On-page SEO is the first and foundational step of any therapist SEO campaign. It builds the core SEO structure of a therapy website. Through this comprehensive On-page SEO for private practice therapist website you will get to know about On-page SEO, why it is important, how it is done.
What is On-page SEO for a therapy website?
On-page SEO means all those search engine optimization methods that are applied on the web page level of a therapist website. It is done to make the website easily understandable, readable, by the search engines and the users alike.
On-page SEO is the opposite of Off-page SEO. Off-page SEO involves gaining backlinks, increasing brand mentions, and domain authority whereas On-page is done on webpage level.
On-page SEO involves optimizing the content of a web page for search engines so that they can easily understand the content and context of the page. It helps them understand what this website is about. It involves optimizing the website content around keywords that users are searching in search engines.
Why On-page SEO for therapist website?
On-page SEO helps search engine crawlers to understand what the content is about. It helps the search engines to understand the context of the web page. It helps to increase online visibility and reach targeted audience.
If there will be poor On-page SEO on your therapist website, chances are you may not rank well for your targeted terms.
Google in its SEO starter guide says that words help users to find a piece of your content. These are the keywords or search queries which users search for in the search engines. These keywords helps search engines bots to understand the meaning of the page.
So when you optimize and write your website page around those keywords, the better the topic authority will be, bots will understand the webpage content better, and better chances of being find in search results.
Google says that optimizing around several variations of a keyword will produce positive effects and impacts on how your website will perform in search engine results. This results in your counselling website being show for many variations and related terms in the Google search engine results.
That’s why On-page is called the base of any therapist website SEO strategy. In involves optimizing therapy website around those queries which are searched and have market demand.
So where these keywords be placed? That’s what On-page SEO for therapists is all about. There are various places where these keywords and their variations are placed. Let’s see them in the next section.
How to do On-page SEO for therapist website?
To do On-page SEO for a private practice psychotherapy website several elements of the counselling website are optimized around keywords, it’s variations like long tail and short tail terms, and other related queries. But you may be wondering what these keywords will be. In my keyword research for therapist website SEO guide, I have talked in detail about how to find keywords for your therapy website. Now let’s come back to the topic.
When the page is optimized around these search queries and keywords, the page became holistic and meaningful.
These On-page SEO techniques are same for any content platform. Whether your website is custom coded, built on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or any other platform, the basic fundamentals will be same everywhere.
These elements are:
1 – Title tag
Title tag is the HTML element which you see in the search results. It is also visible on the top of the browser tab and also when a website is shared on social media platforms. Google call them Title links. Also called as headline part of the search result.
Title tag is the first element which is read by the search engine crawlers. Search engines use Title tag to understand the context of the page. It helps them determine what the page is about.
Below from the image you can understand what the title tag is?
Search engines understand this when relevant keywords are added in the Title tag of the therapist website. Also Title links help users to give a quick insight about the content of a result. It is most often the primary piece of information which a user use to decide before clicking a search result.
Google recommends to have a specific title for each page. Each page of the website should have a different Title tag. When doing On-page SEO for a therapist website, primary keyword is added to the Title tag.
Google also recommends to use the title descriptive and meaningful which will not only helpful for search engine bots but also helpful for the users.
While doing local SEO, title tags usually include the Main service + city. For example, if your local counselling website is on Therapy For Overthinking Houston, then your homepage title can be – Therapy For Overthinking Houston. In this way you optimize your private practice title for local keywords.
2 – Meta description
Meta descriptions are tiny short snippet which you see after a title link in search results. It is the quick and short summary of the web page. Well optimized meta descriptions can help getting more clicks to your therapy website. Having your keywords there also helps in increasing the CTR to your website.
This you can also call a shorty sneak-peak summary of the information the user is going to find inside the page. A good meta description is concise, short, and to the point.
If there is no meta description on your webpage, Google will generate a relevant snippet from the website’s page content.
3 – URL
URL or Uniform Resource Locator is the web address that helps to reach to a particular web page. These are also called permalinks. For example, https://therapistrise.com/seo-for-therapists-private-practice/ is a URL which is leading to the SEO for therapists in private practice guide page. The main work of URL is to provide an address on which a particular file or page is located.
Optimizing URLs mean keeping the URL structure in the language which search engines can understand. Google recommends using simple and descriptive words in the URL and not long id numbers like id?=123457, etc. This is because words are readable by search engine bots whereas id numbers are unreadable.
Along with that Google recommends several other things for optimizing the URLs. These are:
1- Using audience language.
Google recommends to use the same language which your website is in. For example if your website is in Italian, you should use Italian language words in the URL. This helps them to better serve your website to the right audience.
2 – Using hyphens to separate words in the URL instead of underscores.
Google recommends to use hyphens (-) to separate words in a URL and discourages users to use underscores (_) in their URL structure. This helps their search bots to better identify the concepts of the URL.
3 – Keeping URLs in either upper case or lower case
Google treats URLs that are case sensitive differently. For example https://therapistrise.com/SEO-For-Therapists/ and https://therapistrise.com/seo-for-therapists/ will be treated as two different URLs. This will confuse them even if the content on both of them are same. When the search engine bots will get confuse, your rankings will also fluctuate.
Having keywords in URL is also a part of On-page SEO for therapists. Google uses PageRank to give weight to a URL. This is a ranking signal developed by Google to give weight to a particular URL and website. Having well optimized URLs helps search engine to understand the structure of a website.
4 – Headings
Headings are the HTML elements that create a structured hierarchy of titles and sub-titles. There are six HTML headings H1 to H6. H1 is the primary one, then H2s are secondary and so on. The main difference among these headings is the font size. H1 is the biggest in font size and H6 is the smallest.
Headings help structure the webpage content in an order. Also the content becomes easy to navigate. When you use correct hierarchy of headings on your web page the content becomes easy to understand and navigate.
Optimizing headings around relevant keywords helps user to understand the whole content structure of the webpage. This makes the content easy to read for them.
So for example if your website page is on Anxiety therapy Houston, the the headings structure can be like:
H1 – Reliable Anxiety Therapy Houston
H2 – Therapists for Anxiety in Houston
H2 – Types of therapy for anxiety in Houston, etc.
When optimizing the headings of a therapist website page, the primary keyword of the web page is generally placed in the H1 tag, secondary keywords are put in H2s, more related keywords are placed in H3 and so on. If the title tag on the web page is missing H1 is generally considered as the title of the page.
This heading structure helps keeping the user engaged with the content and increase the chances of the user converting into a paid client.
5 – In-content
Content is made up of images, videos, text. When you write good content around a topic, your chances of rankings improve. A good SEO optimized content involves optimizing the web page for several variations of a main keyword. For example, if your webpage is around anxiety therapy, then you should write about what is anxiety, what causes anxiety, symptoms of anxiety, triggers of anxiety, how to reduce anxiety, how therapy works in anxiety, success rate of anxiety therapy, benefits of taking anxiety therapy, etc.
The idea is to cover the topic to its depth. This is done so that search engines can understand the content of the page. Not only the web crawlers but the users will spend more time reading the content, increasing your chances of conversions.
In this way you will have a well optimized web page on anxiety therapy which is also optimized on many related terms.
6 – Interlinking
Like URL helps to provide a location to a particular webpage interlinking means hyper linking a URL from one page to another page. It is a common practice to link to other pages of the same website. It is done to provide easy way to users to navigate and find the information published on other pages.
Google recommends to use descriptive, meaningful words while interlinking. The words which are used to provide a hyperlink to another URL are called anchor text.
Google recommends to use easy to understand, relevant anchor texts to hyperlinks. For example, if you have a page on EMDR therapy Houston, and another one on CBT Houston. You want your users to easily go from EMDR therapy Houston web page to CBT Houston page. To do this hyperlinking will help.
On the EMDR therapy Houston page you can create an hyperlink with CBT Houston as anchor text and link to the CBT Houston page. In the same way, on the CBT Houston page, you can create a hyperlink with EMDR therapy Houston as an anchor text and link to EMDR therapy Houston page URL.
Interlinking between pages help Google bot crawlers to find other published pages on your therapist website. This helps in indexing of the pages.
Google says that using keywords and words in the anchor text helps them understand what the hyperlinked URL is about. So, if your anchor text is EMDR therapy Houston linking to https://therapywebsite.com/emdr-therapy-houston/ page URL, Google bot will understand that /emdr-therapy-houston/ page is about EMDR therapy Houston.
Also, give context to the link. Google recommends to give context to a link. The words before and after the link matters. Don’t chain up links.
Google also discourages using un-readable, meaningless anchor texts like click here, check here, go to this page, etc. These words sends no meaning to the Google bot and are not being understand by them.
7 – Structured data
Search engines are algorithms. They don’t understand human language. They understand the language of computers. In the same way they don’t know what a particular web page is about. To help them better understand what the page is about, structured data is used.
Structured data is a standardized form of code which is written in such a way that Google and other search engines can understand the content of the page. The structured data is used to describe the content on the page. There is a specific vocabulary which is used to write these structured data. This schema markup vocabulary is understandable to search bots.
This vocabulary is written using JSON data format. JSON is a data format which is machine-parsable. It is used for storing and transporting data when data is sent from web server to a web page.
Search engines read the vocabulary made by schema.org to understand the content of the page. The most common schema markup for local therapist website is Local Business schema and Organization schema.
Because you are a therapist, I am not expecting you to be a professional web developer. Therefore, to implement schema markup on your webpages you can use tools like this one which helps to generate schema markup. You just have to input the details in the tool and the tool will output a schema markup code.
Just copy the code from there and paste on the page in the HTML field where you want to implement schema markup on.
Using the schema markup, you can specify what type of local business you have, your address, phone number details, google map URL, name of the business, URL leading to the business page, business opening hours, address of the clinic, latitude and longitude of the clinic, opening and closing hours, reviews about your business, and many other things.
Below is an example of local business schema I created for the sake of this guide. I have used business name, URL, telephone, price range, address, geo, opening and closing hours as data properties to be included in the schema.
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Dummy Therapy Business",
"image": "",
"@id": "",
"url": "https://dummytherapybusiness.com",
"telephone": "1234567890",
"priceRange": "200-300",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "Random street",
"addressLocality": "Random city",
"addressRegion": "AL",
"postalCode": "123456",
"addressCountry": "US"
},
"geo": {
"@type": "GeoCoordinates",
"latitude": 33.2443,
"longitude": 86.8164
},
"openingHoursSpecification": [{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": [
"Monday",
"Tuesday",
"Wednesday",
"Thursday",
"Friday"
],
"opens": "09:00",
"closes": "17:00"
},{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": [
"Saturday",
"Sunday"
],
"opens": "09:00",
"closes": "12:00"
}]
}
</script>After you have got the code, test it in Rich Results Test a schema code testing tool developed by Google. Here is the results of the code I generated.
You can see that the valid schema types are detected by the tool. If you find any errors here, go back to the schema generator tool, edit it and again test.
Schema markup will make it easier for you to tell the search bots about a web page. You can specify the details and information in the markup language, and make it helpful for the bots to read it and understand.
One important point to note here is that don’t overstuff your code with irrelevant details. Google recommends to provide fewer accurate and complete properties rather than many properties with un-accurate, poorly formatted, or in complete data.
8. Mobile friendly
Today is the age of the smartphone. Almost everyone has access to internet and a smartphone. Just like desktops, smartphones are also used to search for information online. In local searches especially smartphones are used more than desktops.
Google use the mobile-version of the website to crawl website content and indexing. They call it mobile-first indexing. Having a therapy website which is not mobile-friendly can negatively impact your search ranking. This is because when users will reach your website, they will find it hard to navigate and find the information.
When they will be unable to find the information like contact details, enquiry form, or any specific answer, they will be disappointed and leave your website. This will increase your bounce rate.
When Google will detect that more users are leaving your website without completing an action and moving to the next website in the search results, they will consider your website as not helpful to the users. As a consequence they will de-rank your website from the ranked keywords.
To make your private practice therapy website mobile friendly keep navigation clear, website layout responsive, easy to read font size on various mobile screen sizes, high-quality images, dynamic serving of the same URL regardless of the device, and same structured data.
Also make sure the counselling website should load fast on mobile devices. Ideally your therapy website should load within 3 seconds.
Google has provided a full documentation on best practices to make a website mobile-friendly. Here is the link to full mobile-first indexing documentation which you can read. I also have a tool on my website which reveals is your website mobile friendly. You can check that here: Is your therapist website mobile friendly?
Final words
On-page SEO is the basic foundation of a strong SEO for therapists campaign. When your On-page will be properly optimized, search engines will be able to understand about the content of your page and determine it’s relevance. A poorly optimized web page can do it’s opposite.
A good On-page optimization is not only helpful for search engines but also for your private practice therapy website users. When the content on the page will be descriptive, easy to read and understand the users will spend more time on the page and increases the chances of converting into paid clients.
Through this On-page SEO for therapist guide, I have tried to explain each optimization method in detail. I hope you got some insights from it.