SEO for a New Therapy Practice: Your First 90 Days

You have opened a practice, the website is live, and nothing is happening. That silence is normal, and it is not a sign that you need to spend money on ads or an SEO agency. For a new therapy practice, the first ninety days are about doing four unglamorous things properly, in the right order.

This is the sequence we set up for practice websites we build. It is deliberately small: four moves, no jargon, and nothing that requires you to become a marketer.

Days 1 to 14: what is the first thing to set up?

Claim your Google Business Profile. This is the free listing that puts you in the map results, and for local services the map block gets a large share of all clicks. Fill it completely: category, address or service area, hours, phone, and a link to your website. Add real photos of your practice room. This single step outperforms months of blogging for a new local practice.

Connect Google Search Console. Free, takes ten minutes, and it is the difference between guessing and knowing. It tells you which searches show your site, which pages Google has indexed, and whether anything is broken. You do not need to act on it yet; you need the data collecting from day one. We wrote a plain-language guide in how to read Google Search Console without the jargon.

Check that your site is actually indexed. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes up after two weeks, something is blocking it, usually a leftover “discourage search engines” setting from when the site was being built. It is the most common and most costly oversight on new practice sites.

Days 15 to 45: one page per specialty, for local SEO that holds

Here is where most new practices go wrong. They put everything on one services page: anxiety, burnout, trauma, relationships, grief, all in a bulleted list. That page now competes for every one of those searches and ranks for none of them.

Give each main specialism its own page, with the town named in the text. “Trauma therapy in Leiden” as an actual page, with a few hundred honest words about what that work looks like with you. Three or four such pages beat one long list every time, because each one matches what a specific person typed.

Keep the writing plain and specific. Search engines reward text that answers a real question, and so do the humans reading it at eleven at night.

How do you write specialty pages without duplicate content?

Every guide on this topic names the same move as the most under-used in private practice: a page per thing you treat, instead of one services page listing everything. All three of the pages ranking above this one say it. None of them says how, and the how is where practitioners stall, because writing five pages that are genuinely different about work you experience as one practice feels dishonest and takes a week.

The trick is that the pages are not different because your method differs. They are different because the reader differs. Someone searching for help with panic attacks and someone searching for help after a bereavement arrive with different sentences in their heads, and the page should open with the sentence they are already saying. Your method section can be nearly identical across all five, and that is fine.

A structure that works, and takes about ninety minutes per page once you have done one:

• The opening two paragraphs are unique. The situation in the reader’s words: what it feels like, when it shows up, what she has probably already tried. This is the part search engines and assistants use to tell the pages apart.
• The middle is shared. How you work, what a session looks like, how many sessions people usually need. Rewrite the connecting sentences, keep the substance.
• The practical block is shared. Price, location, availability, how to book.
• One thing that only applies here. A question specific to this complaint, or one line about when you would refer someone on.

That is roughly seventy percent shared text, and it is not duplicate content in the sense Google penalises, because the pages open differently, answer different questions and target different searches. What actually gets penalised is five pages that differ only in the title. Before you write any of them, it helps to know what the site already signals: our free website check reads that in about a minute. Start with the two complaints you treat most and where you are strongest. Two real specialty pages beat five thin ones, and you can add the rest in month four.

Days 46 to 75: is a blog worth it, or answer the questions instead?

Add a real FAQ to your site, and write one or two articles that answer a question you get in first sessions. Not “5 tips for wellbeing”, which every practice publishes and nobody searches. Something specific: what happens in a first session, how to tell whether therapy is right for you now, what the difference is between the two approaches you offer.

This is also what makes you visible to AI assistants, which increasingly answer “can you recommend a therapist for X” by reading exactly this kind of clear, question-shaped content. The full approach is in how to get your practice found in ChatGPT.

Where to get the questions, since inventing them defeats the purpose. Three sources, all free. The messages already in your inbox: the things people ask before they book are the things everyone wants to know and most practices never write down. Google’s own suggestions: start typing your specialty and your town and read what it completes. And the “people also ask” block on the results page for your main term, which is Google telling you outright what it considers related.

Write one page or one section per question, answer it in the first two sentences, then expand. Resist the urge to save the answer for the bottom; both readers and assistants take the first direct answer they find. A page that opens with “That depends on several factors” has already lost to the one that opens with “Usually between eight and twelve sessions, and here is what changes that.”

Days 76 to 90: check your Google Business Profile, do not churn

Open Search Console and look at two things: which searches showed your site, and which pages got impressions. You will usually find something surprising, a search you never thought of that you are almost ranking for. Strengthen that page rather than starting new ones. One improved page beats three new thin ones.

And resist the urge to change everything. Ninety days is early. Rankings move slowly for new domains, and the practices that win are the ones that keep the same clear pages and add to them steadily.

How long before SEO works for a therapy practice?

Not an SEO agency, until you have done the four steps above; most of what they would charge you for is this list. Not ads, until your website converts the visitors you already get, otherwise you are paying to send people to a leak. Not more directories beyond the one or two that genuinely produce enquiries in your area; they rank instead of you, not alongside you.

Spend it instead on the thing that compounds: a website that is clearly written, clearly structured and yours. That is the foundation everything above stands on, and it is what we build in our practice websites.

In closing

SEO for a new practice is not a campaign; it is four things done properly and then left alone to work. Claim the profile, connect the console, write one page per specialism with your town in it, and answer the questions clients actually ask. Then be patient for a quarter.

Want to know whether your site is technically ready for any of this? Run it through our free Website Check, or look at how we build findable practice websites.