One of the biggest mistakes we see therapists and helping professionals make on their websites is simply not having enough content. We get it, you want to keep things simple. You might have a bulleted list of your services, a short “about me” section, and a contact form. Or, you might actually have a few service pages for each of your specialties. But each page only has about a paragraph. 

You aren’t alone. Many, many mental health professionals have similar setups for their private practice website. But that’s the issue. You don’t have enough content to set you apart for potential clients OR for Google.

Google Wants to Know You’re a Mental Health Expert

When it comes to SEO, content is key! You want Google to recognize you as an expert on mental health, and particularly the areas of mental health you have particular expertise and training in.

Honestly, Google prefers to rank websites written by true experts higher on Google than random things written by people with just an interest in the topic. Expertise of the writer matters when it comes to SEO. But Google has to understand that you’re an expert. So, many of the most educated and experienced mental health clinicians just don’t rank very well on Google because Google simply doesn’t understand that they’re an expert or the value they bring to potential clients.

Google May Not Understand You’re a Mental Health Expert

If you only have a paragraph on your website about anxiety treatment, Google is going to think that you only know a paragraph’s worth about anxiety. If you have 500+ words on your “anxiety treatment” service page and then 3 or 4 blogs about anxiety too, Google is much more likely to recognize you as an expert on anxiety treatment. Which in turn means that Google is also more likely to rank you higher for search terms like “anxiety treatment”, “symptoms of anxiety”, or “anxiety counselor near me”. 

Content Helps Demonstrate Your Expertise

So, one of the first things we do with our clients is bulk up their content! We work with mental health professionals to strategically add content to their website that really showcase their expertise, give value to potential clients, and communicate to Google when to put your website at the top of search results.

So, it’s important to have both service pages and blog posts on your website if you want Google to recognize you as an expert on mental health. Service pages help to demonstrate your expertise in a particular area, while blogs allow you to share your knowledge and experience in a more informal way that helps build up those service pages. Both are important for SEO purposes and should be used in conjunction with each other to maximize your visibility on Google.

However, we can’t optimize everything at once. So, we need a strategy. And generally, our team prefers to start with service pages and then move to blogs that compliment those service pages. When I tell clients this they often ask, “Which is more important, service pages or blogs?”. Which is the question I’m here to answer today! 

Are Service Pages or Blogs More Important for SEO?

From an SEO standpoint, neither is “more important”. Well optimized content is well optimized content! Google doesn’t care if it’s in the form of a service page or a blog post. Both carry the same weight, when it comes to SEO. However, service pages and blog posts have different functions in regard to user experience. 

Services Pages for Psychiatrists, Therapists, & Other Mental Health Professionals

If you’re a therapist, psychiatrist, or other helping professional, the people coming to your website are most likely potential clients. They are probably struggling with their mental health and looking for a solution. They’re interested in the services you provide, your experience, your approach to counseling, and who you are. 

On a Private Practice Website, Service Pages Tell Clients What Counseling Services You Offer

Let’s say someone is struggling with anxiety and ADHD, and they want to know if you offer counseling related to those concerns. They are probably going to look at your service pages to find out, rather than your blog posts. If they find an “anxiety counseling” or “ADHD testing” page on your website, they’ll know that’s a service you offer and they’ll get a chance to read more about your services too. 

Service Pages are Valuable for SEO and Clients too!

That’s why we always start with service pages before moving to blogging. Service pages are important because they tell potential clients what services you offer and what you specialize in. They also give potential clients more information on how depression counseling or EMDR can help them. There is a lot of great information you can pack into services pages. What can clients expect from therapy? Why should they see you instead of someone else? How do they know if it’s time for them to reach out? 

Having service pages for your different specialties helps clients easily identify the services you offer. If there is enough content, it also shows Google that you’re an expert on those services. And if it’s well optimized content, then you are on track to start ranking higher on Google for search terms related to that content! 

So Where do Blogs Come in on a Private Practice Website?

Let’s say you now have several amazing service pages for the different services you offer. You have at least 500 words on each page, content that is valuable for potential clients, and you’ve optimized the pages with keywords and location indicators. That’s amazing! 

But, you check your rankings and see that you’re not on the first page of Google for the search terms you want. That’s where blogging comes in. 

See, you can only build in so many keywords and location indicators into your service pages in a way that feels natural. It’s important to balance SEO with user experience. If you have content that is only there for SEO purposes with no regard to user experience, potential clients won’t be interested in it. 

Blogs Compliment Your Service Pages

Blogging allows you to build in more of those SEO elements (and high quality content) to show Google that you are an expert on the services you offer. However, blogging isn’t just great for SEO. Writing blogs is a great way to give potential clients even more information on your approach and your expertise. They can also be a great resource for your current clients too! 

If you want to rank well for “trauma therapy” then you’ll want to start by writing (and optimizing) a trauma therapy service page. But, you’ll also want to write at least 3 blogs related to trauma therapy too. For example, you might write a blog on the difference between trauma and PTSD. Or, maybe a blog on coping skills for traumatic memories. 

Essentially, you want to write blogs that compliment your service pages to support the keywords those service pages are targeting. However you can always write on a topic that you’re passionate about, and add in the keywords later. Remember, blogging should be fun for you too!

Add Service Pages and Blogs to Your Private Practice Website to Build Your SEO

Now that you know the function of service pages and blogs, it’s time to get to work! If you already have a few service pages on your website, consider adding content to them. Or, if you already have some amazing services pages that are well optimized, it’s time to start blogging. And if after reading this you’re just wanting someone else to do it all for you, then reach out to our team!

Are You Struggling With the Content on Your Website? Our Mental Health SEO Specialists Can Help!

Many therapists and helping professionals are too busy to handle their SEO. You might have time to write a great service page, but have no idea how to optimize it. That’s where we come in! At Simplified SEO Consulting, we offer a variety of SEO services to help mental health professionals rank higher on search engines. Our team of Mental Health SEO Specialists can optimize your website for you, so you can get back to the work you’re best at! If you’re interested in learning more about our SEO services, you can follow these simple steps:

1. Schedule a free 30-minute video consultation with one of our Mental Health SEO Specialists
2. Learn more about how our SEO services can help you get connected with your ideal clients
3. Watch your website climb to the first page of Google through the power of SEO!

Our team can’t wait to meet you and give your practice the tools it needs to thrive!

Additional SEO Services f0r Therapists

We don’t just offer Done-For-You SEO services at Simplified SEO Consulting. For those who are interested in learning how to optimize their own website, we offer training options to! With our 12-Week SEO Intensive program you’ll receive one-on-one training from one of our team members! Or, you can learn SEO in a group of other helping professionals through our Small Group SEO Intensives. We also offer DIY Online SEO Courses on a variety of SEO techniques if you want to learn SEO on your own. Our team is honored to be a part of your business journey, no matter what services are best for you. If you want our advice on which option may be the best for your business, you can always schedule a free consultation with one of our team members!

About the Author

Kaite Ritchie is our Administrative Assistant, Alumni Specialist, and a Mental Health SEO Copywriter at Simplified SEO Consulting. She has had a passion for mental health since college, when she received her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology. During that time she also worked as an Intake Coordinator for our founder, Jessica Tappana, at her private practice! During her time as an Intake Coordinator she got to see first-hand what a big impact SEO can have on a private practice. Now Kaite uses her experience to help mental health professionals across the nation get connected with their ideal clients through SEO! She enjoys writing blog posts for counselors that both deliver great content to potential clients, and improve their SEO. You can schedule a free consultation with Kaite to learn more about our SEO services!

The special thing about working with Simplified SEO Consulting is that we’re doing optimization with ethics in mind. You can trust that we’re not going to sell you some business-y jibber jabber. Our #1 priority is to market a specialized mental health professional to the people that need their services most. Our team consists of mental health professionals from across the board. On our team, we have LCSWs, Masters in Mental Health Counseling candidates, MSW candidates, and more. 

Any time you meet with a Mental Health SEO Specialist, you can trust that we have some sort of background in mental health. 

That being said, as a mental health professional yourself, there’s a reason we all got into this thing. Everyone has their own story as to what drew them to the field of mental health. Some may say they always knew they wanted to go into mental health, some may say that they experienced something big that changed their life trajectory into having a mental health career. Maybe you’re a person who still isn’t sure about the mental health field, or on the opposite end, you loved it too much that now you’re burnout of the field. Whatever it is, I don’t know your story, I only know mine. I got into mental health so that I could be part of something bigger, something that would make a lasting impact. And that’s what guides my work here at Simplified SEO Consulting. 

That’s really what guides us all at Simplified SEO Consulting. Now, you may be sitting there asking me what this has to do with you. But if you clicked on this blog, maybe you need a reminder of why you started. So let’s talk about ways to support you. Oftentimes, we as mental health professionals hold space for a lot of hard discussions, which is incredible. We all know how obvious that is needed. But we also need to hold space for ourselves. And I know, “hold space” sounds trendy and superficial, but it’s true. We do it all the time for our clients. Holding space is defined by Health Plett, researcher and author of The Art of Holding Space: A Practice of Love, Liberation, and Leadership, as “the practice of showing up for another person and allowing them to have whatever experience they’re having without trying to direct them or fix them.” 

So, I’d like to check-in and discuss ways in which you can support yourself, we can support you, and why that’s important for your ideal client. 

Supporting Yourself

We all know the common phrase, you can’t fill from an empty cup. And as cliche, as it sounds, it’s a great analogy for taking of yourself. Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of my clients about how exhausting my school semester has been. And a lot of times, they mirror my sentiments. Add COVID to the list of “Things That Are Exhausting Mental Health Professionals Right Now”, (coming 2023), and we are at a 43% burnout rate in health care professionals as a whole. How have you supported yourself this past week? The past month? Have you been at all slacking on the things you know you need to be doing for your mental and physical well-being? If you have, let this be a friendly reminder to do those things! Some examples I use are to journal/brain dump, call my grandma, go shoot some hoops, and watch a comedy movie. Mental health can be so serious sometimes, and while I love it, I know it has to be balanced with something a little more fun.

Us Supporting You

 

While we know we’re in the business of marketing, we value having an authentic approach. That being said, we will never try to sell you into anything we don’t truly think is beneficial for you. Another one of my favorite parts of this job is that our clients can network with each other within the Facebook group. While the group is usually used for SEO tips and marketing discussions, we know that support within the mental health field is so, so important. Find a buddy within our Facebook group! Ask them questions related to the practice, and build a connection! We do this largely for networking, but also because we can all use a little bit of support now and again.

Why Does This All Matter To Your Future Client Again? 

If you’re burnt out providing therapy, you’re doing more harm to your clients than good. Burnout doesn’t allow you to be present with yourself or with your clients. They, and you, deserve the most present self you can muster.

About the Author

Jewel is currently part of our team as a Mental Health Specialist at Simplified SEO Consulting. She helps private practice owners find their ideal clients by optimizing their websites and providing direct support to clients. Jewel loves the gratification when she sees a therapist’s data increasing and their phones buzzing. As a person who puts a lot of value into mental health, she loves knowing that Simplified’s services help therapists and patients find each other to improve mental health in the world. Jewel is currently in her Master’s in Social Work program at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare. She also interns every week at a Kansas City psychiatric hospital. When she has the time, she loves to read, volunteer, spend time with friends, and travel.

Writing your own blogs or service pages often comes with many questions. One of the most frequently asked questions is: “How long should they be?” However, it is a great question to ask when writing your own blogs or service pages for the first time! Because they actually have different length requirements, or well, length suggestions for SEO purposes but also so that you can put valuable information on your practice’s website. So, how long should they be?

Blogs

To start off with, your standard blog posts should be at a bare minimum of 500 words. These 500 words do not include your call to action section. This amount of words is just enough to cover a basic topic or cover a subject that is short. For example, this could be a blog update on what events your practice has taken part in. However, as an SEO copywriter, I would recommend blogs to be more than 500 words but 800 max for a standard blog. Because if you write more than that, you’re turning your blog into a cornerstone blog. Which is totally different from a standard blog.

Cornerstone Blogs

As I briefly mentioned above, a cornerstone blog is more than 800 words. For a cornerstone, we recommend at least 1,000 words. This is because a cornerstone blog is a deep dive into a topic so it will include more detail that you normally wouldn’t include on a service page or even in a standard blog. With a cornerstone, you will be able to go into more detail and include more information that you normally wouldn’t be able to due to your word limit.

In these 1,000 words, you will be including many SEO keywords to let Google know that you are writing about a topic that you are very knowledgeable about, but you are also including all the information you are wanting to share with your readers who are clients and potential clients. It helps with your SEO and increases your chances of ranking for these keywords on Google.

Service Pages

For your service pages, since these are not a place to go into a ton of detail, they are generally about 700-750 words or less. However, no less than 500 words because then that is too short. Your service page is a place where you are writing about a particular service that your practice offers. This can be anxiety treatment, EMDR, or even workshops. This page is to tell your clients, potential clients, and especially ideal clients, what this service is; what it entails; your approach to it; and how to go about scheduling an appointment. 

Therefore, it doesn’t have to be a super lengthy page. However, some services are less heard of than others and may take a little more explaining. This is why service pages have more of a range than blogs when it comes to length. Now, if you still feel like you need to delve more into the service is your providing, that is where your blogs can come in handy!

Will Anyone Read All of This?

Now, you may be wondering, “Will anyone read all of this I’ve written? It seems really long…” and that’s okay! That’s a natural question to wonder and ask yourself. However, the answer is: Maybe! Some readers may read your whole blog, cornerstone, or service page and that is wonderful. But, most of the time, what we see is people browsing through the headers to see what is written and looking for what they want to know. 

For example, a reader may go onto your service page and browse through your headers only to see what the signs and symptoms of PTSD are. And that is okay! Your service page, or blog, is still drawing in readers and potential clients along with providing valuable information to them AND Google. 

This does bring me to the point of why headings and subheadings are important in your blogs and service pages. They can help your readers know what the sections of your page are about and help them find the information they are looking for. If you want to know more, here is a blog we have written about it! 

Ways to Make Your Blogs and Service Pages Shorter

Okay, so you added A LOT of information to your blog or service page. That’s awesome! However, if it’s too long it can be a bit daunting or even difficult for readers to understand or even navigate. That’s why there are efficient ways to make your blogs and service pages shorter in appearance or in length and not sacrifice any of that valuable information!

Accordion Panels

One way to include a lot of information on a blog or service page on your practice’s website is to use accordion panels. Accordion panels are a type of web design that allows you to open and close panels to show or hide information. It’s often used for website menus, FAQ pages, and more. However, it can be a useful tool when you are wanting to have a lot of information on one page. It makes the information more digestible and makes it less overwhelming when navigating through your page.

Blog Series

Perhaps, you started writing your blog only to realize you wrote almost two cornerstones worth of content. You know that’s too long for one blog but you’re not sure what to do. Here is where the blog series comes into play! Blog series is a great way to break up chunks of content into multiple pages. This way your readers can still navigate through what content they would like to read but it is spread over multiple pages rather than condense into one overwhelming page or a blog that is lacking all the information needed. 

Blog series are also a great way to create content for your blog that shows you are knowledgeable not only to clients but also Google about this subject. Series also help you not have to worry about what you need to write over the next couple of weeks. It’s a win, win!

Internal Links

Lastly, when you do blog series or you want to allude to other information that you cannot fit into a page, internal links will be your friend. You can link your other blogs to one another so that readers can easily find them. However, using internal links can overwhelm readers at times if your blog or service page is full of them. So, use them strategically.

About the Author:

Lynsey is an SEO Content Specialist at Simplified SEO Consulting. At Simplified, Lynsey enjoys writing all kinds of content for clients and their practices to use as resources. Her goal is to always produce quality content for her clients to use for their blogs and service pages. She knows that writing quality, original content is important not only to her clients, but to their practice and the clients that go there too! Especially, when the content is being used as a resource for mental health or even to help her client’s SEO. She is passionate about providing copywriting services for psychiatrists and therapists.

Schedule your next consultation if you’re ready to see how Simplified can serve you!