The Best Digital Marketing Channels for Therapists (2024)
Are you a therapist or counselor looking to expand your online presence and get started (or improve) your digital marketing? Below I’ve outlined the top 3 digital marketing strategies you should focus on, why they’re relevant to you as a therapist, and how you can manage the channel with limited resources.
Note: I’ll assume that you’re a solo practitioner with minimal budget, and you’re trying to fill and maintain a caseload of 20 clients a week.
1. Therapy/Counselor Directories
Directories are the absolute best digital marketing channel you should focus on as a therapist. These directories typically show up very high in search results and so get a lot of website visitors, and most people visiting them have a high intention of starting work with a psychotherapist or counselor.
You’re probably already on Psychology Today or at least thinking about it, and as one of the most respected, globally-used, highest-traffic directories for people looking for a therapist, it should definitely be your priority.
But don’t stop there.
There are plenty of other general directories along the same lines as Psychology Today, which are great to be on, but there are lots of other niche directories that might be better opportunities. Look for directories that are specific to your location (here’s one specific to Chicago, USA for example).
Even better, look for ones that focus on more niche groups, for example South Asian Therapists or Latinx Therapy. There are likely less therapists and
Free vs Paid Directories
A lot of directories are free to list yourself, so it’s a no-brainer to go ahead and get listed. But lots of directories charge monthly or annual fees, and you might be avoiding them in favour of the free ones.
You should consider the financials of the decision: if a directory costs $200/year, and let’s say you’re charging $200 per session, you only need one client to have one session with you to break even. And hopefully that client stays for more than one session, and even more hopefully, that directory will send you at least a few clients.
The more directories you’re on the better. Focus on the ones that are most prominent and/or relevant to your target audience, then expand to others as you see fit, and periodically review the return on investment (ROI) of each directory and cancel subscriptions if they’re not even getting you enough clients to cover the listing cost.
How to Manage Directories Effectively with Limited Resources
Directories are a relatively straightforward channel to manage, since they’re pretty much static: once you’re listed, that’s it. You’ll appear in the directory forever. But there are some tips I’d suggest:
Focus on high-traffic and/or relevant directories first. Don’t put time and effort into a super general but obscure directory you found on page 10 of Google search results. If it was hard for you to find, it’ll be hard for potential clients to find.
Be consistent with your messaging. If the directory links to your website and on the directory your lead message is “affordable couples counseling” and the main message on your website is “I specialize in anxiety and depression”, you won’t get many clients. Being consistent also saves you time! You don’t have to write totally new headlines and descriptions for each directory, keep them similar and just change small parts to be relevant to that directory’s audience.
Use UTMs. If directories link to your website, you need to distinguish them when you look at your website analytics data, otherwise it could be hard to determine which directories are worth keeping. Read more about why UTMs are so important here.
Keep a list of directories. Do some initial research to find as many relevant directories as possible, then keep a sheet outlining important info of each one: cost & renewal date, whether you’re listed on it, the link, etc.
Include the logos and links to your directory listings on your website. For example, showing “listed on Psychology Today” on your website helps build trust with potential clients.
Make your listings stand out. A lot of directories have a lot of therapists, so you need to make your listing stand out. Create a video for your profile if allowed, use persuasive language, address your clients’ needs directly without just explaining what you offer.
2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The next digital marketing channel that’s extremely helpful for therapists on a limited budget is SEO.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of trying to get your website listed higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). For example, you probably want to show up at the top of Google when someone searches “therapy for anxiety near me”, right?
Well, forget it. It’s too competitive. Every therapist wants to rank for that, including big companies with huge teams and giant budgets. You don’t stand a chance.
That doesn’t mean SEO is impossible for you. You just have to be smart.
When done right, over time your website can rank high and you can get a steady stream of people visiting your website and hopefully booking consultation calls. Put in the work now and you can get results later without any effort.
But how do you actually do SEO as a therapist?
SEO, at its basic level, comes in four main parts: keyword research, creating content, building backlinks, and on-page/technical SEO:
1. Keyword Research
There are almost 100,000 searches in Google every second, but your website obviously won’t show high in search for all of them. You wouldn’t want to. The trick is to find the searches that are relevant to you and that don’t have too much competition.
As a basic example, data from Google Keyword Planner estimates that in California, there are somewhere between 100 – 1K searches for “anxiety therapy” and the competition level is “medium”.
If we change that to “social anxiety therapy”, there are 1K – 10K searches and the competition level is “low”.
As you can already see, focusing on social anxiety is a better idea.
The first step to improving your SEO, especially with limited resources, is to find the best opportunities possible.
Let’s continue with the example of “social anxiety therapy”. We want our website to show up high in results when someone searches that, what next?
2. Create Content
To rank high, you need great content. Let’s say you want to rank well for “social anxiety therapy”. Well, so do tons of other therapists. You need to create content that stands out.
What do I mean by content?
Content can be lots of things. Website pages, blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, TikToks, I’ve even seen cases where the top result in Google is a Google spreadsheet. Anything digital that can be indexed (aka found) by Google is content.
What you create depends on your goal. As a therapist, your goal is probably to get new clients, so your content should be based around that, so let’s say you want to write a blog post focused on “social anxiety therapy” that has a link to book a free consultation call with you at the end.
Your blog post ideally needs to be well-written, insightful, with unique perspectives, maybe with an infographic, maybe with a relevant YouTube video embedded. If it doesn’t have all those things, it’ll be beaten in search by a post that does (this is an oversimplification, but it’s the basic idea).
3. Build Backlinks
Even if you have the most comprehensive, unique and insight blog post about “social anxiety therapy” the world has ever seen, on your brand new website for your solo practice, you probably still won’t rank high.
Why?
Google doesn’t trust you.
Don’t take it personally. They just don’t know you yet.
Search engines trust websites based on their authority, and authority is built by other websites linking to yours, showing that they trust you. These links are called “backlinks”, and they come in a mix of quantity and quality.
Let’s say you gave an interview to the New York Times and they linked to your website, that’s a hugely-valuable backlink. There are also sites that exist just to provide backlinks to desperate people willing to pay for spammy links; not only are these not valuable at all, they can be actively harmful if a search engine thinks the site is spammy enough.
How do you get backlinks to your therapy practice?
Some strategies to getting good backlinks to your therapy website include:
Sharing your content on social media, and encourage social media users to re-share to their own feeds
Get listed on directories (see above)
Contribute guest posts to mental health blogs, or other therapists’ websites
Reach out to sites that have listicles like “top 10 best therapy providers in ___”; often you’ll need to pay to be featured, but some smaller sites might just add you, perhaps in exchange for you promoting their website on yours
Create YouTube/TikTok videos - both of these themselves typically show up very high in search results
Host or join a mental health podcast
4. On-Page/Technical SEO
Creating great content and having your site be trusted by other websites is hugely important, but you also have to make sure your content and website is optimized for SEO. Everything has to be a good experience for users and for the search engine crawlers - make sure you have title & description metadata set, alt text on your images, headings in hierarchical order, your website has to load quickly, and tons more super technical things.
How to Improve SEO with Limited Resources
Invest time in keyword research. Creating content takes time, which is hard to come by. Don’t waste time trying to rank for keywords that are too competitive or too low volume.
Use AI, but don’t rely on it. SEO is time-consuming, but you can use tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot to speed up the process. They can help with keyword research, outlining content structures, writing content, suggesting technical optimizations, and lots more. Just make sure your content isn’t copy and pasted AI-generated trash. Search engines may penalize you for it, and even if they don’t, users are growing more and more savvy. They’ll soon grow to distrust you. Let your personality shine through.
Use Google Search Console. GSC is a free tool that will show you what keywords you’re ranking for and where your opportunities lie. It’s literally the best tool at your disposal in measuring and improving your SEO, so make it your best friend.
3. Google Search Ads
What if I told you that you didn’t have to put all that effort into SEO? You could just pay to appear at the top of search results when someone searches “social anxiety therapy”.
That’s what Google Search Ads are. And they’re extremely cost-effective.
In 2023, it’s estimated for every $1 a business spent on Google Search Ads, they got $8 in revenue.
For therapists, I suspect that’s even more when you consider the lifetime value of a client and your rate per session.
Similarly to SEO, to run ads effectively you’re looking for good opportunities from initial keyword research. Lots of searches and low competition = great opportunities to run profitable ads.
Search ads also give quick results. Directories might give you a few clients here and there and SEO takes a long time to build your website traffic to where you’re getting regular clients, but search ads will fill up your caseload very quickly. You just a few days to setup, a week for Google to first optimize, then after that you’ll get lots of website traffic very quickly (depending on the keywords you’re targeting).
You should optimize your search ads for your specific goal, in your case probably people booking free consultation calls. You also really need to make sure your website/landing page is well-optimized - it must load quickly, it must follow a flow that makes sense for someone to scroll through it and eventually be convinced to book a free call. There’s no correct way to do that, it’ll come down to lots of testing.
How to Run Google Search Ads Effectively with Limited Resources
Search ads are easy to get started with, as I outlined in my guide to Google Search Ads for small businesses. But they can be extremely costly if you don’t set them up right.
You need to target the right keywords, create high-converting ads, and stay on top of optimization to make sure you’re not wasting money.
Because they can be expensive, you also want to give yourself the best chance of success. In the image above, neither of the ads at the top are particularly great - both are missing the favicon icons in the top left, the second one doesn’t use any sitelinks (extra information underneath the main text).
If you want to set them up yourself, you can, but do read my guide above and look for YouTube videos and other resources to give you the best chance of success.
Depending on your location, Google also offers a promotional credit offer for new accounts, for example, when you spend $600 on ads in the first 2 months, they’ll give you $600 in ad credit. I’d use that guideline ($600 in the first 60 days) as your baseline minimum spend for ads. Below that you’ll miss out on the credit and bigger budgets let Google Ads optimize better.
Related
Google Ads for Therapists - get examples of how exactly to set up Google Ads to get new clients for your private practice
The Best Digital Marketing Channels for Therapists
Hopefully this guide helped you. Having worked with a number of therapists, the best digital marketing channels are directories, SEO and Google Ads.
SEO is slow and free
Google Ads if fast and costly (but profitable)
Directories are somewhere in between
I’d strongly recommend starting with directories, then working on SEO and search ads simultaneously, or prioritizing one over the other depending on how quickly you want to get clients and/or how much time you want to invest creating content.
If you have any questions about anything in this guide, leave a comment below or email me at adam@wattsahead.co.
And if you’re looking for support in putting any of this into practice to grow your therapy business, get in touch with me here. I’d love to help!
