Therapist Tips to Grow Your Private Practice
For therapists, building and expanding a private practice is a rewarding journey that requires dedication, passion, and strategic planning. As more people recognize the importance of mental health and seek professional help, the demand for qualified therapists continues to rise. To capitalize on this opportunity and achieve long-term success, it's essential to implement effective growth strategies. Today, we’ll explore proven methods to help you grow your private practice and thrive in the competitive field of mental health.
Define Your Niche
To grow your private practice, defining your niche is a really important first step. It involves identifying a specific area of expertise and specialization that aligns with your passions and skills. In other words: what makes you different, and how can you lean into that? Here are a few ways to think more about this:
1. Self-Reflection
Make a list with three columns, and label them “interests,” “strengths,” and “experiences.” Now, write out all of the things that come to mind for each of those categories, regardless of whether they’re modalities, things clients have said about you, or things you want to do in the future.
2. Identify Your Passion
After looking over your list, what are you most passionate about? Circle your top three.
3. Market Research:
Now it’s time to find out what the other therapists in your area are doing. Do you notice there is an over-abundance of therapists specializing in childhood trauma? If that’s your specialty too, you’ll need to think about how to make yourself stand out. Do you specialize in seeing LGBTQ clients, or children and teens? What are the current trends in mental health in your area? Check on what everyone else is doing so you can make sure whatever you pick is different enough to stand out.
4. Think about your ideal client
You may have done this a little in step 3, but now it’s time to dig even deeper. Your ideal client can make even the most generic specialties unique. You specialize in adjustment disorders, but you prioritize elders? Now you’re definitely going to stand out. Think about your ideal client’s interests, passions, the ways they react to problems, and how they would behave in therapy. If you’ve ever treated your ideal client before, then focus on appealing to them, even if they stopped seeing you years ago.
Create a Professional Website
A professional website serves as the face of your practice, making it easier for potential clients to find you and inquire about services. It is an integral part of growing your private practice. Make sure your website is user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and includes vital information such as your credentials, services offered, contact details, and office hours. A few tips I always like to share when creating a website include:
Make sure your services offered are in a drop-down, with a different page for each service. This increases the chances for one of your pages to end up on the front page of Google, provided you did your SEO right.
Include a link to your client portal somewhere (I usually do the bottom of the page,) so that clients can easily find it and don’t have to email you to ask for the link any time they need it.
Make sure your “Contact Me” button is on every page and very easy-to-see. Potential clients should have no problem figuring out how to send an inquiry
Include photos of you, your office, and anything else potential clients might need to see in order to visualize seeing you. This is a great way to stand out, and if a lead is between you and someone identical, but you have office photos, they are definitely more likely to pick you.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
I could write an entire blog post about how important SEO is to grow your private practice, but here are the basics:
1. Keyword Research: Use tools like Answer the Public, Google Trends, and Pinterest Trends to determine what keywords are popular right now. I recommend using a keyword that is 3-4 words long, as they’ll usually be a little less competitive than shorter ones. That’s why I love Answer the Public so much; you put in your 1-2 word focus and they’ll show you all the different long-tail keywords you could use.
2. Keyword Optimization: This is basically just incorporating that keyword you picked naturally into your blog post. Google will ignore things like commas and periods when scanning your article, so if you need to break your keyword up to make it sound natural, you are welcome to do so. You want to have it in your title, in your introduction, and 3-5 times throughout the rest of the article. Also include it in your headings if you can.
3. Link-Building: Include 2-4 links from your own website and 2-4 links from other reputable websites in your article. If you can, I would also suggest reaching out to have other websites link back to your blog post as well. There are many ways to do this, and it is very much worth doing if you can.
Leverage Social Media
Social media is a great way to showcase your expertise and grow your private practice. Create engaging content, share helpful tips, and participate in discussions related to mental health and therapy. You can use whatever platforms you’re comfortable with, but most professionals recommend one “temporary,” and one “evergreen” platform to start.
Temporary platforms include Instagram, Facebook, and other platforms where people won’t naturally come across the content again. Conversely, evergreen platforms include Youtube, blogs, Twitter, Reddit, Linkedin, and other places where your content is likely to pop up again even a few years later.
Client Testimonials and Reviews
Encouraging clients to leave reviews is generally considered unethical and violates APA and NASW ethics codes, so it can be really challenging to grow your private practice this way. Google reviews in particular are a huge help and really boost the amount of internet traffic you’ll see, so it is important to do your best to increase the number of those you get. A few ethical ways to encourage more reviews include:
1. Make it easy for clients: You can leave instructions or a link to your Google Business Profile on your website.
2. Manage negative reviews: You will receive a negative review eventually, but thankfully you can minimize their impact. Make sure you respond politely and quickly. Thank the customer and apologize for their experience.
3. Thank your clients directly: You can thank your clients directly, as long as you do so in a HIPPA-compliant message.
Conclusion
Strategic planning and a ton of trial and error are required to grow your private practice as a therapist. From defining your niche, to creating a great website and getting reviews, it is a lot to handle on top of running your business and seeing clients.
If you’d like some of that taken off your plate, reach out! I specialize in brand identity and social media design, and I’d love to help you make your brand feel cohesive, unique, and genuine to you. I can also help you streamline your content creation process with custom-made Canva templates and a lesson on bulk creation.