I know the marketing strategies for therapists out there can often seem like they take a ton of work and time – including many of the strategies I share through Private Practice Skills!
But sometimes, a few easy tweaks here and there really can boost referrals to your counseling practice.
So roll up your sleeves and get ready to take on a few simple marketing strategies for therapists to get more of your ideal clients contacting you!
Let’s dive into the tweaks you can make right now to help boost referrals to your practice:
therapist marketing strategy 1: Google My Business
Yes for real. Google My Business.
I’ve talked about how to market counseling services using Google My Business before, but it’s worth mentioning again.
I’m telling you, therapists just aren’t leveraging this tool! So I’m going to keep bringing it up until it becomes common practice in our field.
I’ve gone over the long list of benefits of Google my Business before. The key point is: it makes it much easier for potential clients to find you online. Your practice shows up in Google maps, gets its own highlight feature in a sidebar, and makes it more likely that your website will show up in Google search results. Here’s what those features look like:
Here’s my private practice (“Life Christian Counseling”) showing up in the first three maps results for a highly competitive search term in my area:
Here is my practice featured in the right sidebar of Google Search results. This is also called a Google “Knowledge Graph:”
How sweet would it be to have your practice show up in the sidebar of search results like that?
My Google My Business profile gets nearly 1,000 clicks per month and sends over 100 potential clients to my website every single month. And it’s FREE!
You can set it up in literally 10 minutes. I’m not kidding.
If you do have a Google My Business profile already, it’s a good idea to revisit it and update any information that might have changed or add an updated photo. This just helps signal to Google that you’re still active.
If you’d like to learn more about Google My Business in order to maximize your marketing strategy, I have an easy, affordable training to help you do that. In the time it takes to watch a movie, you can have your free Google My Business profile set up and maximized to help your ideal clients find you. Learn more about the training: The GMB Secret.
therapist marketing strategy 2: fix your Psychology Today profile
Listen. I have a hard truth coming y’all. Most therapists’ Psychology Today profile is far from optimized to help potential clients find them.
There is a strategy to creating a Psychology Today profile that helps the right potential clients find you and book with you. Set aside a half-hour or an hour to make a few tweaks and you’re sure to see more of the right kinds of referrals coming in through your Psychology Today profile.
Want to know more about the right strategy to boost referrals through your Psychology Today profile? Here’s a step-by-step video going through all the mistakes I made on my Psychology Today profile and how to fix them:
If you’re making a lot of the same mistakes on your Psychology Today profile, you’re in good company! Better that you know now how to address the items and optimize your profile to help your ideal clients find you.
therapist marketing strategy 3: start blogging
If you’ve been following me for a while, you may have seen this one coming. I’ll admit, a blogging marketing strategy isn’t a one-and-done task like the first two tasks. But if you’re not already blogging and you have the bandwidth to add on a new task to your ongoing schedule, blogging is SUCH a valuable therapist marketing strategy.
I know many therapists are afraid to blog. Maybe you feel like you don’t know what to write about or that it will take too much time. But even if you spend just one hour blogging every month, it is still completely worth it!
Yes, there are tons of strategies you can learn to optimize your blogging so that what you write is more likely to start showing up in Google search results so that you can market your practice there. If you have the bandwidth to learn about that, great! I’ll share some of those resources in a moment.
Just Start!
If you don’t have time for a massive blogging overhaul, don’t sweat it! Seriously, just start. Think about what topics often come up for the kinds of clients you work with and start writing blog posts on those topics. You don’t have to be prolific or write eloquently. Just speak your mind and offer one or two practical tools that you’ve found can be helpful for your clients.
And just like most things in life, the more you blog, the easier it gets. These days I don’t spend longer than an hour writing a blog post- and most of that is focusing on SEO strategy to make sure the post will show up in search results.
You don’t have to spend too much time actually writing the blog. Just give it a try! In time, it’s bound to make your website easier for potential clients to find. And once they arrive at your page, it will make it easier for folks to build trust with you as well.
If you’d like to learn more about developing a blogging strategy that helps your practice show up higher in search results, check out my step-by-step video showing you how to write a blog post for private practice:
And that’s it! If you aren’t doing these things already, I think these three easy marketing strategies for therapists will go a long way in bringing more referrals into your practice.
I hope you found this article helpful if you want to boost referrals to your practice this year. If you’d like more support with getting your private practice off the ground, then check out my FREE Starting a Private Practice in Counseling Checklist:
Starting a Private Practice in Counseling Checklist
And until next time, from one therapist to another: I wish you well!
-Marie
Photo by Avel Chuklanov on Unsplash
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