Content Marketing for Therapists: Start With What Is Already Published About You

Content marketing for therapists is publishing plain, accurate answers to the questions a prospective client has before they contact you: who you work with, what a first session is like, what it costs, whether you take their insurance, and how to reach you. Done well, a person arrives at your contact form already knowing whether you are a fit.

Most guides stop at what you write yourself. That is half the job. A good share of what people read about your practice was written by someone else: your Psychology Today profile, the other directories that list you, and the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI give when someone asks about you. Those are content too. They describe you, and if they are wrong, they describe you wrongly.

This guide covers both:

1. Write answers on your own site.
2. Audit and correct what is already published about you elsewhere.

Then it covers what the ethics codes rule out, and how to tell whether any of it is working.

About a third of U.S. adults (32%) used an AI chatbot for health information in the past year, and 16% used one for information about their mental health, according to a KFF poll of 1,343 adults fielded February 24 to March 2, 2026. The same KFF poll found that adults under 30 were about three times as likely as adults 50 and older to use AI for mental health information (28% against 8%).

Two more findings from that KFF poll matter for a practice. Most of the people who asked an AI tool about mental health (58%) did not follow up with a doctor or other health professional afterward, KFF reported in March 2026. And 77% of adults said they were concerned about the privacy of personal medical information given to AI tools, according to the same KFF poll.

What this means for you: for some of the people looking for a therapist, an AI answer is the first description of your field, and sometimes of your practice, that they read. It is built from pages that already exist: your site, your directory profiles, and whatever else is published about you. You cannot write the answer. You can make sure the pages it draws on are accurate.

The ethics codes already treat these listings as your statements. The APA Ethics Code, Standard 5.01(a), names directory listings, along with advertising, brochures and published materials, as public statements, and says psychologists do not knowingly make public statements that are false, deceptive or fraudulent. Standard 5.02(a) adds that psychologists who engage others to create or place public statements promoting their practice keep professional responsibility for those statements. That covers an agency or a freelance writer you hire to write your marketing.

The ACA Code of Ethics, Standard C.3.c, goes a step further for counselors: when feasible, counselors make reasonable efforts to ensure that statements made by others about them or about the counseling profession are accurate.

Read together, the standards point to a task most marketing guides never mention: check what is published about you, and correct what is wrong. A Psychology Today profile that still lists an insurance panel you left, a directory that shows an office you closed, or an AI answer that gives last year's fee is not a marketing problem first. It is a statement about your practice that is no longer true.

WebsiteTherapy handles the AI side of that audit: alongside the posts it writes in your practice's voice, it checks what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI say about the practice and drafts a fix for anything that is wrong or out of date. Directory profiles stay yours to correct. You can run the same audit by hand. Here is how.

1. List every place you appear. Your Psychology Today profile, every other directory, your Google Business Profile, insurance panel and network listings, a group practice's staff page, and any old site that still resolves.
2. Write down what is true today. Your name and license as they appear on the license, the practice name, address or telehealth-only status, the states you can see clients in, fees, insurance, specialties, whether you are taking new clients, and how to reach you. This is the one record everything else is checked against.
3. Ask the AI tools what a client would ask. In ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, ask about your practice by name: what it offers, what it costs, whether it takes a given insurance, how to book. Save each answer with the date.
4. Compare, line by line. Mark each place that is wrong, out of date or missing something a client needs.
5. Write one correction note per wrong place. Where it is, what it says now, what it should say, and the source of the truth (your license record, your fee schedule, your site). One note per place keeps the fixes small enough to finish.
6. Fix what you control, then the sources AI leans on. You can edit your own profiles directly. You cannot edit an AI answer. What you can do is correct the pages it draws on, starting with your own site and your directory profiles, and check the answer again later.
7. Repeat on a schedule. Profiles drift when your practice changes and nobody updates them. Re-check after any change to fees, insurance, location or availability, and at least every few months otherwise. The monthly routine below is the light version; this is the full audit.

If your Psychology Today profile is the one most in need of work, we cover it field by field in our Psychology Today profile guide. For the AI side on its own, see how to run an AI visibility audit.

Your own site is the one place you control every word. Start with the questions people ask before they reach out, in their words, not yours:

• Who do you work with, and what do you help with?
• What happens in a first session?
• What does it cost, and do you take my insurance?
• Do you see clients online, and in which states?
• How do I get in touch, and what happens after I do?

Answer each one in the first sentence, then add detail. A clear FAQ page covers most of these in one place. Blog posts come after that, and the next section covers where their topics come from.

You do not need a separate set of tricks for AI search. Google's own guidance on AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations necessary: the same search basics apply, along with helpful, reliable, people-first content. Accurate answers on your own pages are that content.

Once the basic questions are answered on your site, blog topics come from three places: the conditions you treat, the approaches you use, and the questions clients ask you.

• The conditions you treat. For each one, write what it is, how a person might recognize it in themselves, and how it is treated, in plain words. One condition gives you three posts, each answering a question a person types into a search box.
• The approaches you use. For each approach you are trained in, write what it is, who it suits, and what a session looks like. These reach people who already want therapy and are choosing a kind.
• The questions clients ask you. Keep a running list from consultation calls, with no identifying detail: "Do I have to talk about my childhood?", "How long does therapy take?", "Is it okay to cry in a session?" A question one person asks you is often one other people are searching for.

Write in the words people search, not in clinical terms. A person is more likely to type "why do I feel numb" than "alexithymia", or "relationship anxiety" than "attachment-based couples therapy". Put their phrase in the title and the first sentence, then introduce the clinical term inside the post.

Awareness months give a post a reason to exist this month: May is Mental Health Awareness Month in the U.S., and many specialties have their own. Publish a few weeks ahead, so the post is on your site when people start searching.

Pick a pace you can keep. The monthly routine below assumes one piece a month, every month, not a burst and then silence.

Keyword research for a practice does not need a paid tool. Three free sources cover most of it:

1. Google autocomplete. Type the start of a question about your specialty and note how Google completes it. Each completion is a phrase people search.
2. People also ask. The related questions Google shows under a search are questions people ask about that topic. Each one can be a section, or a post of its own.
3. Google Search Console. Once your site has a few months of data, the Performance report lists the searches that already bring people to your pages. A search that shows up often while your page sits on page two or lower is a candidate for its own post.

Our SEO guide for therapists covers the search side in more depth. To see which posts lead to inquiries, not just visits, pair Search Console with Google Analytics: our GA4 guide for therapists covers the setup.

Some content that works for other businesses does not belong on a therapy practice's site.

• Testimonials from clients. APA Standard 5.05 bars soliciting testimonials from current therapy clients or others vulnerable to undue influence. ACA Standard C.3.b says counselors who use testimonials do not solicit them from current or former clients or anyone vulnerable to undue influence. NASW Standard 4.07(b) bars soliciting testimonial endorsements from current clients or others vulnerable to undue influence, including asking a client for consent to reuse something they said earlier as an endorsement.
• Client stories and case examples. APA Standard 4.07 bars disclosing confidential, personally identifiable client information in writings and other public media unless reasonable steps are taken to disguise the person, the person has consented in writing, or there is legal authorization. On a marketing page, the simplest rule is to write about the problem and the approach, not about anyone you have seen.

One more rule of our own: a post can explain what an approach involves, not how much better a reader will feel, or how soon.

The same standards apply to anything written for you. Under Standard 5.02(a), a draft from an agency is still your responsibility, so read it, and anything an AI tool drafts for you, as your own statement before it goes live.

Page views tell you that a page was found. They do not tell you that it helped anyone decide to call. For a practice, the number that matters is inquiries: contact form submissions, calls and booking requests.

• Count inquiries each month, and note which page each one came from where you can see it.
• Add an optional "How did you hear about us?" field to your contact form, with no health questions on it.
• When a person says "I saw on a directory that you take my insurance," and you do not, that is a correction to make, not just a conversation to have.

A post that brings few visitors and a steady trickle of good-fit inquiries is doing its job. A post with thousands of visits and no inquiries is not.

1. Write one page or post that answers a question a prospective client asked you this month.
2. Check your top directory profiles and ask one AI tool about your practice.
3. Correct anything that has gone out of date, one note per place.
4. Count last month's inquiries and where they came from.

Four steps, once a month. It is a routine, not a content calendar. Skip a month and pick it up the next.

WebsiteTherapy does the writing and the checking as part of a practice's site: posts written on a schedule in your voice, and a check of what ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI say about you, with a fix drafted for anything wrong or out of date. See what is included, or read how it works. Either way, the audit above works the same with a notebook and an afternoon.

• American Psychological Association, Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct (amended effective January 1, 2017)
• American Counseling Association, ACA Code of Ethics (2014)
• National Association of Social Workers, Code of Ethics, 4.07 Solicitations
• KFF, Poll: 1 in 3 Adults Are Turning to AI Chatbots for Health Information (March 25, 2026)
• Google Search Central, AI features and your website (updated December 10, 2025)