SEO for Therapists: Helpful Tips to Improve Your Website’s Rankings
How SEO Can Help Your Private Practice
SEO helps people who are searching for your therapy practices online find you. Want to know how to get new therapy clients every day? SEO, also known as search engine optimization: is a great way to attract new clients to your private practice! After all, most people begin their search for a therapist on Google. Think of SEO as a strategy to improve your website so it ranks better and is seen more on search engines.
How Does SEO Work?
Here’s how SEO works, Google, which is the most popular search engine with over a 90% market share, uses its own search engine algorithm (think of these as a set of rules) to rank website content. Google takes things into consideration like keyword usage, backlinks, and your website content’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (known as E-A-T) as well as other factors to determine where your website should show up on a search engine results page (SERP for short). Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with the specifics for now!
Today, we go over 5 helpful SEO tips for therapists that you can get started on ASAP to gain more clients online.
5 Helpful SEO Tips Therapists Should Implement Today
1. Create and Make Updates to Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business (or Google My Business) profile is one of the best ways to drive local traffic to your website. And since it’s a Google listing, the search engine naturally prioritizes it above other listings. It’s basically a directory listing that contains information such as your:
Business name
Location
Hours
Services
Phone number
Driving directions
Website
People are actually 70% more likely to visit a business that has its Google My Business profile filled out (Raising the Digital Bar for Small Businesses).
To determine if you have a Google Business profile, search for your business and see if it pops up. It should on the righthand side of your search engine results page with photographs and information about your business in a profile. If not, you can easily create one by heading to
www.google.com/business. (Note: You’ll need a Gmail email account to get started.)
Once you’ve completed your profile (make sure everything is up to date), Google will ask you to verify it. This typically means you’ll be sent a piece of mail with a verification code. Once that’s sent, be sure to verify your account. Then you can make updates and adjustments as needed. Update your profile every 1-2 weeks with posts, reviews, etc. to remind Google that you’re an active player online.
Check out your Google Business Insights to see how your profile is performing. You can view this in the “Google Insights” tab. You can see how many people called, got directions, and clicked on your website. You can also see what words your clients searched for to find you, which is another key component of SEO.
2. Conduct Keyword Research and Update Your Private Practice Website Content
If you want to bring ideal clients to your website, you need to optimize the content on your site with the right keywords (the words and phrases they’re searching for online). Here are some tools you can use to figure out what your ideal clients are searching for online:
You can then use these keywords in your website content to optimize your web pages for clients searching for a therapist like you! When optimizing your website’s content, we recommend putting the most important keywords in your URL and Heading 1, the second most important in your Heading 2, and so on.
One tip is to use long-tail keywords that are more specific. This is because when clients are using long-tail keywords, such as “holistic EMDR therapist in Denver, CO,” they’re doing so because they know exactly what they’re looking for and want to find someone ASAP. These searches are more likely to book a session or introductory call with you.
3. Get an SEO Audit Done
Broken links, no keywords utilized in your content, and no internal linking can hurt your SEO. An SEO audit covers everything from technical aspects to content issues and broken links. You can use an SEO tool like Moz (30-day free trial) or Semrush (7-day free trial) to conduct a website audit.
4. Add Your Private Practice to Directory Listings
A directory listing is a business listing that showcases your private practice’s business information. Before you start adding your private practice to any directories, make sure to claim all your social media handles, whether you use them or not, as they’re directories too!
Once you’ve done that, you can add your private practice to some or all of the following directories (these are some of the most popular ones out there):
5. Start a Client-Centered Blog
Blogging is a great way to share what you do and who you are with your clients. It’s also a highly effective SEO tool that’s often underutilized.
Think about all your future clients that have questions about therapy. What are they asking? What do they want to know? What are they worried about? You can write blog posts targeting each of these keywords for your area, so when they search for them, you have a chance of showing up on Google.
A few examples are “What are the best treatments for anxiety?” or “What questions should you ask a couples therapist?”
If you ever need additional ideas, think about what your clients care about, look at what people are searching for via Google’s “People Also Ask” feature that appears on Google search results pages, and conduct keyword research (keyword tools often give you suggestions) to get started.
Add your keywords into your blog posts and see what happens.
Hot Tip: Share your blog post on all your social channels after publishing it to gain backlinks (these are links back to your website content, which also help with SEO).
If you’re looking for more marketing support and trainings for private practice therapists, be sure to check out our free trainings for therapists!
