How SEO for Therapists Helped Me Ditch the Marketing Anxiety for Good

This is a guest post from Danielle Wayne. Enjoy!

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Hi, I'm Danielle Wayne. I'm an online therapist for millennials with anxiety and an SEO evangelist.

All great online marketing starts with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO for therapists is incredibly important, especially when you’re talking about SEO for a therapy practice. You need to market yourself and your practice in order to bring in clients, as we all know. But we don’t all know how to do it. No one taught us in grad school how to market ourselves and what the hell SEO even means. They teach us all the other alphabet soups but heaven forbid they teach us business terms like SEO.

Because no one teaches therapists how to market, we spend a lot of our time Googling, paying for coaches, looking for answers, asking our friends who are remotely connected to the field of marketing, and in the end struggling when it comes to all things business. Because we’re doing these things to try to feel more secure in ourselves. This lack of knowledge creates self-doubt as well as doubt in our business and abilities. At least, it did for me, which is super vulnerable to admit when my niche is anxiety work.

SEO For Online Therapy Practice

When I decided to start an online private practice, I did a lot of research into marketing because this wasn’t taught in grad school. If this was taught to us, maybe I wouldn’t have had to do so much research. I started to feel anxious about myself and my abilities because not everything I found applied to an online business. For example, a lot of my research said to network. But no one wants to network online, or at least they didn’t before the pandemic.

Pre-Covid, no one was willing to do a Zoom meeting with me to network, for example. Clients barely knew what online therapy was. There were huge barriers when it came to marketing myself as an online therapist because I didn’t know how to market or apply it to an online business.

But I got some basic marketing advice that told me to put myself where my clients are. Which means online. The things that people search for change, but almost everyone is using Google to find everything. 

Since SEO is what ranks you higher in a Google search, SEO helps every business in the online space. Therapist SEO is incredibly important, especially for those of us who are running online therapy businesses. Once you know what SEO is and how to use it, the anxiety of marketing yourself decreases.

Therapist SEO is unique, especially for those of us who only provide online therapy. The first place people look when they’re searching for a therapist is Google. Because we’re usually just selling our therapy services and not products or classes, SEO for therapists needs to be specifically tailored towards therapists and our potential clients.

Learning Therapist SEO

I found myself doing "all the right things" and it still wasn't working out.  And when I wanted to stop doubting myself, that's when I reached out to a professional (wink wink, that's what people do when reaching out to therapists too). It was some of the best money I’ve spent on my business hands down! Having someone in your corner who specializes not just in SEO but in SEO for therapists is a game-changer. Strategists and copywriters who know how to use SEO for therapy practices are incredibly valuable.

I’ve done my own research as well, and I know a lot more now than I did back in the beginning. Once I learned about SEO and how it works in the world of marketing, my anxiety decreased. I stopped doubting myself and my business abilities so much. 

I’ve learned that paying attention to what people are searching for and why is important for therapist SEO. I keep a close on my analytics and metrics. It helps me understand what blogs, for example, people are searching for and clicking on the most. Paying attention to metrics has helped me figure out what I want to write about when it comes to posting on my blog.

As a therapist who has a blog, I can tell you that if you’re a therapist, especially an online therapist, you should have a blog that is well-optimized for SEO. At the beginning of my business journey, I didn’t know how helpful a blog would be, or that I should even have one. But it’s one of the many parts of SEO for online therapy practice that has helped me gain success in my business .

Blogs are great because they get more traffic to your site. It’s also kind of fun to write them because I get to share my unique perspective on therapy topics. People who find my blog may want to work with me because what I wrote resonated with them. 

That’s a big reason you should have a blog. Another logistical reason is that it boosts your SEO to have consistently updated blogs. I’ve learned that Google likes that. If you’re a therapist in private practice and you want to optimize your website for SEO, one of the ways to do that is to blog. And it’s a fun way to connect with potential (and current) clients!

Decreasing Marketing Anxiety With SEO For Therapists

If my anxious little story about how I started off in the marketing world for my therapy practice resonates with you, know that you’re not alone. It’s not your fault that you didn’t know how to market yourself. No one teaches therapists how to market or what SEO is. I learned the hard way. Maybe you have too. Or maybe you’re hearing about SEO for the first time, which is great! Now you can face the marketing beast head-on armed with more tools and knowledge.

SEO for therapists is so important for our businesses. And once you’ve either hired someone to work on your SEO or learned more about it to try it out yourself, you’ll feel so much lighter. The heavy burden of marketing will be lifted by learning SEO for your therapy practice. 

One thing to know is that SEO is a long game, and it took a while for it to take off for me. But once it takes off, it really takes off! I want everyone to know how useful SEO for therapists is based on my own personal experience.