Telehealth and in-person: targeting both in your SEO

If you offer both telehealth (video and phone sessions) and in-person appointments, you target them with two different SEO strategies on two different pages - because a person searching for each one wants something quite different, and Google treats those searches differently too.

The mistake I see most often is a single page trying to do both jobs at once. It says "in-person and online counselling across Auckland and nationwide" in the first line, and ends up ranking well for neither. When you blur the two intents, you dilute the signal. Let me explain why they need to be pulled apart, and how.

In-person search is local search

When someone wants to sit in a room with a therapist, they search locally. They type things like "anxiety therapist Ponsonby" or "counselling near me". Google reads that as a local intent (the searcher wants a nearby result) and leans heavily on physical signals: your Google Business Profile, your address, reviews tied to that location, and pages that clearly name the suburb and the service.

So your in-person pages need to do local things well. Name the suburb. Name the service. Have a real address on the page. Keep your Google Business Profile accurate and reviewed, because for local searches that profile often matters more than the website itself. This is bread-and-butter local SEO, and it is where a physical practice has a genuine advantage over a faceless national directory.

Telehealth search is not local at all

Telehealth breaks the local rules on purpose. A client doing video sessions does not care where you are - they care that you are registered in New Zealand, that you work with their issue, and that you offer online appointments. Their searches drop the suburb entirely: "online therapist NZ", "telehealth counselling anxiety", "video therapy for couples".

That is both freeing and harder. Freeing, because you are no longer limited to people within driving distance - your potential audience is the whole country. Harder, because you are now competing nationally, not just against the two other clinics in your suburb. The terms are broader and more contested, so the page has to earn its place with genuine depth, not just a location name.

In-person SEO wins by being the closest good option. Telehealth SEO wins by being the most relevant good option, wherever the client happens to live.

Why one page can't serve both

Google works out what a page is about from its signals - the words on it, the links to it, the searches people click it for. When a page says "in-person in Wellington AND online nationwide", those signals point in two directions. The local signals are weakened by the national framing, and the national relevance is muddied by the Wellington emphasis. You have asked one page to answer two different questions, and it answers both softly.

Separating them lets each page send a clean signal. It also matches what the reader wants: someone after online sessions does not need to scroll past your parking instructions, and someone coming to your rooms does not need a paragraph about how video therapy works.

How to structure it

You do not need dozens of pages. A simple, honest structure usually looks like this:

• In-person service pages, one per core service, each naming the suburb or city and pointing to your Google Business Profile. These carry the local terms.
• A dedicated telehealth or online therapy page (or one per service if you have the content to justify it) that speaks to a national audience and never leans on a suburb.
• Clear internal links between them, so a visitor who lands on one can easily find the other if their situation changes.

The in-person pages follow the same discipline as any good service page for a psychology practice: one clear intent, real detail about the service, and no hedging. The telehealth page follows the same rule with a wider lens.

A note on tone

This is mental health, so I would gently push back on any urge to over-optimise. Do not stuff suburb names into every sentence, and do not promise outcomes. The pages that rank and convert in this field are the calm, clear, human ones that answer a worried person's actual question - can you help me, and how would we work together. Get the intent split right, then write like a person, not a keyword.

Do those two things - separate the intents, and keep the writing human - and you can quietly own both the local search in your suburb and the national search for online therapy, without either one getting in the other's way.