A therapist blog can be a great tool for everyone running a private practice. It's your personal channel where you can talk about different aspects of mental health and use it to grow both your SEO (search engine optimization) and personal brand. Let's see how you can use this tool effectively!
What is a therapist blog?
Perhaps you had those times in life when you thought, "I really should write more about that!". If that's true in your case, this post is for you!
Therapists run blogs to talk about things that matter to them and their clients. Typically, a blog is an integral part of your website, although it can be named differently. Here are the names you can choose from:
Blog
Free resources
Resources for therapists (this one's rather long)
Free knowledge
Mental health knowledge
Articles
Posts
Each name works, so pick the one that's closest to you. When you run a therapist blog, you can talk about your mental health journey (people love reading posts that create emotional connection and relatability), issues that you help with, different therapy modalities, relaxing techniques, mental health tips, etc.
Blog content is entirely up to you, but if you want it to be a meaningful and valuable business asset, you should focus on two main areas: SEO and personal brand.
In fact, in our opinion, the blog is one of 10 of the most important features every therapist website should have!
A blog for therapists: A vital SEO tool
If you want to grow your online presence and bring more traffic to your website, you should definitely consider a blog. It can be a valuable tool in your SEO strategy; primarily, it's a great way to add more keywords and key phrases to your website.
Additionally, what's also important is that with a blog, you can build so-called topical authority. In other words, you can showcase your knowledge and experience on different aspects of mental health and position yourself as a mental health expert.
If your website (including your blog) is a valuable source of knowledge on a given subject, Google will gradually move it up in the SERP (search engine result page) so that you get more organic visibility.
What's important here is to understand the correlation between your blog and keywords. Let's talk a bit more about that.
The role of keywords and key phrases in therapist blog
Let's use an example: You are a family therapist and you want to create a blog for your website. Before you jump to writing blog posts, it's good to think about what your potential clients might be interested in.
A few examples:
How to improve your daily life as a family
How to deal with emotional fatigue
How to navigate child anxiety
How to look for experienced child therapists, etc.
Just ask yourself, what your ideal clients are looking for when it comes to working with a therapist. The answers usually work great as blog posts! :)
Also, it is vital to conduct keyword research to see whether those subjects (and related keywords) are popular on Google in your area or province. Let's run such research using the tool provided for free within the Google Ads dashboard. For the sake of this experiment, we're looking for keyword popularity in British Columbia and only in English:
As you can see, related searches revolve around IFS and marriage. So, now you know what your blog posts should focus on such issues because they have many searches in this area. You can also use other, more general tools, such as AnswerThePublic.com (keep in mind you only get one free search per day), to find more ideas on what to write about.
Now, if you combine popular keywords in your area and incorporate them into your mental health counseling blog, you will get better results SEO-wise compared to writing just on a whim.
Use an SEO content editor
Using an SEO content editor can greatly enhance your blog writing process, making it easier to integrate keywords and optimize your posts for search engines.
A good SEO content editor helps you identify primary and secondary keywords relevant to your niche and blog topic. It enables you to see how well your draft is optimized for these keywords so that you can create SEO-friendly blog posts.
Take a look at the SEO recommendation for this blog post generated in Frase.io:
As you can see, the SEO content editor will adjust everything to your main keyword, which in this case is "therapist blog". A good SEO content editor will tell you:
What keywords and key phrases to use (and how many)
How long your post should be
How many headings, photos and links it should have
How your competition scores for the same keyword (so that you know what to do to outrun them)
Such a tool is paid, but it can be very helpful when it comes to creating SEO-friendly content. If you're considering getting such a tool, here are your options:
They all get the job done, but Frase is the cheapest option, especially if you're just writing for your own needs and not too often (less than 10 blog posts a month).
Use the blog to build your personal brand
The blog is also vital concerning your personal brand. People want to do therapy with people they trust, people they know they will help them. The blog will help you build your reputation as a compassionate and experienced therapist.
That's why you shouldn't be afraid of putting your personal perspective and experiences into your blog posts. On the contrary, that's what you SHOULD do! Of course, there are some universal experience or common experience when it comes to anxiety or burnout, but if you can add your personal approach or point of view, your readers will appreciate that more (and so will Google!).
When working on a blog, think about how you can establish more in-depth relationships with your client base. You can talk about what a typical therapy session looks like, share your therapy rules, what to expect from your therapy practice, etc. You can even share some passages from your personal life if you feel that's appropriate.
The goal is to build trust and recognizability. That's why, for personal brand purposes, you should:
Add your photo to every blog post
Create a professional bio of you as a blog author
Include links to your social media profiles (if you use them to build your personal brand, too)
Treat your therapist blog as a business tool
We've seen that many times - therapists write blog posts with no research and no attention to keywords, just about what they feel like writing about. That's not necessarily wrong; you will come up with great blog post ideas that don't have popular keywords attached to them, and that's fine.
But if you want to use your blog as a business tool, you should plan two types of blog posts:
Posts that are designed to build your SEO - with keywords and questions asked by actual clients.
Posts that are designed to build your image, your reputation, or just to share your thoughts.
Combining both types of posts will give you the best results.
Wrapping up
Blog posts are very helpful both for SEO and personal brand purposes. If you have a website, we encourage you to consider creating blogs that will gradually attract more and more people to your private practice.
Before we conclude, there are a few frequently asked questions that we want to address :)
FAQs about therapist blog
How often should I write?
At least once a week. With SEO, it's important to be regular as it's a long-term game. Plan ahead an adequate amount of time each week to write at least one blog post.
Can I use artificial intelligence (ChatGPT or some other tool)?
In a word? Sparingly. You sure can use such tools, but you need to use them in a smart way. Don't just generate a post and copy-paste it to your website. Rather, use AI to generate good outlines and ideas for blog posts.
Remember, with SEO, it's important to create helpful, practical content. You want to share your personal experience as an expert. ChatGPT and other similar tools will just rephrase things that are in their database. Make your blog posts unique, and you will get ahead.
What should I write about?
Use the Google keyword research tool and AnswerThePublic.com to generate ideas for your blog posts. If you use an SEO content editor, it will also help you generate content ideas for your blog.
How can I make my blog posts more effective from the SEO perspective?
Above all else, write helpful and high-quality content that resonates with your target audience
Include H1-H4 headings to build a clear structure for every post
Include keywords and key phrases recommended by the SEO content editor
Include at least one photo per post and add an alt attribute to it