Therapist SEO doesn’t end with just putting some keywords on your website. Good SEO services for therapists also cover off-page optimisation, which is about optimising the inbound link pointing to your site, which Google uses as a proxy for the ‘importance’ of your site relative to competing sites with similar content. It’s usually not possible to rank well on competitive keywords without some intentional link building, and this is the easiest part of the process to get wrong (most penalty situations occur because of link building gone wrong, often done by fly-by-night agencies.)

On-page is the bread and butter of SEO success – it’s about making sure your website is following best practices to make use of the right target keywords in the right places within your content, and making sure the structure of your website fits the keyword list you want to target (in other words, you have a logical search entry page relevant to each target keyword on your list). This is a combination of high volume and long-tail keywords, which are more specific search terms with low volume but which can often convert well due to their specificity.

Local SEO for mental health providers essentially breaks down into website SEO and Google My Business (Maps) SEO. The goal is to rank well on both the website organic search listings and the Google Map Pack at the top of local searches. To drive clients to your practice you need to find the specific keywords that have search volume, result in conversions, and are winnable based on your starting position and budget.

Website SEO breaks down into two main components – on-page SEO and off-page SEO, which is largely about the links pointing to your website from other sites.

There are essentially three categories of keywords that most mental health clinics will want to target. The first are your broad service + location keywords. In most cases for a larger city this will be something like ‘psychologists + suburb name,’ or in a smaller town it may be the whole town name. (It’s usually not worth targeting a broad keyword for an entire large city unless you have multiple clinics across the city.) This is usually your highest volume keyword.

The second category of keyword consists of your specific services + your location. This might include things like ‘marriage counselling + suburb name,’ ‘anxiety therapy + suburb name,’ etc. These may not be as high volume as your main term but will often convert well due to how specific they are.

The third category is your ‘symptom keywords.’ In other words, people Googling the manifestations of their problems. While these may seem like a great place to focus they are often not the primary targets for a local business because the search results will tend to include a lot of strong international .com results. For local businesses you’re best to focus your budget on search terms that include a location word that would only be used by a potential client in your area.

While your exact strategy may differ depending on the specifics of your clinic, local areas and your starting position relative to competitors, the fundamentals of the strategy will be similar: a combination of forming a long term plan to own the general, broad keywords in your market (eg Psychologists + main suburb name), plus building out a content strategy to effectively capture traffic related to specific therapy types you offer.