When it comes to website analytics, you're a clinician, not a marketer.
But did you know, your website is quietly turning away potential clients every single day?
Without data, you’d never know why. That’s where Google Search Console and Google Analytics help you grow your practice and book more clients. Knowing how to use these tools could be the difference between a waitlist and a half-empty caseload.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics were launched nearly over 20 years ago to help marketers, SEO professionals, and business owners access website’s analytics. These tools can help therapists, private practice owners and mental health agency owners greatly too. The real power comes in using these tools in sequence, both Analytics and Search Console to help you to understand what your target clients are searching for, how you can be more easily found on Google search, as well as opportunities to improve your website’s performance.
How therapists can get setup with Analytics and Search Console
To get access to both these tools, you will need a Gmail account or email connected to your Google account. After, you will add a HTML tag code from Google to the head section in your website or a TXT record to your domain records to verify ownership of the site.
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How are they used and different?
Let’s break down the two platforms for therapists. Essentially, Search Console = how people find you whereas Analytics = the BEHAVIOUR of what they do when they arrive on the site.
Google Search Console for Therapists
Google Seach Console is the monitoring dashboard for all your website metrics, including views, performance, top-performing pages and posts, insights and impressions. It gives you insights to develop strategies, alerts you to help resolve problems and shows the overall condition and health of your site.
Some key Google Search Console metrics for therapists include:
- Keywords (e.g. “therapist near me” “therapist in [city]” “couples therapy online” or “sliding scale therapist”)
- Performance (issues with sitemap, 404 not found pages, broken links, malware, page speed, etc).
- Backlinks – which websites like Psychologytoday.com, TherapyDen, local business directories, guest articles you’ve written, are linking back to your website.
Keywords are fundamentally the most important component to Google Search Console, as it shows you the real language your potential clients use when they’re looking for help like “online therapist for anxiety,” “affordable therapy [city],” or “therapist accepting new clients” as they reflect how people actually search.
Google Analytics for therapists
Google Analytics, on the other hand, is more about how your clients are behaving and interacting with the site. It tracks visitor behaviour once they land on your site such as what they read, how long they stay, and what they do next.
Useful Google Analytics metrics for therapists include:
- # Page Visits – How many times a specific page was viewed like your About page, Services, page, or a specific blog article.
- Page Bounces – When a patient lands on your therapy website page and leaves without interacting further.
- Time spent on pages – How much time, second or minutes a user spend on that page.
- Scroll Depth – How far down a user scrolls on the page.
- Clicks – click on links, buttons or phone number.
- Device and mobile traffic – whether your visitors are arriving on desktop or mobile.
- Website Traffic – overall volume of visitors to your site over a given period.
Analytics only goes so far, and having a human judgement to make critical decision about your data is useful for your website’s performance and growth.
Therapist Example 1: High bounce rate on your therapist bio page.
Perhaps you find on Google Analytics that people do not visit your About or Bio page for very long and actually end up exiting the site. Your website SEO manager might be able to identify that your bio description is too credential-heavy and jargon-laden. Instead, writing copy to be more client-focused and addressing what a client is feeling is exactly what a good website manager would recommend. After rewriting this section on the your About page, analytics could determine if that helps improve your website engagement like increase in scroll depth, increased time on page, increase clicks and decrease in bounces.
Therapist Example 2: You recently pivoted to online but your Google search queries still show in-person queries.
Perhaps you recently decided to in the last year to focus solely on online therapy. However, you’re noticing in the past 6 months on your Google Search Console that your major search queries are unrelated to online therapy and more about your in-person and [city] location-related searches. The fix here is updating homepage copy and headings to prominently feature online therapy content like in H1 and H2 headings as well as FAQs sections on the homepage. A few months from now, the queries could be assessed to see if online therapy improved in searches based on the new updates to the site.
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Therapist Example 3: Google Search Console identified your core service.
Do you offer multiple specialisms? As a generalist, do you offer services ranging from couples therapy, grief counselling, in-person, online and work-related stress to career issues? It’s common for therapist to handle a spectrum of mental health problems, but if these website tools identify which service pages are ranking highest for you – say grief counselling is driving the majority of your traffic, it might be a good sign to pay attention to. When doubling down or niching in that specialization, it could bring in more of the right clients rather than trying to rank equally and spread yourself too thin.
Therapist Example 4: 70% of your clients try to book appointment via phone but they bounce off the page.
A SEO website manager might notice a high usage of mobile device but also high bounce rate on your Book Appointment page. Perhaps they investigated this more to solve the problem and identified that your contact form/questionnaire form or onboarding form works well on desktop but unfortunately the mobile version was not mobile-optimized. The form is too long, too much scroll, and button is cut off on mobile. A quick UX fix can meaningfully increase inquiries and improve clicks on your Book Appointment page all thanks to the help of Google Analytics data and insights.
Ready to see what your website is actually doing?
These are just a few of the patterns that emerge when someone is actively monitoring your website data. Every therapist’s site tells a different story and knowing yours is the first step to growing your practice with intention.
We help therapists set up, interpret, and act on their website data, so you can focus on new and current clients, not dashboards. Get in touch to learn how we can help your practice grow and learn more about our SEO services for theapists.
