If you are reading this post, then it means that you got a therapy website which is not ranking on search engines or you heard about SEO for therapy website and wants to learn about it. In this comprehensive SEO guide for private practice counsellors, you will get to know about what is SEO for therapists in Private practice, why you should so SEO for therapists, and how to do SEO for private practice therapists. Let’s go then.
What is SEO for Therapists in Private Practice
SEO or search engine optimization is the process by which a private practice therapy website is optimized so that it can rank in various search engines. It is done to drive clicks and gain organic visibility in search engines like Google.
Google and other search engines doesn’t know that you have a therapy website. Even if they know they will not rank the website in the first place. They need signals. To let them know and rank your counselling website, SEO is done.
SEO for therapists can be done at 3 levels, local, national, and international. This guide is more inclined towards local SEO, but other two are also similar in strategy.
SEO for a therapy website is done in 3 parts. These parts are On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. On-page SEO builds the foundation, Off-page SEO builds website authority and trust, and Technical SEO removes technical issues which can cause website to not index and searched.
When all these 3 parts of therapist SEO are done right, Google and other search engines start giving your website visibility on their search pages.
But to understand therapy SEO more deeply we will need to understand about the working of a search engine first because it is the place where your website will be shown after ranking.
What is a search engine
A search engine is a programmed online web based software which is used to search, identify, and find the information published digitally on the internet or the world wide web (WWW) by web publishers and webmasters. This information can be in the form of text, images, video or any other media type.
In simple terms you can call it an online website directory where all the information about websites and their content is available. Google and Bing are two most popular examples of search engines.
To provide the correct information to the user, search engines rely on various signals also called as ranking factors/signals that help them assess the website. Using these ranking signals a search engine assess the quality of a website, understand the core topic, and stores them in their database.
After the assessment the search engine ranks website in the order of best to worst for a search query. We will be reading about these factors later in this guide but let’s first understand how a search engine works.
How search engine works
The basic function of a search engine to serve the information asked by the user. But to server that information the search engines need to collect that information, assess it, and store it in their databases.
To find the information search engines use bots popularly called as “Web crawlers”. These web crawlers helps build the search database of search engines which is called search index. These search engines are made up of several web crawlers which crawls websites, collect the information published on them, make a copy of the information collected, keep a copy of website’s URLs, and store it in their databases. Crawling here means accessing the data which is publicly available on your website.
The most important way which search engines use to crawl a website is through links. A crawler’s main work is to follow the links and discover content and other media files. A web crawler can come to your therapy website in several ways. Either directly through your website or through any other website which is linking to you.
After coming on your private practice counselling website, they will go to other pages on your website through the links placed on your website.
The data they will crawl from your therapy website is then stored by them in their databases (search index) to be served later whenever someone searches something similar to the content that is on your website.
Now whenever someone will do a web search query using keywords to find information, the search engine algorithm will go to their database, look for the best match of information related to the searched query, collect a list of websites which the algorithm finds suitable according to ranking signals, and then list those websites in front of user.
That’s how a search engine works.
One more thing I want to mention is that the results in the search engine results pages (SERP) are normally ranked by the relevancy to the searched query. Search engines also take into account the User intent, also known by the term query intent or search intent to categorize and identify what the user is trying to find and present them with the best results based on the search term typed in the search bar of a search engine.
Overall, there are 5 types of general user intent. These are Informational Intent (why, where, how, etc.), Navigational Intent (login, signup, etc.), Transactional Intent (book online, shop online, for sale, etc.), Commercial Intent (best therapy in city, best XYZ, etc.), Local Search Intent (near me, nearest therapist, etc.)
That’s how a search engine works. But there is a caveat. Google and other search engines use various ranking factors as criteria to valuate a website. Based on those ranking factors search engines try to provide relevant websites according to the searched information. In the coming paragraphs you will get to know about these ranking signals.
Why to do SEO for private practice therapy website
This is a very important question to ask in the first place. Why should you invest your time and money in SEO for therapists? The simple answer is to gain visibility in search engines.
Most of the users who use internet starts their search by typing the query or a keyword in a search engine’s search bar. Based on the query asked by the user the search engine provide them with a list of websites which they can visit.
If your website will not be in the answered list, no user will get to know about your private practice. You website will become just a digital visiting card, which no one will see. As a consequence, no one will be able to book a session with you.
So, to show your website on the first page of Google and other search engines, so that your potential users can visit you and engage with you, SEO for therapists is done.
Secondly, doing SEO for therapy website will reduce your dependency on other paid marketing channels like paid ads. Paid ads work only till your are paying, them moment you stop adding funds to your ad account, your ad stops working and clients flow zero from ads. That’s not the case with SEO.
SEO is organic reach. Once you are ranked you don’t have to spend money like in paid ads.
Parts of SEO for therapists in private practice
As I mentioned above, therapy SEO has three parts. On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. These 3 parts collectively helps in ranking a website on the first page of Google. It is utmost necessary to have a understanding of them before performing SEO for a counsellor website.
1. On-page SEO
The first part of therapy SEO is the On-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to all those optimization methods that are applied at the page level of a website. This is like the basic foundation of SEO for therapy website. In On-page SEO several elements of the website are optimized. These elements are:
Keywords
Keywords are search terms that a user use to search for something online. A user starts it’s search journey by typing in a keyword. Keywords are of 4 types. Informational, Navigational, transactional, and Commercial. These 4 type of keywords have different search intent.
Informational keywords are those where a user is looking to learn about a topic. Example – How to do therapy SEO?
Navigational keywords are those in which a user is looking for location of a website or page. Example – Therapist blog
Transactional keywords are those keywords where a user wants to buy something. Example – Anxiety checklist for sale
Commercial keywords are those which user use to find specific services or products. Example – Therapist in Phoenix, Therapy Phoenix.
Title-tag
Title-tag is the clickable headline which is seen in search engines. Title tag provides the main context of the page. It is visible on search results, in the top of browsers tab, and in shareable links. In the below image you can see the title of this website.
Meta-description
Meta description is the text that appears under the title of the page in search engines. A good meta description helps in improving the CTR of the page.
URLs
The URL or the Uniform Resource Locator is the web address for a file, page, image, etc. In simple ways, it the address of a resource which is available on the website. For example: https://therapistrise.com/seo-for-therapists-in-private-practice/ is a URL.
Headings
The headings are used to organize the content and structure on the webpage. Headings go from H1 to H6. H1 being the biggest and H6 being the smallest.
Internal links
Internal links are hyperlinks that takes a user and web crawlers from one page to another within the website. For example this text in “therapist SEO” is a hyperlink which is linking to the Therapist SEO category page. The text around the link is called anchor text.
Structured data
Search engines have to make a lot of efforts to understand the content of the page. To make it easier for them structured data is used. This structured data provides information to search engines what this page is about.
It is the information provided in a JSON-LD markup file about the content on the page. To create this schema markup file, standard vocabulary and format is used which search engines can understand. Most of the search engines use vocabulary provided by schema.org
2. Off-page SEO
All those methods that are applied outside the website are categorized in Off-page SEO. These methods are:
Backlinks
Incoming links coming back to your website are called backlinks. Links are of two types: Dofollow and Nofollow. Dofollow links pass the authority of the donor domain and signals that the linking site trust the content of the linked website whereas Nofollow link do not pass the authority and signals that linking website doesn’t trust the content of the linked website.
Dofollow links are more powerful than Nofollow backlinks.
Social Links
Links that are coming from social media platforms like Facebook, Youtube, X.com come under social media links.
Brand mentions
Getting featured on authoritative, popular websites which Google and other search engines trust comes under Brand mentions.
3. Technical SEO
Technical SEO involves optimizing the backend of a therapy website. It is done so that the crawlers can crawl your website easily without any issue. It includes optimizing robots.txt file, serving website over SSL (HTTPS Protocol), checking .htaccess file issues, update sitemaps, optimizing website speed issues, fixing broken links, making website mobile-friendly, fixing canonical issues, fixing javascript related problems.
Robots.txt file
A Robots.txt file tell search engine crawlers which URLs they can access and which they cannot. It is used to manage the crawler traffic on your website.
HTTPS
HTTPS means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure. It helps tell the search engines that the connection between your web server and website is encrypted.
.htaccess file
Unlike Robots.txt file which tells crawlers which URLs they can crawl, .htaccess file serves more SEO purpose. Using this file you can redirect URLs, block IP addresses, improve website speed. A very handy file for SEOs who knows code.
Sitemap file
A Sitemap file is a file where you provide all the information about the published pages and posts on your website. Crawlers use this file to crawl your website.
Fixing broken links
Broken links are those links on your website that does not lead to a live page but to a 404 page. Broken links can harm your SEO efforts. All the broken links on the website are checked and then redirected either to the homepage or a similar page/post.
Fixing canonical links issue
Canonical links are those URLs that Google and other search engines consider duplicate. It helps to show the right version of a page in the search results.
Fixing JavaScript code issues
JavaScript is an important part of any webpage now. It adds functionality to a website. Fixing the JavaScript code mean fixing the code which can cause rendering and indexing issues of the page.
Making website mobile-friendly
Google uses mobile version of the website to crawl and index a website. They call it mobile-first indexing. A website will be called mobile-friendly when the design is responsive, URL’s are same regardless of the device type, same content, same Robots.txt file, same structured data, same meta data.
How to do SEO for a private practice therapy website?
Now you have got a good understanding about various parts of therapy SEO. It’s time to actually see how to implement it on a therapy website.
Before starting anything, first connect your website with Google Search Console. It is a website performance reporting platform provided by Google which is used to measure traffic, find errors, and track performance issues.
Start with keyword research
The first and foremost task while doing therapy website SEO is doing thorough keyword research. A strong keyword research is the backbone of any therapy SEO project. Keyword research will help in identifying all those keywords that users are searching in your local area. Around these keywords all the pages and content strategy will be made.
There are several methods to do keyword research, free and paid. I will describe the whole process with both methods.
The best free way to do keyword research is the Google auto complete feature. You may have noticed that when you type something in the Google’s search bar it automatically gets completed. That’s the autocomplete feature of the google.
We can use this autocomplete feature to do our foundation SEO keyword research for the counselling website. Start by typing in your main practice. For the sake of explanation, I am using “Anxiety Therapy Houston” as my main keyword.
When I typed in anxiety therapy Houston, Google recommended several other keywords which are relevant to our main keyword. I have marked them in red line in the below image. These are the keywords that you should focus on.
Now when I actually searched for the main keyword, I scroll to the bottom of the page. Google has another handy search feature “People also search for”. This is another great place to get keyword ideas for your therapy website.
In the “People also search for” section you will be presented with more keyword ideas. I have underlined those keyword ideas in red in the above image.
Now, you have to go to each keyword idea suggested in the “People also search for”. You will be presented with more keyword ideas. I am showing you by going to “Somatic therapy Houston” in the below image.
In this way you have to do keyword research for your therapist website from free method. After thoroughly going to each suggested keyword, the last work will be to assemble the keywords and decide how many pages will need to be created.
Now let’s move on to the paid keyword research method. There are various SEO tools that helps in doing keyword research. Two of the popular ones are Ahrefs and Semrush.
I am using Semrush here to find local keywords. Other tools also have the same procedure. In Semrush, go to Keyword Overview, and in the right side of the tool, enter your main keyword from which you want to start. I am using the same keyword that I used in the free method.
Below the input field, select the country you want to find keywords, and then click on “Search”.
You will be presented with a similar screen like the below.
Here you can see the estimated search volume of the keyword. Now scroll down to start the actual research.
Here you can see all the keyword variations of your main keyword. Collect them all. Now, scroll down little more to find the ranking websites for that keyword. That’s where the real magic starts. You will find list of ranking websites in the positions 1-10.
Click on each website one by one. For this guide, I am doing it for the #1 ranking website. When you go the website analysis and scroll down a little bit, you will find all the keywords for which this website is showing in the search results, their ranking position, and clicks data. In our case it is 444 keywords.
Collect all those keywords and assemble them based on similarity.
Repeat the above steps with other 9 ranking websites. You will gather a huge list of keywords you can target. Also, do the same activity with the keywords which come in website analysis. In this way, you will discover a good number of keywords.
Prepare website structure
Now when you have a good number of keywords with you it’s time to develop a website structure strategy for them. Segregate and group similar keywords together.
For example – Anxiety therapy Houston, therapy for anxiety therapy Houston, anxiety disorder therapy Houston can be grouped together on a single page. Similarly, keywords related to another keyword like CBT therapy Houston can be grouped together to be included on the same page.
You should use an excel sheet to list down all the keywords and segregation. After the segregation, the next major step is deciding the URL structure of the website. As I said above, good URL structure also plays a major role in On-page SEO of a therapy website.
There are various ways in which you can structure your website’s ULR structure. I am listing down 3 major ones which you can use on your therapy website.
1- domain.com/xyz-therapy-city/
This URL structure is the most common one. In this URL structure you can just create a therapy page along with the city. This structure works best when you are working in a single city. Additionally, you can create a domain.com/services/ page to list all the therapy service you provide in that area.
2- domain.com/city/xyz-therapy/
This URL structure works best when you have multiple clinic locations. You can specify which therapy you provide in which city using this URL structure.
3- domain.com/xyz-therapy/city/
This is similar to multiple locations URL but the structure is different. Here you have a dedicated page around a particular therapy and then dedicated pages for the locations you provide that service in.
These 3 types of URL structures are the most common ones used in local SEO for therapy website. Also, one more thing to note is that keep URL characters in small case only. Don’t use upper case. From the below example you can understand what I am talking about.
Incorrect URL structure: domain.com/URL-is-in-Upper-Case/
Correct URL structure: domain.com/url-is-in-lower-case/
Now, after grouping the keywords and deciding the URL structure, it’s time to actually create pages for each service that came up during your keyword research process and start the ON-page SEO process.
You may be wondering that I can list all the services on a single page, then why to create separate page for each service? You have a valid question. Creating separate page for each service will help build topical authority of your therapy website and building trust with your potential clients as most probably they will land on the exact page they are looking for.
Do On-page of each service page
After you have developed the website structure strategy for the website’s pages, it’s time to actually add content on those pages and optimize them.
Start by optimizing the title tag, meta description, URL of the page, and H1. Put you main keyword in these 4 elements. For example if your page is on EMDR therapy Cedar Rapids, your title tag can be “EMDR Therapy Cedar Rapids”, URL structure can be domain.com/emdr-therapy-cedar-rapids, H1 can be “Reliable EMDR Therapy in Cedar Rapids”.
After that, add secondary keywords to the headings and in the content. In similar way create other pages and later interlink them. Add alt text to images which are meaningful and don’t leave them empty.
Now after properly optimizing the page, next thing to do in On-page SEO for therapy website is adding relevant structured data to each page.
For a therapist website, Local Business schema is the most ideal. This schema will tell search engines that your website is a local business. Add your location, name of the business, open hours, latitude and longitude details, URL of the webpage, and other relevant information in the schema.
There are several online tools like this one to generate schema markup for your website. And if you are on WordPress, you can utilize SEO tools like Rank math, or Yoast. They have inbuilt schema feature.
Apply Off-page strategies
Now when you have properly setup website, created all services and location pages, did On-page SEO, it’s time to move on to the second most part of therapy SEO i.e Off-page SEO.
Like I mentioned above Off-page involves getting backlinks and increasing website authority. But why do we need backlinks in the first place? Let me tell you the reason why it is done. Google and other search engines are algorithms which themselves can’t understand which is a better website and which is not. They rely on signals. Out of these signals, links coming from other websites to yours play a very big role.
Google and other search engines use these links to determine the relevancy of your website and trustworthiness.
These backlinks tell search engines that this website is authoritative and trusted. But how do search engines decide which backlink is more trusted. They rely on PageRank. This is a ranking system provided by Google to websites. Each website has different page rank. A backlink from a more powerful page rank website will be more valuable then a link from a low page rank website.
You can consider these backlinks as votes with a more popular website having more vote value as compared to some random website.
For example – A backlink from healthline.com will be more powerful than a link from a normal website.
Now coming back to the topic. Since you are local getting these high power backlinks will not be enough. There is more to be done. There is a step by step process you should follow while doing Off-page SEO. This process is described below:
1- Start by joining local and service specific directories
First of all get listed on local business directories and service specific directories like Psychology Today. These directories will work as citations for your business. I like to say them pillow links as they work like cushion for your website.
One important thing that you should remember while building citations is that keep your business name, address, and phone number same everywhere. In short it is called NAP consistency. Don’t change it. Why so? because as you know Google and other search engines are algorithms. Having inconsistent NAP on websites will confuse them to understand which is the right business name, address or phone is of yours private counselling.
A confused algorithm will impact your rankings as they will not be able to understand properly about your business information. So, keep NAP consistent everywhere.
2 – Join social media platforms
Next on the list is joining the popular social media platforms like Facebook, X.com (Twitter), Youtube, etc. They will help building trust and attract social media users.
3 – Join local chamber of commerce
Like I said above, Google trust those websites better which are mentioned on authoritative websites. Local chamber of commerce website is one of them. Get yourself listed in your area’s local chamber of commerce. This is very important while doing local SEO. By doing so, you will signal search engines that you business is genuine and trusted.
4 – Get a press release done
You may be thinking why a press release? But a press release is an important part of local Off-page SEO strategy. Prepare a press release and send to press release aggregators to be distributed in online publishing news platform. A press release will help you in getting brand mentions as 100+ websites will be mentioning you on their platform.
5 – Approach industry specific websites for guest posts/niche edits
In the next stage, advanced Off-page strategies starts. As I mentioned above, Google trust websites that have high page rank. So having a backlink from them will also send trust signals towards your website.
In this step, you have to identify websites that are authoritative and relevant to your practice. For example, you are a relationship counsellor, the ideal websites for you will be dating, marriage, relationship, etc. Backlinks from these websites will help building the relevance.
I am not saying that just get backlinks from those. Also, get backlinks from your local city websites. That will also be considered a good backlink in this case.
6 – Join Qwoted/Souce of Sources
Qwoted and Sources of Sources are platforms where journalists list questions for expert opinions. In return of the expert opinion they mention the expert and their website on the associated media publishing website.
You being an expert in your field can use these platforms to gain authoritative backlinks. Start answering questions they ask in the email. The frequently mention the selected answers in big publications. When your answer will be mentioned most of the time they give a link too from the website.
7 – Run a digital PR campaign
This is an advanced SEO strategy where you run a digital PR campaign for a topic. For example, you prepared a report on cities with most divorce cases. And then you send this report to relevant journalist who writes about divorce.
By doing this two things will happen. Your report will be published in big publications and secondly most probably you will get a backlink back to your website. All this without spending money on paid backlinks.
But as I said, this is an advance Off-page SEO strategy. Therefore, it will need a good news angle and newsworthy report that journalists can publish in their websites.
So, work on a report which is newsworthy.
These backlinks strategies are not a one-off strategy. You have to keep doing them at regular intervals to maintain your rankings.
Apply Technical-SEO strategies
Now you have completed On-page and Off-page SEO strategies on your private counselling website, it’s time to remove the technical errors from the website which can cause crawl errors and indexing issues.
Because it requires some degree of coding skills, you may require a web developer to execute this part.
Start by checking your robots.txt file – Check if everything is okay there. Check for any instructions that may be blocking bots to crawl.
Improve core web vitals – Check your Google core web vitals score. If it is above 85 (both mobile and desktop) then it is well and good, other work on improving the core web vitals following the recommendations provided by Google Page Speed Insights.
Fix canonical URL issues – Run your therapy website URL in a technical SEO audit tool like Screaming Frog. This tool will tell how many URLs are canonical on your website. Fix them.
Also, Google Search Console itself will tell you which URL’s are canonical. You can find them in the filter “User-Declared Canonical Not Selected“.
Make website mobile friendly – As I mentioned above Google use mobile-first indexing to index a website. So it is utmost important that your website should load fine on mobile devices. Check your website layout, design, responsiveness, text size, loading speed on mobile devices.
Use a tool Uptrends to check the mobile loading time for various data and mobile devices.
Update sitemap – Google and other search engine crawlers regularly visit sitemap file to find new URLs. A faulty sitemap file can prevent them from accessing them. So check if all the URLs of your website are visible there. Add xml file of your sitemap to GSC.
Redirect 404, Faulty URLs and Page – If you have 404 error pages on your website it’s time to redirect them back to the right destination page. You can do them using .htaccess file or using a WordPress plugin.
Check for any JavaScript code error – As I mentioned earlier code errors in JavaScript too can hinder web crawlers to come to your website. Screaming Frog is the ultimate tool that can help you inspect these errors. If you find any issues, fix them.
Final Words
Finally you made it till the end. If you are reading till now, that means you have got a good understanding about therapy SEO. Through this comprehensive SEO for private practice therapists guide, I have tried to explain everything in detail.
SEO is one of the best marketing channel for your private counselling website. With the right SEO implementation you can expect your private practice therapy business to grow manifold.
Also, I want to mention that SEO is not a one time process. It is as continuous as the flow of a river. You have to keep working on your therapy website’s SEO to keep it ranking. As your competitors are also working to rank their website.
One more thing to note is that search engines keep changing their ranking algorithms from time to time. So, you should keep an eye on these algorithm changes too. As these changes can impact your rankings.
With that said, I wish success to your business. I hope you find this SEO for therapists guide useful.