Believe it or not, writing good content on your website can directly grow your practice. Many mental health professionals we speak with can’t quite connect the dots about content and growing their patients – but it’s actually pretty simple. I’m going to break down how writing content for your practice can bring quality patients to your door. While writing is not a magic pill that makes your practice grow overnight, blogging proven strategy that we use to grow mental health practices.

Let’s get started with some questions I hear regularly about investing in a content strategy and how writing can grow your private practice:

Why Blog For My Private Practice’s Website?

Writing content on your website, whether it’s on the service pages or on blogs, creates opportunities for your target patients to find your practice. Here are some reasons you should write content regularly:

1. We have proven to our patients that writing great content will bring you more patients – We have the data to show the results
2. Content showcases you as an expert
3. Content can be repurposed and posted on many different mediums: social media, email marketing, and beyond
4. Content shows Google your expertise – Google will learn that your website is about a certain topic and start ranking your website higher in its search results

How Does It Work?

Many mental health professions, including therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and other specialty practitioners, ask us “how does copywriting work to grow my business?” Let’s dive into how it works:

Google’s goal is to rank the most relevant results for searchers. Your patients are searching for great content that you have expertise in. For example, a psychologist’s patients may be searching for “eating disorder treatment in Miami, FL” if they or their family member are struggling with an eating disorder. Wouldn’t it be great to have your practice show up for the exact words, also known as keywords, for your patients needing your expertise?

What Should I Write About?

One way that I consult with clients about what to write is to break down their main 3 services. If you’re a therapist and your main service is to treat anxiety, then you should be creating content on subjects related to anxiety and anxiety treatment that your potential patients are searching for.

To find subjects that your patients are searching for, you’ll do what’s called “keyword research.” There are a number of free keyword research platforms, including the keyword planner in Google Ads. Another great tool is answerthepublic.com which allows you to type in a main service and then find relevant searches people are making. Here are some topic ideas off the top of my head for anxiety:

• Types of anxiety disorders
• What is generalized anxiety?
• Best anxiety treatment methods
• What is social anxiety disorder?
• What is separation anxiety disorder?

There are many ideas you could come up with! Like many mental health practitioners, you probably treat a lot more than just 1 condition. You could create hundreds of topics on each condition, so you certainly have your work cut out for you!

How Should I write?

After you discover the “what” you should be writing, the “how” is equally important. Here are some principles of good writing that both your customers and Google will love:

1. Writing should be interesting to your potential target, not the way you think it should be written (i.e. Don’t write a bunch of fancy terms that your patients won’t understand)
2. The length of each blog should be at least 500 words, but 1000 would be recommended
3. You should have 1 main topic (known as your h1 title), and subtopics that make sense underneath the main topic. If you’re talking about anxiety, don’t include a title and paragraph about pizza (unless they are related somehow?)
4. Make sure that you have an image with an “alt tag” with your main title. Your “alt tag” is a way that Google images ranks images on their search algorithm. If your blog was about “Best foods for anorexia weight gain”, think about image(s) that would appear when someone searches for “foods for anorexia weight gain” because the searcher would probably want to click on your image to see more content
5. You should include this main title in the meta title and metadescription – these meta words are what Google uses to list your piece of content on their search results. If these aren’t attractive or don’t make sense to the patient browsing for a search result, they won’t click on your content!
6. You should include a call to action title (h2 title, not the main h1 title) like this “Get anxiety treatment in (your city name, state abbreviation)” – See what I just did? I included the keyword + the city + the state symbol. This will help you rank locally in your city for when someone searches for this term. Make sure to diversify this for each page of copy that you create.

Conclusion on Writing for Your Practice

Writing for your private practice is a great strategy that actually works to bring you new patients. Yes it can take time to write 1000+ words each week, month, or other duration. They key is consistency, writing for your audience, and creating great, robust, expert posts. A good thing to do before writing once you know what to write about is to search on Google to see what exists currently for the topic. Perhaps you see that not a lot of great content has been written on a certain topic. This is an opportunity to create amazing content that positions your practice above the rest.

In conclusion, I highly recommend that you spend the few hours each week or month to create amazing content. Like working out, results won’t happen overnight. But if you stay consistent for 6-12+ months, you will see the difference.

Happy writing!

TherapyByPro is an online mental health directory that connects mental health pros with clients in need. If you’re a mental health professional, you can Join our community and add your practice listing here. We have assessments, practice forms, and worksheet templates mental health professionals can use to streamline their practice. View all of our mental health forms, worksheet, and assessments here.

Author: Anthony Bart

Anthony Bart is a huge mental health advocate. He has primarily positioned his marketing expertise to work with mental health professionals so that they can help as many patients as possible. He is currently the owner of BartX, TherapistX, and TherapyByPro.