying committed to creating valuable content, you'll transform your website into a powerful asset that attracts the people you're most equipped to help.
Remember, though, that SEO is an ongoing journey, not a one-time fix. In order to get the most benefit from your efforts, it’s important to be patient and never rush the results. Embrace the process, and celebrate the milestones along the way.