The Therapy Practices Winning New Patients from Google All Have These Local SEO Fundamentals in Place

When someone decides they're ready to find a therapist, their first move is almost always a search. Not a referral call. Not an insurance directory. A search — typed or spoken — that sounds like 'therapist near me', 'anxiety counselor in [city]', or 'EMDR therapist [neighborhood]'.

Google responds to those searches with two types of results: the Map Pack (the three business listings with a map, shown before any organic links) and the regular organic blue links below it. Both are winnable. Both require different but overlapping strategies.

The Map Pack captures the bulk of clicks on mobile, where most mental health searches now happen. A practice that appears there is visible at exactly the moment someone is deciding whether to reach out. A practice that doesn't appear there is essentially invisible to that person — even if they have a beautiful website.

This matters because therapy is an inherently local service. People want a provider they can get to. They filter by distance, insurance, and specialty. Local SEO is the mechanism that connects your practice to that demand in a way that paid ads and directory listings alone cannot replicate long-term.

Industry benchmarks suggest that local search visibility compounds — practices with strong GBP profiles, consistent citations, and location-relevant website content tend to pull further ahead of competitors each month. The good news: most therapy practices in most mid-sized cities have not invested in this systematically, which means the opportunity is still open.

Google uses three core signals to decide which local businesses rank in the Map Pack. Understanding them removes the guesswork from where to invest your time.

1. Relevance

Google needs to understand what you do, who you serve, and where you practice. This is established through your Google Business Profile categories, your website content, and the language on your service and location pages. A therapist whose GBP lists only 'Psychologist' as a category, with a website that never mentions the city name or specific conditions treated, sends weak relevance signals. A therapist whose GBP lists accurate primary and secondary categories, whose website has a dedicated page for 'anxiety therapy in [City],' and whose content addresses the specific populations they serve sends strong ones.

2. Distance

Google factors in the physical distance between the searcher and your practice address. You cannot fully control this signal, but you can work with it. If you have a physical office, make sure the address is verified and consistent everywhere it appears. If you offer telehealth across a wider area, that's handled differently — through service-area settings in GBP and geo-targeted landing pages — rather than trying to trick Google about your location.

3. Prominence

Prominence is Google's measure of how well-known and trusted your practice appears to be. It's built through patient reviews, inbound links from local websites, citations in reputable directories, and overall online presence. A practice that has 40 detailed Google reviews, appears consistently in Psychology Today, Healthgrades, TherapyDen, and local business directories, and has earned even a handful of links from local health or community organizations will outrank a newer profile with thin signals — all else being equal.

Most local SEO work for therapists comes down to strengthening all three pillars systematically, not chasing any single tactic.

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the foundation of local visibility. It's what populates the Map Pack listing, the Knowledge Panel when someone searches your practice name directly, and the details Google shows when someone finds you on Maps.

A fully optimized GBP for a therapy practice includes:

• Primary category set accurately (e.g., 'Psychologist', 'Mental Health Clinic', 'Counselor') — this is the most important field in the entire profile
• Secondary categories that reflect your specialties (e.g., 'Marriage Therapist', 'Family Counselor')
• Business description that names your city, specialties, and the populations you serve — written naturally, not keyword-stuffed
• Services section populated with specific therapy modalities (CBT, DBT, EMDR, couples therapy, etc.)
• Hours of operation kept current, including telehealth availability
• Photos — at minimum, an exterior photo, waiting area, and headshot; these meaningfully affect click-through rates
• Website link pointing to your homepage or a relevant location page
• Q&A section seeded with questions patients actually ask, answered by you

One thing many therapists miss: GBP posts. Weekly or biweekly posts — announcing a new group program, sharing a mental health awareness note, or describing a service — signal to Google that the profile is actively managed. Active profiles tend to rank above dormant ones with otherwise similar authority.

For practices with telehealth, GBP allows you to set a service area in addition to (or instead of) a physical address. If you see patients only via telehealth, configure GBP as a service-area business and list the regions you serve. For hybrid practices, list the physical office address and configure a service area.

Note: All profile content and any patient-facing responses must comply with HIPAA privacy rules and APA Ethics Code Standards 5.01–5.06 governing advertising and public statements. When in doubt about what to include, consult your licensing board guidelines.

Your GBP does a lot of work, but it can't do everything alone. Google cross-references your profile against your website. A website that corroborates your location, specialties, and service areas increases the confidence of your local ranking signals.

For most single-location practices, the highest-value on-site action is building a dedicated location page — not just embedding your city name in your homepage once, but creating a page specifically designed around a search like 'therapist in [City]' or 'anxiety therapy [City]'.

A well-structured location page includes:

• The city and neighborhood prominently in the page title, H1, and first paragraph
• A description of the practice that naturally mentions the city and surrounding areas patients might travel from
• Specialties offered at that location
• An embedded Google Map showing the office location
• Local trust signals — whether the therapist trained locally, serves specific local communities, or is affiliated with local organizations
• Schema markup (LocalBusiness or MedicalBusiness) that communicates address, phone, and hours in structured data

For practices treating multiple specialties, consider separate landing pages per specialty-plus-location combination — for example, a page for 'couples therapy in [City]' distinct from 'depression treatment in [City].' Each page can capture its own search segment without cannibalizing the others, provided the content is genuinely distinct and useful rather than templated.

For multi-location practices, each physical office location warrants its own page and its own GBP profile. Trying to rank a single page or single profile for multiple cities dilutes your signal across all of them. See our multi-location SEO guide for the full per-location structure.

Reviews are one of the most visible and most misunderstood factors in local SEO for therapy practices. They influence both where you rank in the Map Pack and whether someone who finds you chooses to contact you.

In our experience working with healthcare practices, Google rewards profiles that have a consistent, ongoing stream of reviews more than profiles with a large burst of reviews all posted in the same week. Recency matters. A profile that received 30 reviews three years ago and nothing since will often rank below a profile with 15 reviews spread across the past 12 months.

For therapists specifically, review generation requires more care than it does for, say, a restaurant. You cannot:

• Offer incentives for reviews (violates FTC endorsement guidelines)
• Reveal that someone is a patient in any response, even indirectly (HIPAA violation risk)
• Post fake reviews or have staff post reviews posing as patients

What you can do, in compliance with HIPAA and the APA Ethics Code:

• Include a passive review invitation on your website (e.g., 'If you've worked with our practice and feel comfortable, a Google review helps others find support')
• Mention your Google listing in discharge documentation or end-of-treatment communications, where clinically appropriate and ethically permitted in your jurisdiction
• Respond to existing reviews — positive ones with a brief, warm, generic acknowledgment; negative ones with a carefully worded, privacy-preserving response

Review responses deserve particular attention. Never confirm or deny a reviewer is a patient. Never share clinical details. A response like 'We appreciate you sharing your experience and take all feedback seriously — please contact our office directly so we can address your concerns' handles almost any negative review without creating a HIPAA exposure.

This is educational guidance, not legal or compliance advice. Verify your review practices against your state licensing board rules and consult a HIPAA compliance resource specific to your practice structure.

A citation is any online mention of your practice's name, address, and phone number — whether that's in a directory listing, a local news article, or a professional association profile. Google uses citation signals to validate that your business is real, consistently described, and located where you say it is.

For therapy practices, the most important citation sources fall into three tiers:

• Tier 1 — Therapy-specific directories: Psychology Today, TherapyDen, Zencare, TherapyTribe, Good Therapy, Healthgrades, Zocdoc. These carry the most weight because Google recognizes them as authoritative sources in your vertical.
• Tier 2 — General health directories: WebMD, Vitals, US News Health, RateMDs. Lower specificity but still credible citation sources.
• Tier 3 — General business directories: Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Foursquare, Yellow Pages. Basic hygiene; inconsistencies here cause more harm than the listings themselves provide benefit.

The biggest citation error therapy practices make is inconsistent NAP data. If your GBP lists your suite number as 'Suite 200' but your Psychology Today profile lists it as '#200' and your Healthgrades profile omits it entirely, those inconsistencies create ambiguity Google resolves by reducing trust in all three. Audit your citations annually and after any address or phone number change.

Building new citations from scratch is time-consuming but straightforward. Tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark can identify where you're listed, where you're missing, and where inconsistencies exist across hundreds of sources — making the audit manageable even for a solo practitioner.

Beyond directories, local citations from non-directory sources (a mention in a local parenting blog, a link from a community mental health organization, a feature in a local newspaper) carry significant weight because they're harder to manufacture and signal genuine community presence.