SEO for Therapy Practices
Your future clients are searching right now. They are typing how they feel, not what you call your specialty, and what they find is Psychology Today, three directories and a practice two suburbs over. This page is about fixing that.
A directory listing puts you on a page with forty competitors. Your own site puts you on a page with none.
Why therapy practices are different
Most SEO advice is written for e-commerce and then loosely reapplied. Almost none of it survives contact with a private practice.
Directories outrank you by design
Psychology Today, Zocdoc and Healthgrades have spent two decades building authority on exactly your keywords. You will not outrank them by writing more blog posts. You outrank them on the specific, local, human phrases they are too generic to serve.
Clients search a feeling, not a diagnosis
Practices describe themselves the way a clinician would. People search the way they feel at 11pm. The gap between “perinatal mood and anxiety disorders” and “why do I feel nothing about my baby” is where almost all the missed traffic lives.
Private pay changes who you want to find you
If you are private pay, more traffic is not the goal, the right traffic is. Ranking for “therapist who takes Medicaid” wastes everyone’s time. The work is attracting people ready to pay for the thing you are genuinely good at.
Many of you cannot publish an address
Home offices, shared suites, telehealth only. Google Business Profile has a service-area configuration for precisely this, and it is set up wrong more often than it is set up right. Done properly you appear locally without publishing where you sit.
Tracking has to respect who your visitors are
Standard analytics setups record page paths and query strings that can reveal what a person was looking for. On a therapy site that deserves actual thought, not a copy-pasted tag. It can be configured to tell you what is working without recording what should stay private.
AI answers are becoming the referral
People increasingly ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI for a recommendation instead of scrolling results. Those answers are built from directories, citations and structured data, not from how nice your website looks. Most practices are invisible there.
What this looks like in practice
Real numbers from live client reporting. Client names are withheld for confidentiality.
One of these practices now owns a search category in Denver that no competitor had listened closely enough to hear.
The full breakdowns, including the parts that did not work, are on the case studies page.
Common questions
No, and most practices should not try. A handful of genuinely useful pages that answer what people actually search will outperform a year of weekly posts written to hit a quota. Being the best answer to a specific question matters more than frequency.
It is a reasonable source of referrals and a poor foundation. You are renting attention on a page beside forty competitors, with no control over ranking and no asset at the end of it. Keep the listing. Do not let it be the whole strategy.
Meaningful movement in three to six months, compounding after that. Anyone promising faster is either selling ads and calling it SEO, or is about to do something to your site you would not approve of if it were explained to you.
Usually yes, and it is one of the highest-return things a group practice can do. People search for a person as often as a service. Individual pages also let you target specialties that would look cluttered on one shared page.
Start with a free, 20-minute Ask Kimberly call. If you want the work done, implementation is $2,500 a month for the first six months, then $1,500 a month after that if you want to keep going. Month one has two calls with me, one at the start and one after seven to ten days of work, then it settles into a working session each month. $2,500 a month is the most this ever costs and you can stop at any point.
Running Google Ads too?
Paid search for therapy practices is managed alongside SEO, so both work from the same tracking and the same plan. It is built inside Google’s advertising rules for health-related services. See Google Ads
Keep exploring
Everything we do for therapy practices, and the proof behind it.
Not sure where to start? Ask Kimberly.
Twenty minutes with me, free. You will leave understanding why you are not being found and what the right next step is. Rather have me inside your accounts? Under the Hood is $500 one-time, with the first fixes made live.
Work directly with the owner. No account managers, no handoffs.