SEO for Therapists & Counseling Clinics

Client Case Study: Our SEO Strategy for Therapists & Counseling Centres.

In this case study we’re going to break down how we’ve helped Love This Therapy generate 750 visitors/month from their counseling clinic’s SEO campaign.

Here is a brief overview into the SEO campaign we’re currently running.

1. Build a great, business website optimized for search engines and users
2. Build a great, optimized Google My Business page for local SEO and generate customer reviews.
3. Submit your business to online directories
4. Submit and index your website with Google Search Console and a sitemap
5. Improve your websites page speed (but don’t agonize over it!)
6. Optimize and add the most important website content (there is a lot of these in the therapy niche).
7. Write content to support your search engine rankings.
8. Build links. Some lower quality links are fine (eg: local business directories) otherwise focus on quality.
9. Review your SEO marketing strategy and build on steps 2, 3, 7 and 8.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely here for one of two reasons.

• You’re dissatisfied with your current SEO provider. This could be for a lot of reasons but ultimately it’s because your expectations are not matching the reality.
• You’re a therapist that is not currently running SEO and you’re either thinking of DIYing it or hiring an agency or a freelancer to run your SEO campaign.

How much does SEO cost for a counseling or therapy clinic?

The cost of an SEO campaign for a therapy clinic run by Salt Water Digital is $700 – $1500/month.

This is highly dependent on the area you are in. If you’re in a big city like Vancouver it would be $1500. If you’re in a suburb of a big city (eg: Burnaby) or in a tier 2 city (eg: Kelowna) it will be between $1000-$1200. 

If you’re in a much smaller market, say Penticton, your campaign may only be $700/month.

How long will it take for my therapy business to generate business with SEO

Under normal circumstances you should start to see small amounts of traffic within 3-6 months. If you have a solid existing website and online presence that is being underutilized you could see improvements in as little as 1-2 months.

When we started our campaign with our client they were getting 3-4 clicks per day. Within 6 months they were generating 10-15 clicks per day and now a year and a half later they generate 20-30 clicks per day via search.

The turning point is when we convinced our client to rebuild their website. It had been built on WordPress + Elementor (our web builder of choice) but it was a mess. A pre built template that was slow and buggy. It was a classic example of “you get what you pay for”. It’s not uncommon for business owners to hire a freelancer to build their website for cheap. And oftentimes it results in a shoddy website that aesthetically looks fine but performs poorly.

I would love to be able to say “hey just fix this, or fix that” but it’s never just one thing.

When we rebuilt the site it was generating 15 clicks per day, initially we saw a small drop before it really started to surge.

What’s an easy way for me to determine if my therapy business is a good candidate for SEO?

Most counseling and therapy clinics can benefit from an SEO campaign. It’s pretty unusual that a market is saturated to the point that an SEO campaign doesn’t make sense.

The main thing is do you want to grow your business? This may seem like a snarky comment but I’m being genuine. If you operate a small practice with a couple of providers and your calendars are full, you don’t need to run an SEO campaign.

There are plenty of excellent therapists who will never have a shortage of work and they’re not trying to grow a clinic. They don’t want to manage staff, they just want to help their clients.

What metrics do you track for a clinic’s SEO campaign?

In month one we set up keyword tracking based on keyword research, GA4 (the newest Google Analytics) and Google Search Console. Initially our north star are the keywords we are tracking. There will be ebbs and flows to the rankings but we want to see keywords rising up and to the right. We also track the Google Business Page performance.

We can also set up key events. Click to calls, clicks to JaneApp (or whatever scheduling platform you use) and form fills. 

In addition to these metrics, you should be tracking leads yourself.

Therapy & Counseling SEO Case Study: What SEO Services We Focus On

Our focus is always building relationships that last. That means setting realistic expectations (no, you’re not going to generate thousands of high intent clicks per month) and delivering solid results.

The goal is to continually make strides. This takes a few forms but mainly focuses on:

• Are organic keywords improving? They’ll fluctuate from month to month and there will be some dips but overall we want to see a steady improvements
• Is organic traffic increasing? If keywords are improving chances are organic traffic is improving.
• Are Google Business Page keyword rankings improving? We use software to track individual IP address searches like this:
  
  
  
• Are Google Business Page stats improving? We want to see improved clicks, calls and impressions.

Current Keyword Rankings for our Counselling Client:

In the last 28 days (Nov 2024) we are generating 750 clicks or ~ 27 clicks per day. Now some of this traffic is generated via blog content which our client deserves all of the credit for (they’ve published a lot of content) but the majority of it is driven via the homepage, service pages, team member pages and so forth.

As we continue to work on this client’s website we will continue to generate more web traffic to these high intent pages.

Rankings are steadily rising, we are in the top 10 for virtually every major keyword we track with a few exceptions. We also rank exceptionally well for long tail keywords. The nice thing about this space (counseling & therapy) is there are a lot of different modalities and services.

In addition to this the Google Business Page (or local map pack rankings) are increasing every month as well.

As we continue to work on this client’s website we will continue to add more website traffic.

Executing an SEO Strategy for a therapy or counseling clinic

If you’re looking to DIY your own SEO strategy or generally want to know “what should an agency be doing” this is the section for you.

I would like to give credit where credit is due. Our client has been excellent. They write a lot of content for their site which has been very helpful. And when we ask for copy for a new service page they deliver it quickly.

Step 1: Counseling keyword research and building a well optimized counseling website

As I previously mentioned, the client built a new website with another provider. It was OK but a little bit buggy, not particularly user friendly and slow.

This was a new clinic so the website and Google Business Page were brand new which always makes things more complicated.

After about 6 months I suggested that we pause the SEO campaign for two months and funnel that budget into a new website.

We build all of our client websites on WordPress. It is unquestionably the best option for SEO.

What does a well optimized counseling clinic website look like?

Ideally it has the word “therapy” or “counseling” in the domain name. This will make it easier to rank for that particular keyword.

The homepage should be built to rank for counseling and therapy (ie that’s your primary keyword). Unlike service area businesses we are going to focus on the city that we’re physically located in. Generally, clients aren’t going to travel 30 or 45 minutes for counseling unless it’s a word of mouth referral. 

A full list of modalities, conditions and types of counseling offered should be built out. DBT, therapy for stress, counseling for teens, couples counseling and so on. The more modalities, conditions you treat and types of counseling offered the more high intent traffic you can generate.

These pages should be built out. Do not build one crummy service page that lists all of the services you provide and call it a day. We want a page for EVERY single offering we have. 

As an example we recently broke out marriage counseling and couples counseling. Are they similar? You bet. Are they the exact same, no sir.

If I wasn’t married I would not search “marriage counseling” and vice versa. We want to match user intent exactly.

In order to do this you need to do some counseling seo keyword research.

I’ll save you some time here is a counseling keyword list that you can use to get started with. The search volume is for the entire US. Now obviously you need to do the keyword research for the location you are in but these will still give you the general size of each search term in your area.

Counseling Keyword Strategy Sheet

So now you’ve built pages for all of your counseling services including: DBT, CBT, ADHD counseling, anxiety counseling, teen counseling, play therapy and so forth. 

Do not skimp on content.

Write original content (>500 words min.) and add in some duplicated content blocks. These may be related therapy services, why choose your company or blog post widgets etc.

Step 2: Build a Well Optimized Google Business Page For Your Therapy Clinic

Building a Google Business Page is relatively straight forward. 

Select the appropriate primary category and list out all the sub services you offer. 

Here is a list of categories you can choose from:

• Psychotherapist
• Mental Health Clinic
• Mental Health Service
• Counselor
• Family Counselor
• Marriage or Relationship Counselor
• Coaching Center
• Life Coach
• Psychologist
• Psychoanalyst
• Child Psychologist

How do you pick which one to use? If you’re not hyper focused on a single type of therapy eg: Marriage Counselor pick a more general topic. Mental Health Clinic, Counselor, Psychologist are three good ones.

For larger clinics with different types of providers eg: psychologist, counselor I would opt for “Mental Health Clinic”.

The primary category you pick matters, like a lot. If you really want to rank for Psychologist, choose Psychologist but understand that it will hinder you ability to rank for other terms.

Next add all of the sub categories you offer eg: family counselor, child psychologist and so forth. Don’t bother adding sub services that aren’t part of Google’s predetermined drop down menu.

List your business address, phone number, business hours, area served and a good description (who you are, what services you provide, what areas you service etc.)

You can also add photos, business page posts and FAQs to your Google My Business listing which are all useful.

Start collecting reviews. I can’t stress this enough, Reviews are the lifeblood of your Google Business Page.

I know that it is HARD for counseling clinics to generate Google Business Reviews. Legally, you can’t solicit reviews in most provinces and most patients do not want to leave a public review which is why very few clinics have a lot of reviews. This of course means you don’t need a lot of reviews to compete.

Step 3: Submit the Site to Local Online Directories

Easy peasy. Build 5-10 citations per month. You can use a service like Bright Local.

I recommend building the important ones out manually. Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and any organizational, provincial, city or state counselor lists. There are a few in every province we’ve worked in and they typically add you when you’re registered but it doesn’t hurt to check.

We will continue to do this until the end of time.

Step 4: Submit Your Clinic’s Website Sitemap to Google Search Console

If you’re using WordPress install the Yoast plugin (free) click on “Yoast SEO” and then click on the features tab. Scroll down until you see XML sitemaps. Hit the “?” button and there will be a link that says “see the XML sitemap”.

Or if you use WordPress + Yoast your sitemap will be: /sitemap_index.xml

Add your website to Google Search Console.

Once you’ve done that go to the “Crawl” tab and click on “Sitemaps”. At the bottom of the page, you will find a “Add/Test Sitemap” button.

Click on this button to submit your sitemap. You need to make sure that the sitemap is in the correct format, otherwise it won’t be accepted. After submitting your sitemap, you can check the status of your sitemap to ensure that it has been accepted by Google.

Pro tip: If your site isn’t indexed it won’t rank. It can take a while to index new pages but you can put a request in through Google Search Console to index each specific URL.

Step 5: Improve Your Site Speed

If your website is is slow that hurts your chances to rank highly in the SERPs.

Use Google’s Page Speed Checker: https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to see how fast your site loads. We aim for sub 2.5s on mobile >70 and sub 1.5s on desktop >90. 

• Use a solid host like WPX
• Use a content delivery network like cloudflare.
• Use the correct image sizes
• Use a tool like WP Rocket to optimize techncial seo aspects
• Use a tool like imagify to compress images
• Remove large images or videos from the mobile version of your site.

Pro tip: Do not agonize over technical SEO, including page speed. None of our client sites are perfect. We spend time optimizing each of them but in a lot of cases when there is lots of media and content it’s difficult to create a perfect score. This won’t cripple your SEO., it is a balance between design, SEO and UX.

Step 6: Optimize Your Website Content: Homepage, Modality Pages and Therapy Pages

For starters, you need to optimize the following:

• Your header tag (H1) which is the title on the page
• Your SEO Title which is what Google shows when your website pops up in the search results
• Your URL which is the part after the / ie: www.yoursite.com/DBT-Therapy-City
• Your site structure which is what pages link to other pages on your website
• Meta description which is the description the Google shows under the SEO title. You want to optimize this for clicks.

Once you’ve tackled those five things it’s time to optimize the content to target the right keywords.

We use a combination of tools to do this. The first one is SurferSEO which helps us with creating an optimized page. It provides suggestions on word count, structure and NLP-keywords which helps us determine the right keywords for any given web page.

90% of service businesses need to add content to their site.

You can also use a tool like Mangools to help uncover additional therapy services to build pages around and to uncover additional therapy seo keywords to add to existing pages. If you’re unsure if you should add a specific service page or location, er on the side of more. Add it.

Use Hemingway to try and lower the readability grade. We want our copy to be clear.

Pro Tips

• Not all of the content needs to be unique on every page.
• In addition to the unique content use FAQs and additional services.
• Don’t stuff keywords, that is an old outdated strategy.

Step 7: Add Relevant Mental Health Blog Content

Please, please, please do not publish 500 word, unformatted, useless garbage. Blog content can help your local seo but it should be useful, well written and thorough.

Wondering what that looks like? Take a look at our site’s blog (like this one). It’s not thin content and hopefully it’s useful.

You’ll notice we use custom graphics sparingly and we rarely use video. It helps but it’s not absolutely necessary. 

You can create custom graphics with Canva.

Pro Tip: If an article hits, going back and creating custom graphics, graphs and visuals to add to the article afterwards is a great idea. It takes a lot of effort. As an example, I went and added a bunch of media to this article about HVAC SEO but it took me 2-3 hours to do that. I added a video, more call to actions and inserted some relevant screenshots. Adding a few stock photos probably won’t cut it.

If you’re going to use AI like Chat GPT it should be used as a base that you rewrite, format, edit and add your own spin to it. Google’s search engine isn’t keen on AI content and I suspect they will continue to get stricter, filtering out search results that their algorithm detects as written by AI.

Start by answering basic questions you hear from your patients. There are so many topics in this space. 

“How Can I Be Emotionally Available To My Son”
“I’m anxious when I drive, what can I do?”
“Holidays are hard. How can I deal with the stress?”

For counseling clinics there are two ways to generate blog content. First you can do traditional keyword research. Try and find low competition keywords to rank for example: how to overcome high functioning depression.

This strategy is fine and if you have a background or help with your SEO efforts this is a good tactic. 

An easier way to do this, with fewer tools is to answer “people also ask” questions.

To do this you search for a broader topic, for example “CBT counseling” and then look under people also ask and write topics on those.

My favorite way to generate blog content this is even simpler. Write in depth articles that will help people. Answer a question a patient asked you this week.

You will naturally hit on topics people search for, you don’t need tools to do keyword research and ideally, if the topic is broad enough you can actually send patients and clients to those resources for further reading. 

Step 8: Link Building

Link building is still necessary in 2024. Perhaps one day it will be obsolete but until then we always include it as a part of our campaigns.

Aside from generating reviews on your Google Business Page and optimizing your sites homepage, modality pages and condition pages link building is the most important lever you can pull.

The trick is to build links in a way that is sustainable long term. In order of value:

• Links from local news publications. Hard to beat these, harder to acquire.
• Links from industry publications.
• Links from city relevant sites
• Links from guest posting on industry related sites
• Links from guest posting on industry adjacent sites
• Local and high value directory links
• Social profiles
• Other directory links
• “PR” packages

There are other types of links that can be built but these are the links generally worth focusing on. Link building is a full time job and most local service businesses aren’t well equipped to do this work.

Step 9: Rinse and Repeat

There is virtually a limitless amount of work that can be done for local SEO.

Generating reviews, adding blog content and building links is a job that is never truly done. Once you establish top 5 rankings you want to maintain those rankings and try to identify additional keywords to improve upon. That’s not to say an SEO campaign should never end but there is always “more” that can be done.

As these industries continue to evolve and tech becomes more accessible to more clinics, it will continue to get more competitive.

Ten years ago most therapy clinics MAY have had a functioning website, but chances are they either didn’t have a site or their site was borderline unusable. High quality websites used to cost $5,000 -$10,000 today they can be built for a fraction of the cost (our web builds start at $1,500) and even the least tech savvy individuals can use a simple page builder like Wix or Godaddy to get a website built.

The best time to work on your counseling clinic’s seo marketing strategy was yesterday, the second best time is today.

If you are a small – mid sized clinic who wants to see real value from your digital marketing spend contact us. We are a small team of experts with a proven track record.

Salt Water Digital: Marketing Services for Healthcare Clinics

Salt Water Digital is an internet marketing company that focuses on three core services:

Website design, build and management

We build all of our websites using WordPress and Elementor. We use a suite of premium plugins that allow us to generate great SEO results and beautiful websites. Jenn who is our lead web designer has been with our company for over five years and has a unique talent for blending marketing strategy and design.

SEO Strategy and SEO Services

Therapy and counseling seo, like any healthcare service requires us to focus on an SEO strategy that delivers high intent clicks. We’ve honed our SEO strategy to deliver repeatable and consist results. Dan is our lead SEO strategist and has been working in the SEO industry for 10+ years working on both the client side and building his own projects.

Google Pay Per Click Services

A well oiled pay per click campaign delivers consistent leads for your clinic. We’ve built and run hundreds of campaigns over the past 8 years and understand how to deliver results. Steve who is our lead PPC strategist has been running PPC campaigns for clients for over eight years. Having built and sold his own businesses he understands that every marketing dollar needs to deliver results.