 Here's something I don't say enough: you can do some of this yourself.
I'm a content strategist who works exclusively with therapists on SEO and digital marketing. My whole business is built on the fact that most therapists need help with this stuff. And I'm still going to tell you: some of it, you can handle on your own. I think that honesty matters. Because if someone leads with "you need to hire me for everything," that's a sales pitch, not advice. And the therapists I work with have good instincts about the difference. So let's actually answer the question. What can you do yourself? Some SEO tasks are genuinely accessible, even if you don't have a marketing background. Here's where you can make real progress without hiring anyone. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile If you have a physical office, this is one of the highest-impact things you can do for local SEO, and it's completely free. Add your address, your hours, your specializations, a few photos, and a description of who you work with. Google uses this to surface you in local searches and in the map results that show up when someone types "therapist near me." I wrote a whole post on this if you want to go deeper. Fix your page titles and meta descriptions These are the lines of text that show up in Google search results, the headline and the short summary underneath it. Most therapy websites have either a generic title (just the therapist's name) or nothing at all. You can update these directly in Squarespace, Wix, or whatever platform you're on. A good title for your homepage might be something like "Trauma therapy in Vancouver | [Your name], RCC." Clear, specific, local. It takes about 20 minutes to update across your whole site. Check your word count Open each page of your website and read it. Does your homepage have 150 words or 800? Does your services page actually explain what your clients will experience, or does it list your credentials? Google needs content to understand what your site is about and who it serves. If your pages are thin, adding more words, more specificity, more of your actual voice, is something you can do yourself. Ask for a Google review Not from clients (that's an ethics issue), but from colleagues who've worked with you, professionals who've referred to you, or supervisors. A few genuine reviews on your Google Business Profile help your local rankings meaningfully. Write one blog post Not 10. One. Pick a question your clients ask you all the time, or something you wish they understood before they came to you, and write a few hundred words about it. You don't need it to be perfect. Done is better than perfect when it comes to SEO content, because a post that exists can rank, and one that's still in your drafts folder can't. Where it gets harder Here's where I want to be straight with you, because this is also where a lot of therapists burn out and give up. Keyword research takes time and some expertise It's not just about guessing what your clients type into Google. It's about finding phrases that have real search volume, that you can actually rank for, given your site's current authority, and that match the intent behind the search. There are free tools (Google Search Console) that can help, but interpreting what you're seeing takes practice, and choosing the wrong keywords to target means writing content that doesn't reach anyone. On-page optimization is detail-heavy Things like heading structure, internal linking, image alt text, and schema markup (structured data that helps Google understand your site) are learnable, but they take time to understand and apply consistently. One or two things missed isn't a disaster, but the cumulative effect of doing all of it well is real. Writing for SEO and writing for clients at the same time is a skill This is the part that trips up most people. Content that ranks needs to target specific phrases. Content that converts needs to speak to how your clients are actually feeling. Getting both in the same piece, without sounding stiff or keyword-stuffed, is harder than it sounds. And for therapists especially, the writing also needs to feel warm, ethical, and human. That's a specific combination. Seeing results takes patience, and it's hard to know if you're doing it right SEO is a slow game. Even when it's working, you won't know for six-plus months. When you're doing it yourself without a lot of feedback, it's easy to spend time on the wrong things and not realize it until you've wasted a few months. So what's the honest answer? DIY is genuinely worth it for some things: your Google Business Profile, your basic on-page titles, your word count and content depth. If you have time and interest, it's worth learning the basics. But the reason most therapists eventually get help is not that they couldn't figure it out. It's because figuring it out takes time they don't have. You're in sessions most of the day. Admin takes what's left. Marketing is the thing that always gets pushed to next week. If that's where you are, that's not a failure. It's just an honest look at your bandwidth. What I offer is a way to stop losing time to the learning curve. You get a strategy built around your specific practice, your niche, and your location, and content that sounds like you, not like a template. The goal is always to get you to a place where your website is doing some of the work consistently, without you having to think about it every month. If you want to know where your site stands right now, I offer a free 30-minute consultation. We'll look at it together, I'll tell you what I see, and you'll leave with a clear list of what needs to happen, whether you work with me or not. Comments are closed.
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