7 Steps to Creating a Successful Therapy Blog

In this post, I'll show you how to write a therapy blog that will help you attract clients to your private practice. You'll learn about choosing a niche for your blog, finding an audience, defining relevant topics, and promoting your articles to help people find you online.

How many therapy websites have you seen that feature just one or two blog posts? My guess is a lot. Looking at these lonely posts makes one wonder "what was it all for?"

Especially if the articles are in the stating the obvious category like "mental health is health" or "3 ways you can start with self-care today".

To put it mildly, these blogs are useless. Not only for their content but also because they produce no traffic to your website, don't build your authority as a professional, and don't really help the reader. All the things that blogs are meant to do.

If you want to write a successful therapy blog, you first need to understand its purpose.

A therapy blog is a tool for your private practice to help your readers, build up your therapy brand and attract potential ideal clients to your practice.

How do you do that?

By creating relevant, high-ranking content favored by search engines like Google with these 7 steps:

1. Choose a Niche

Let's approach your blog as a stand-alone product for your business and define who you'll be writing for. It helps if you already know what kind of client is the best fit for your practice, but if you don't, you can use this free worksheet to figure out who your ideal client is.

After you define who you're writing for, you need to think about your readers' preferences. Ask yourself: Why would they care to read what you have to say?

Remember, your blog is meant for your potential clients out there, not you or your colleagues. So even if you care about the findings of a particular study, your readers might not.

Decide what the overall theme of your blog will be, based on your ideal client, your expertise, and your readers' possible interests.

2. build a Website

It goes without saying that your website should have the capacity to include a blog. It doesn't matter if you build your website on your own or hire a company like Brighter Vision to create it for you. Your website should have a webpage with the title "Blog" to feature and store all your articles.

Important: Make sure that your URL sequence looks like this: www.yourdomain.com/blog.

If your blog lives on another website or has your domain name in a different order, search engines will not relate your blog to your website. And the whole point of attracting clients to your site will be lost.

3. find out what people want to know

Google ranks pages by relevance. It means that it will pull up what it deems to be the best answer for a person's search query. So for example, if I type in: "How to stop arguing with my 15-year-old daughter", Google will show me an article that answers this specific question first.

So how can you predict what people will be searching for? Well, by doing some research on what people in your niche are asking about.

You can look back at past conversations with your own clients and try to recall the specific questions they had for you when they first came to see you.

And if you want to dig deeper, you can observe what people are talking about on social media ask on Quora.com and see the hot topics on Google Trends or a website like Answer the Public.

4. Define the topics for your therapy blog

So now that you know what kind of information people in your niche are looking for online, you can start outlining your blog topics.

And in fact, these insights can give you ideas of how to write about your services on your "services" page too. Your service descriptions and your blog posts can complement and inspire one another. Here's how Simplified SEO Consulting is describing this relationship:

"For every service page, we recommend having at least three blogs about that service... this is an opportunity to go deeper and explain more to potential clients who are looking for more information."

In essence, the more relevant and useful information you can provide on a particular topic of your expertise, the higher you will rank on Google.

5. Write relevant articles

Writing a successful article doesn't end with a sought after topic only. There's also a technical aspect to high ranking and building authority.

Your article needs to take into account a specific term that people search for, a keyword. So if you know what topic you'd like to tackle, the next step would be to look at what keywords are best suited for this topic. For this, you can use a tool like Ubersuggest.com. It has a keyword research function that will give you an idea of what particular word or phrase people use when they search for your topic.

And even though I would not recommend peppering your article with this term too much, you will benefit from including it in your title.

In addition to keywords, you need to structure your articles so they're easy to scan and skim. It's a bad idea to visually intimidate people with big blocks of text. Nobody has the time or the stamina to read an article that feels like a midterm paper.

Make sure to break your text into paragraphs, adding subheads, bullet points, and images.

6. Set up your email marketing service.

Your article will remain unknown unless YOU let people know about it. One of the easiest ways to notify people is through email.

Of course, you can send it to your friends and family, but besides a temporary ego boost, it will be of little use to your business. To help you distribute your article to your wider network and current and (even) past clients, you need to set up an email marketing service.

In fact, email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels in attracting new clients to your practice. But even if you feel like this strategy is too advanced for you right now, you can use services like ConvertKit or Constant Contact, to email your entire network about your insightful new blog post.

7. Promote your Blog

If you want your therapy blog to be successful, you need to actively promote it. Email marketing is a great way to do it, but it's not the only way.

To help you rank higher on Google, you need other websites to link to your blog. It can be a bit of tedious work so you may want to outsource it but it's possible to do it on your own as well. For that, you can identify the websites that would benefit from the content on your blog and simply email pitching them your article.

This may look like emailing a colleague asking to share your article on their website or social media or even turning to an online publication that writes on a similar topic. Undoubtfully, this will require creativity on your part, but it's possible!

Social media is another great way to share your blog posts. You can link to your article in your posts or create social media posts based on your article to grow your followers on different platforms.

Conclusion

Creating a therapy blog can be a tremendous asset to your private practice. Not only will it position you as a thought leader and an expert in your field but it will also show people how you can help them.

Right now, over 80% of people turn to Google and other search engines to find health-related topics online, and having a therapy blog will give you access to the people who're actively looking for mental health help.