10 Easy Tips to Format Blog Posts for SEO as a Therapist
If you’re a therapist, you should be sharing knowledge and insights through a blog. For an introduction to blogging and why it’s extremely important, especially for therapists, read this post.
Having and updating a blog is fantastic, if you’re already doing it. But you might not be getting the results you want from it, so you might feel like you’ve put in tons of hours of writing time for little reward. In this post, I’ll outline 10 steps outlining how to format your blog posts to have the best impact on your SEO ranking and lead to more traffic, and hopefully, more clients in your caseload.
Here’s what this post will cover:
1. Define your keywords
Before you even start to write, you need to decide topics to write about using keyword research.
If you want your content to show up in search engine results, your content needs to be relevant to what people are searching. If no one is searching for ‘how to overcome my fear of kitchen appliances’, don’t write a blog post about it. On the opposite end of the scale, there’s not really any point in writing a blog post discussing ‘what is anxiety’ because it’s been covered by millions of other sites and there’s no way you’ll ever rank high in search for it.
As a therapist, consider your services, treatment approaches, and what you know more about than anyone else. Maybe you specialize in agoraphobia and you use a CBT approach to treatment, so you might want to write a post around that.
Take your keywords and enter them into a tool like Google Keyword Planner (free!). It will show you the average monthly searches and level of competition for your chosen keyword and suggest other ideas. Here are the first results for a search for ‘cbt agoraphobia’ in the US.
These results mostly have low competition and somewhere between 100-1000 people a month is searching for these terms. That’s great, you can write a post called ‘How cognitive behavioral therapy can treat agoraphobia’ and you’ll probably get some traffic (after a while — SEO isn’t quick!).
You also need to consider intent. Are the people searching “cbt treatment for agoraphobia” actually people affected by agoraphobia looking for treatment, or are they maybe psych students looking for ideas for an assignment? Could go either way.
Putting in time upfront to do some research will save you a lot of wasted time writing unnecessary posts that no one wants to read.
2. Write a compelling title
The title of your blog post should include the keyword you’re targeting, for example ‘CBT for agoraphobia’ and be enticing for people to click when they see it in search results. Consider these two options, both targeting the same keyword:
“A discussion about the merits of CBT for agoraphobia in terms of symptom management”
“5 ways CBT can help overcome your agoraphobia”
The content of both might be identical, but the second one is way more appealing to click when it shows in search results. It’s easy to read and sets a clear expectation about what the content is going to be.
Your post has a title but also make sure you set the metadata title, which may not be automatically set. The metadata title is what search engines display as the page title in search results, which may be different to the page title itself (or may not).
There’s no specific ideal length for your title, but research from Zyppy, an SEO platform, suggests 50-60 characters is ideal.
3. Write a compelling meta description
Similar to the title, your description is also important. It should be 150-160 characters long and include your primary keyword. This is your chance to entice readers to click on your post. Note that even if you write a meta description, search engines will often share their own preferred snippet based on what the user is searching for, as well as other reasons.
Ahrefs, a leading SEO tool, says Google rewrites meta descriptions 63% of the time.
So, honestly, if you ignore one thing on this list, ignore this one.
4. Use headings and subheadings (properly)
If you learn one thing from this post, learn this one. No matter what website builder you’re using, you’ve probably noticed various Heading options: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Heading 4, etc., and in code they’re listed as H1, H2, H3…
Without any additional knowledge, these just look like bigger or smaller headings.
But headings are of vital importance to search engines’ ‘understanding’ your content. They provide a structure to your post that tells search engines how the post is organized.
Let’s continue with that “5 ways CBT can help overcome your agoraphobia” post we’re writing.
Your H1 tag is the title of your post, at the top of your blog post.
H2, H3, and other tags are nested underneath in a hierarchy, like this:
<H1>5 ways CBT can help overcome your agoraphobia
<H2> 1. Exposure Therapy
<H3> Gradual exposure
<H3> Build tolerance
<H2> 2. Behavioral Experiments
<H2> 3. Developing Coping Skills
Some rules to remember for using headings correctly:
Never use more than one H1 per post/page
Never skip a heading - underneath H1 is H2, underneath H2 is H3, etc.
H1 is always bigger than H2, which is bigger than H3, etc. This should be handled by your website builder/blogging platform, but it’s good to know.
5. Focus on your introduction
Think back to writing high school or college essays — your introduction is by far the most important part of your content. Most people won’t read more than this, so you need to capture their interest and give them a reason why they should stick around and read the rest of the content.
Include your focus keyword in the first 100 words, and ideally even earlier, especially if your content is relatively short.
If you’re writing a guide to something or your post is 2000+ words, consider adding a table of contents at the top, linking to each section. Using this post as an example, maybe you already know about the importance of keyword research and writing metadata titles and descriptions, so you wanted to skip right to the part about using headings properly — the introduction let you do that.
6. Use internal and external linking
Unlike physical books, your blog posts don’t exist in a vacuum. They’re digital and dynamic, and hopefully have some similarities to other posts on your site, or you’re including quotes or research or other helpful resources inside your blog posts. Add hyperlinks to create connections.
(Btw, note the use of different heading levels in this section!)
Internal linking
Hopefully you’ve written a few posts about the same topic or have some semi-related posts. If our post is “5 ways CBT can help overcome your agoraphobia”, we could link it to other posts we’ve written titled:
“What’s the difference between agoraphobia and claustrophobia?”
“Understanding the different types of anxiety disorders”
“6 ways to support someone with agoraphobia”
“Why CBT is the best treatment approach for anxiety disorders”
Each of these should link to each other — in logical ways; don’t link things for no reason. These connections between other pages on your own site is collectively called ‘internal linking’, and it serves two main purposes:
Gets people to stick around
Have you ever read an article online and clicked to go to another article? Of course you have. Maybe you read a movie review that linked to the review for the previous movie, or a write-up of other movies a particular actor has done. By spending more time on the site, you’re more likely to return to that site later, or in your case, more likely to trust you as a therapist and book a consultation call.
Gets search engines to understand your site and your authority
By linking your pages together, you’re telling search engines how your site is laid out, which pages are similar and which pages aren’t. And if you write 10 posts that are all about the same kind of topic, Google will start to think, ‘Hey, this person is a real expert on agoraphobia, I’ll start to rank them higher in search results’ (extreme oversimplification there, but you get the idea).
External linking
The other kind of linking is creating connection to other websites. You might link to a reputable source talking about agoraphobia to back up what you’re saying, or link to a podcast talking about mental health; any link that isn’t to your own site is an external link.
External links help Google understand how your pages relate to other sites online, provide useful resources to your audience, and can create networking and partnership opportunities to other sites — maybe you link to a therapist who also provides help for agoraphobia but using a different treatment approach.
If your site is linked to from another site, that’s a huge ranking signal for search engines because it demonstrates trust. Someone else is saying, “Hey, this person has such good content I want my audience to see it”. Getting these links can be extremely difficult, time-consuming and expensive, especially from reputable, well-established sites.
7. Use and optimize images
No one wants to read a wall of text. Space your content out with relevant, high-quality images.
Often it’s hard to source your own images, especially as a therapist, but there are plenty of stock photo sites (free and paid) that offer lots of options for you. Your website builder/blogging platform might have their own options to choose from.
For each image, add ‘alt text’ to it, which is a metadata field attached to the image. Alt text is an accessibility feature so that in cases where the image can’t be seen or displayed, some text is presented instead; as such, the alt text should describe the content of the image and ideally mention your focus keyword (which hopefully is natural if the image is relevant).
8. Add a call to action
Your blog posts shouldn’t just… end. If someone has read all the way to the end of your post, they’re very likely to want more content from your and/or they’re likely to be willing to do something for you. That sounds a bit sinister, but bear with me.
A call to action is an opportunity. Consider why that person came to your post in the first place.
Are they looking for a therapist? Add a button that says “book a free consultation with me”.
Are they looking for self-help support? Add a link to another resource of yours called “CBT worksheet for agoraphobia”.
Is this post an introductory post? Add links to more in-depth posts about specific points raised.
Don’t just leave the person hanging. Probably they’ll close the tab and never come back to your site again.
9. Write high-quality, engaging content
There’s no formula for ‘the perfect blog post’. Google’s exact ranking signals are known only to themselves, but they encourage you to create content that demonstrates EEAT: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The exact definitions of those is a topic for another time, but
You can use AI tools like ChatGPT to help you in the process, but
10. Update old content
Once you’ve published a piece of content, don’t just forget about it.
You should be periodically reviewing your content to make sure old posts remain accurate. Also, make sure to add or change internal and external links as needed (maybe you wrote a new post that’s super relevant to an old post — make sure the old post links to it!).
Search engines love recent content and they love accurate content, so keep your content fresh and reap the rewards from it.
Tips to Format Blog Posts for SEO
There you have it, 10 straightforward tips to format your blog posts to make sure you’re getting the best impact out of them in terms of search engine optimization.
SEO overall is an extremely complex, time-consuming and difficult process with no guarantees of success, but by following these tips you’ll at least have the basics down in terms of how to format your posts. Without these basics, you’ll be putting in many hours of writing time with very little chance of success.
If you want to understand more about SEO, check out my beginner’s guide here. Or learn how to improve your SEO using the best free SEO tool available, Google Search Console, by reading this post.
