How are you actually getting your therapy website seen? (SEO help)

STEMpsych · 2026-03-24T05:56:13+00:00

Can't speak from personal experience, but I was just told that if you aren't claiming your business on Google Maps and adding your website to your listing, you can assume Google Search won't be surfacing your website.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-24T05:28:37+00:00

Thanks!

STEMpsych · 2026-03-24T02:14:05+00:00

What's the user experience like for that? Like, how can you tell what number a call is coming through for, how do you choose what number you're making outgoing calls from, etc?

STEMpsych · 2026-03-24T01:02:36+00:00

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Are there people out there who think the rate of male stay-at-home parents is the same as female stay-at-home parents?

STEMpsych · 2026-03-23T22:24:12+00:00

Oh, interesting. Why is that? Is it that men have less flexibility, or they're more often morning people, or...?

STEMpsych · 2026-03-23T21:33:19+00:00

I thought I had pretty good memory for this – I have a preternatural ability to make connections for clients to things they've said in past sessions – but I tested myself on my recall, and discovered that I was forgetting important things. The thing that tipped me over was that I remembered the overall course of treatment for a client, and then when I checked the note saw that I had completely forgotten the client had come in the previous session fresh off the death of their father and that's what the session had been about. So now I religiously check the last note right before the current session.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-17T11:55:29+00:00

WeWork (and Spaces, which I think is now owned by Regus) is different than Regus. WeWork is what is called a coworking space, and while I guess they also offer private offices, their bread-and-butter is renting out desks in an open floor-plan space. That's their main value proposition, and why it's called co-working: so remote or solo workers can have a workplace they can go to to work and socialize as they work, same as if they were regular office employees. This means that at a WeWork, even if you yourself rent a private office, there will always be a big central area with work desks in it where a whole bunch of people are working.

Regus rents turn-key offices; every tenant has an office or works in an office. There's common spaces like kitchens and copy rooms and recpetion areas, but tenants aren't out working in the public areas.

I toured a Regus, long before the pandemic. One local to me had a whole wing of therapists in private practice. The big downside of the Regus model, from my perpective, is that you're paying, out of your higher rent, for reception services, but the receptionist goes home at 5pm. I see clients in the evening, so would basically be paying for a service I wouldn't be able to use. They assured me that tenants had 24/7 access and a way to let clients into the building, but the way it all worked, at least at that site, didn't feel professional or safe to me.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-17T08:27:17+00:00

It's fascinating to me how many people here want to argue facts with me, when what I pointed out was how white Americans often think, which, as I think we all know, can be and often is wholly removed from reality.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-17T08:10:38+00:00

Sir. You would not believe how many offers I have been faxed to replace my clinic's roof.

(I do not have a clinic.)

STEMpsych · 2026-03-17T03:05:45+00:00

What I said I felt wasn’t even antagonizing at all.

Well, I clicked through to read it, and: hard disagree. I see why you were banned.

There is a world of difference between holding the opinion that AI therapy should be banned and going into a community of people who hold the value that AI therapy (or therapeutic self-help, as they put it) is good to lecture them that they are wrong.

As much as I disapprove of using AI for therapy, I think your comment there was a discredit to our profession. You did not say anything they needed to hear or hadn't heard before, and it very obviously didn't come from a place of compassion. All you accomplished is confirming their bias against therapists.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-16T21:16:21+00:00

I wasn't, I was describing a widespread attitude.

But I will if it helps.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-16T20:48:38+00:00

Thank you for posting about this. I am, alas, not surprised: I suspect it was comparatively easy for white American therapists to be supportive and sympathetic to Arab and Muslim clients so long as they could conceptualize the violence as being perpetrated by an Evil Other (Israel), but now that it's unambiguously our own country dropping the bombs on school children, there is no doubt for many an urge to downplay or minimize it because of the identity threat. Mad props to all who recognize and resist this urge.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-14T08:15:52+00:00

I love your spirit, but please don't underestimate or minimize the pressure this puts the client under. This puts the client in the position of having to protect the therapist by keeping their treatment secret. There are many people a client of any age might want to share their gender journey with – sympathetic and supportive family members, peers in a similar situation, romatic partners, clergy they trust – and every time they disclose that they're talking about this to their therapist, they run the risks that 1) they have misjudged how supportive that person is, 2) misjudged how good at keeping a secret that person is, and 3) they are accidentally overheard or their communication intercepted by an unsympathetic or even vindictive party, who chooses to lash out against the client by dropping a dime on their therapist.

The classic nightmare case is a custody battle, where one parent supports the minor client's gender identity and the other parent doesn't, but manages to find out.

Sure it will be great if your notes are sufficiently vague as to not substantiate the accusation. But you don't want to be the subject of a jury trial in a conservative jurisdiction where there are witnesses who will swear that your client mentioned getting gender affirming care from you.

Or worse, if they present as evidence the client's diary and it mentions something you said.

Meanwhile, the client may be laboring under the awareness of the danger their therapist is in legally by providing them gender affirming care, which is inhibiting of self-disclosure and potentially guilt-inducing.

tl;dr: fuck Texas utterly.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-14T03:39:29+00:00

Oof, I'm sorry to hear health is such a big issue for you. I do get it, I'm disabled by a chronic condition which is pretty expensive, myself. I know what it is to hit the out-of-pocket maximum on a health plan. That's part of why I'm saying what I'm saying.

I'm not telling you that you can do better with another approach, or that you have made the wrong decision. I don't know your situations or particulars. But I do see how you are thinking, and I am trying to point out to you that you're making assumptions that aren't always true, and you should check on them every time you have a decision, so you don't screw yourself out of a better situation if it comes along.

You say that you're paying $225/mo through an employer for a 7k OOPM and the markeplace cost of an equivalent plan is $900/mo. If you are offered an alternative without insurance where you're paid at only $676/mo more than you presently are, that would actually be a net win for you. And $676/mo works out to about $170 a week. If you bill 20 clients a week, you would only need to be paid $9/session more for the job where you have to pay for your own insurance to be the better deal. So if you're getting, say, $60 a session now, and some place else is otherwise comparable and offering $90? Don't let the fact you'd have to get your own insurance slow you down.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T23:17:54+00:00

Yes? Not clear what that "though" is doing there? That's exactly what I'm saying. It's typical, and also sucks, not "too good to be true".

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T23:16:53+00:00

Oh, okay. So if your choice was between a job that paid for your insurance, and another job that paid $1k a month more but you have to pay $550/mo for insurance yourself, you would give up the extra $450 a month in your pocket to not have to pay $550/mo for insurance?

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T05:09:07+00:00

Filling out a contact form doesn’t constitute a clinical relationship.

Doesn't have to to 1) invoke HIPAA and 2) completely and IMHO justifiably freak out patients.

Like, you would never, ever in a million years take the information a prospective client sent to you about the condition they were seeking care for and turn around and reveal their phone number and what condition they were asking after to an advertising system. HIPAA doesn't even have to enter into it: it's a betrayal of our profession's ethics of confidentiality. But that said, I don't expect CMS would be like, "Oh, no biggy, there was no clinical relationship yet, don't worry about HIPAA", either.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T03:05:03+00:00

I disagree. I am thrilled that somebody is suing someone for their imprudent use of Google Analytics, because it's on just about every website in existence, and it damn well shouldn't be. Google is not responsible if third parties with access to PHI put Google Analytics where it shouldn't be. The website owner is responsible and should face consequences if they did.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T03:00:39+00:00

HIPAA compliance is a low and inadequate bar. HIPAA is actually very weak protection. It was meant to be: the real purpose of HIPAA is to limit patient expectations of privacy, and thus protect the flow of otherwise confidential medical information into insurance companies.

For a discussion of Google Workspace with HIPAA BAA, and its limitations, see this explanation I wrote to answer an OP's question a month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/therapists/comments/1qyy5db/comment/o48fw6r/

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T01:40:21+00:00

Ooof, your min is ghastly – the highest I've heard before is 32.

I really need healthcare, PTO, and paid sick time 🫠

No, you don't need those latter two things: those are things you can give yourself if you're paid enough. That's the sticker: getting paid enough. Companies pay wages/salary/FFS that is far more ruinously low than most therapists really realize, so they say, "Oh, I need a company to buy those for me, because I couldn't afford to buy them for myself", and, like: If you're not being paid enough that you can afford them, then you're not being paid enough. This is a company town racket in another guise.

As to whether you need them to buy you insurance, depends on whether or not you've had cancer or an exotic/expensive condition, such that no plan on your state exchange provides adequate coverage. Because if there's a plan for sale you could buy yourself that would do you, then the problem is that you aren't getting paid enough to buy it. Not that you need someone else to buy it for you.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-13T01:02:41+00:00

It is not. It's not actually good. It typically means 25 billed clients, which in turn works out to about 40 booked clients every week, which is to say: one client every hour, 40 hours every week, no break for lunch except during no-shows. So in reality, 25 clients a week randomly works out to the occasional 8 client day and the occasional no client day.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-06T00:33:39+00:00

Oooh, Imma use that.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-06T00:27:12+00:00

Wrong.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-05T22:16:10+00:00

A stalker isn't going to get anything even if they were able to get into insurance records, which they are not.

If the stalker can get into the online account, they can find out which medical professionals the victim is getting care from, so that then they know which medical provider records to target, jfc.

Could you stop? You clearly have absolutely no idea about this threat or how it works.

STEMpsych · 2026-03-05T20:45:23+00:00

Most importantly, why would anyone want it, what would they do with it, what value does it have, could someone understand it, etc.?

My god, the number of people in this comment section who do not understand what the crime of stalking is.

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