SEO for therapists: what the search results actually look like

Search for a therapist and the page fills with directories before it fills with practices. That is not a failure of your site. It is how this market works: people compare several therapists in one place before they look at anyone in particular, and directories are built for comparing.

It changes what your site is for. A practice site is not competing to be found first. It is competing to be the one that gets chosen after someone has seen your name somewhere else, which means the page has to answer the questions a directory profile cannot: how you work, what a session costs, what the first appointment is like, and whether you have space.

On this query Google shows an AI answer before any result. Some of the clicks are taken before the list begins, and the answer is assembled from pages that state things plainly rather than from pages that hint.

Practical consequence: write the plain version. Fees in numbers, availability in words, the approach in a sentence a person could repeat to a friend. Pages that do that get quoted. Pages that open with a paragraph about your philosophy do not.

A page per thing you treat, in the words a client would use rather than the clinical ones. Someone types “anxiety therapist” and a page about anxiety, not a list of modalities.

Fees on the site. Half the questions people ask around this subject are about money, and a practice that publishes its fee gets fewer enquiries and better ones.

A booking path that works on a phone at eleven at night, because that is when people decide.

Load speed, because a site that takes six seconds on a phone loses people who were already unsure about calling a stranger.

A practice site is a small site: a few pages, a fee list, a booking path. That is the cheapest thing we build, and the price is published before you talk to anyone.

If you want ongoing search work rather than a site, that is a separate monthly arrangement, one month at a time, and we publish that price too.