A Guide to Blogging for Therapists, And Why It’s So Important (2024)
In this post I’m going to discuss a topic many therapists have asked me about: blogging. Stay with me here. Maybe you’re rolling your eyes because isn’t blogging what people did in the mid-2000s? Nobody does it anymore, do they?
Despite the rise of AI and new types of search, getting blog posts to rank high in Google (other search engines also available) is absolutely huge. If you commit to it and you do it in a structured way, you can fill and maintain your caseload without spending a cent.
In this post I’ll cover:
What is a Blog?
I don’t like the term ‘blog’, at least not for therapists. A ‘blog’ is really just a page that has a list of posts, typically presented in reverse chronological order, are conversational in tone, and are predominantly text. To me, ‘blog’ brings up the image of digital nomad travel bloggers or tech review sites. That’s not the vibe you want to have.
As a therapist, you could call it ‘resources’ or ‘articles’ or whatever terminology you prefer. For the rest of this post, I’ll keep using the word blog to refer to the collection of pages/content consolidated together.
Importance of Blogging for Therapists
You’re a private practice therapist. You set up a website and now your ideal clients are just going to start finding you in Google and booking consultation calls in no time, right?
Nuh-uh, sorry, doesn’t work like that.
Your website probably has a homepage, an about page, an FAQ page, a contact page, and several ‘services’ pages outlining the fact that you specialize in anxiety, depression, trauma and the same services that thousands of other therapists also specialize in.
That’s not bad, it’s just the bare minimum.
Adding a blog will set you apart from 90% of other therapists. Adding a good blog will set you apart from 99% of other therapists. How?
Every page you create on your website can be indexed by search engines, meaning they’re eligible to show in search results. Search results are displayed based on what the person searching is specifically searching for.
Let’s pretend that there are 5 therapists in your city that all specialize in anxiety. If someone searches “therapist for anxiety near me”, you probably want your dedicated anxiety service page to show first, and the content of your page probably matches that search pretty well, so Google might show it high, but maybe someone else’s service page shows higher.
Now consider that someone searches “what are the different treatments for anxiety?” — those service pages are okay results. But what if you had a dedicated blog post that outlines a comparison between CBT, DBT and ACT? That would be a much better result, so Google would prioritize that. And those other therapists probably don’t have that kind of specific content at all, so you’d definitely show as the first result.
That’s a huge oversimplification of how search engines rank pages, but hopefully it makes sense.
If your content is helpful, relevant, well-written, and engaging for a specific search query, you have the best chance of showing high in search results. And if you show high in search results, you’ll get lots of traffic to your website.
The idea is to create lots of content to capture lots of different searches. That takes time, but it’s worth the effort.
How to Generate Ideas for a Therapy Blog
Hopefully you can see the importance of blogging, but now you’re probably thinking: “what the heck do I write about?”
You might be a creative person and just be flowing with ideas and personal anecdotes that you can’t wait to write about, or you might have absolutely no idea where to start and don’t really want to share anything personal.
If you’re the latter type and wish you were the former, well, I’d say that the first one is actually worse. You’ll write thousands of words across multiple blog posts, publish them all, never get any website visits, get disheartened, and then abandon your blog forever.
The single most important part of blogging, especially if you’re a one-person business, is research and planning. Your blog posts should provide information that people are actually searching for. How do you find out?
1. Search Google Yourself
This is super simple. Just search something in Google and look at the results, focusing especially on the ‘People also ask’ questions. Here are the ‘People also ask’ results when I searched for “anxiety therapy”:
These are all questions you could potentially write an entire blog post about. Click into each one to see what the search result actually is — look for results that are out-dated, old, inaccurate, incomplete, or in some way you think you could write a more helpful post. Also note the actual websites that are showing up. For example, if PsychologyToday shows up, they’re obviously a very reputable site and it’s unlikely you’ll be able to overtake them in search results.
If the results you’re seeing all look like good, recent articles from reputable sources, broaden your searches. Search different types of anxiety. If you specialize in CBT approaches to social anxiety, search “CBT therapy social anxiety” and see if there are opportunities there.
If this qualitative kind of approach feels overwhelming, consider a second option:
2. Use Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that lets you enter keywords and a specific location to see much search volume they have and how competitive they are. Here are the first few results for the search ‘anxiety therapy’ in all of the US.
Honestly, this specific search is not that helpful. They all have the same amount of searches (and the range isn’t that useful). There are a lot more recommended Keyword ideas in the tool you can look through, and you can try lots of different searches to look for opportunities. You’re looking for anything with high searches and low competition; once you find some, then try searching Google manually to see if it’s something worth creating a blog post about.
The big players in keyword research like this are SEMRush and Ahrefs, both of which have free plans you can try out, but the limits are quite restrictive and the paid plans are unrealistically expensive for solo small businesses.
Overall, my recommendation for coming up with ideas is: think niche. If you specialize in a more unusual framework or type of treatment, write lots of posts around that because it’s definitely less competitive than “anxiety therapy” or equivalent.
What Should You Blog About as a Therapist?
Once you’ve decided on a keyword to target, you need to create the content. Let’s say that the keyword you’ve decided to write about is “CBT for agoraphobia” because it seems less competitive and you specialize in CBT and agoraphobia. There are tons of different ways you could approach creating content for that keyword; there’s no right answer as to what’s best, and in fact the more different types and approaches to content you have, the more Google will trust your authority on the topic.
Here are 5 ideas for content around “CBT for agoraphobia” for your own inspiration:
A Guide to CBT for Agoraphobia
Myths and Facts About CBT for Agoraphobia
Combining CBT with Other Treatments for Agoraphobia
Success Stories: How CBT Transformed Lives of People with Agoraphobia
DIY CBT Techniques for Managing Agoraphobia at Home
Feel free to use these ideas if this specific topic is what you want to discuss!
The point is just to consider different angles, different resources that people might find helpful, and some of these could answer those ‘People also ask’ questions in Google.
Lastly, not all of these not to be fully text only. ‘Myths and facts about Agoraphobia’ you could create additionally as a single image highlighting the main myths and facts, which could be easily shared on social media.
How to Write Blog Posts Easily with AI
Tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are here to stay, and they’re incredibly useful. Using them is the difference between creating one good post over many hours and creating multiple great posts in half the time.
But I don’t recommend just asking ChatGPT to “write a blog post about CBT for agoraphobia”. People can tell, even subconsciously, what’s AI-generated and what’s human generated. Write in your own tone of voice, using your own words.
AI tools are extremely effective at structuring content though. Tell your preferred tool to outline a structure for the blog post you want to write, which will make it much easier for you to stay focused when writing.
Related: Learn how to format blog posts correctly for SEO
What to do Once Your Blog is Published
After doing all your research and writing an amazing post, you’re ready to publish! And hey presto, now it’s live for the whole world to see.
So now you move onto the next one, right?
Well, yes, but also hang on a second. There’s a lot of things you can do with published blog posts to support your SEO:
Share them on social media. Tell the world about your new posts! Share across all your social media channels and encourage people to read and share. This will get you website visitors and also (slightly) boost your SEO.
Link between articles. Frequently review your published posts to see if it makes sense to internally link between different posts. This will not only help Google understand the hierarchy and relationship between posts on your site, but it also simply keeps people on your site longer — I’m sure at one time or another you’ve been reading something online and clicked a link to go to another page on the same site. And the longer someone is on your site, the more they start to trust your authority, and ultimately the more likely they are to book a call with you (or just share your content with their friends).
Review and update. Remember when we looked in Google for posts that were out-dated or could have been improved? Be mindful of that for your own posts. If you post something today, in six months’ time it might be out-dated and therefore less likely to be ranked well by search engines.
Blogging for Therapists is Super Important
There you have it, a detailed guide to blogging for therapists. Hopefully this post was helpful, please leave or comment or reach out if you have any questions, I’d love to help if I can!
