When Someone Searches “Therapist Near Me” – Why Your Private Practice Website Doesn’t Show Up?

You got your therapy website ready. You got hosting, published content, added all the essential pages and published the website on the open internet. After that you try to search the website on Google’s search engine. But when you type “therapist near me” or “therapy + [city]” into Google, you notice your private practice therapy website is not in the search results. You try several times, but still you can’t find yours. If you experienced this, then you are not alone.

Maybe you have done all the therapist website setup steps properly, but making it visible in the Google search engine is a different game. Many therapists assume that simply having a website will mean clients will find them online. But the reality is different. There are more nuances to it other than just publishing the website online. Just having a website will not put your website in the top results of the Google search engine.

So why does your therapy website doesn’t show up when someone searches for “therapist near me” or “therapy +[city]”. What is the reason?

The main reason your therapist website is not showing up or ranking in Google and other search engines is because your private practice website is not optimized for search engines. In short, therapist SEO is not done on it.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization refers to the optimization of a website so that search engines can recognize it, evaluate it, and rank on their search pages.

When you have poor SEO implemented on your private counselling website, chances are the Google algorithm will have hard time understanding your private counsellor website and as a result, it will not rank on Google.

Even if you have invested in good hosting, content but if it is unoptimized the website is less likely to be seen in the search results. Maybe you are not aware but SEO itself is a big thing. SEO is not posting about website on social media, it is different.

Keep in mind that I am talking about organic search results that appears when you search on Google and not paid results. That’s a different thing.

Google and other search engines are basically coded algorithm which evaluates each website on several ranking factors and then gives the website ranking position in their search results for keywords.

So, to secure these rankings special optimizations are performed on the therapy website to make it search engine friendly.

If your therapist website is not showing up or not ranking in the search results for your targeted terms it means your private practice therapy website’s SEO is poor. It is unoptimized and lacks authority.

This is not something that you should worry about. There are ways and methods that are performed to make a therapy website search engine optimized.

These methods are On-page optimization(keywords, meta titles, descriptions, URL, interlinking, images), Off-page (backlinks, citations, domain authority optimization), and website technical issues optimization (speed, hosting, robots.txt).

These 3 are essential part of any therapy website optimization. When performed successfully these 3 methods help you gain visibility in search results.

Now you may be wondering how to start learning about SEO for therapists. I have a detailed comprehensive guide on SEO for therapists in private practice. You should start your SEO learning journey from there.

Here is the link to the SEO guide -> SEO for therapists in private practice