Therapy Practice Website Design + SEO

Almost nobody arrives at a therapy website casually. A pediatrician just handed a parent a referral slip, a surgeon wrote "start PT in two weeks", a school team said the district can only give thirty minutes a week, or somebody finally decided this week is the week. They open four practice sites in four tabs and scan for the same two facts: which plans you are in network with, and whether you have a slot that is not on a Tuesday at 10am. A website design that answers neither, and asks them to fill in a contact form to find out, is the reason the tab gets closed.

You are also not being compared with the practice down the street on their terms. You are being compared inside a payer directory, a Psychology Today profile, a school district provider list or a hospital referral packet, all of which show a name, a phone number and nothing else. That is why the search that reaches you is rarely "therapist near me". It is the phrase the referring clinician wrote down, typed back in almost verbatim: pediatric feeding therapy, vestibular rehab, sensory integration, EMDR, early intervention evaluation. Local SEO for a practice means being findable for the language of the referral, in the town where the client actually attends sessions, not just the town on your lease.

The other thing that makes this vertical strange is that your product is a recurring appointment. You are not selling one visit. You are selling a weekly block for the next three months, which means an enquiry you cannot schedule is not a lost sale, it is a lost quarter of a slot. Everything on the site should be judged against that.

Structure follows discipline, then location, then age group. A clinic offering speech, occupational and physical therapy under one roof is three separate searches with three different vocabularies, and one blended services page competes for none of them. Evaluations get their own pages too, because an evaluation is a different search, a different appointment and often a different payer question than ongoing therapy. Location work follows the same logic: Google Business Profile handling differs for a clinic with a waiting room, a counselor working from a home office who does not want the address published, a telehealth-only panel and a therapist who sees clients in schools or homes. If a real share of your caseload is delivered inside assisted living or private residences, that setting behaves differently again and our senior care work covers it.

Intake is where most practice sites get careless. A form should collect enough to route and schedule, meaning discipline, payer, who referred you, guardian details and the time windows that work, and it should stop there. The moment a field asks for a diagnosis, symptoms or medication, the submission is protected health information and forwarding it to a shared inbox is a bad habit dressed up as convenience. The same caution applies to tracking: a retargeting pixel on a page about a specific condition is an easy way to broadcast something a client never agreed to share. For the tighter side of that, including portals, record systems and vendor agreements, our healthcare and life sciences work goes further.

Then there is the content problem you already know about. Your clinicians are booked to the hour, they document after every session, and no amount of encouragement is going to make them write web pages at 8pm. So we take it off them. A recorded twenty minute conversation with the treating clinician produces the page, they review it for accuracy rather than drafting it, and their name and credentials go on it because that is what the reader is checking.