Psychology Today holds the directory searches in every city and the health authorities hold the general terms. Neither can explain how your intake works, whether you bill direct, or what a first session is like, and those are the pages a nervous first-time client reads twice.
Licensing is provincial, virtual therapy is provincial too, and each college publishes advertising standards. Everything is written for the province you are registered in and checked by you before it goes live.
The searches in Canada
The shapes therapists are found by in Canada. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher
puts there: the town, the suburb, the matter, the treatment.
- therapist near me
- psychologist [city] covered by insurance
- registered psychotherapist [city]
- online therapy [province]
What is different in Canada
Coverage is the question
Clients search whether extended health benefits cover a psychologist, a psychotherapist or a social worker, because the answer differs by designation and by plan. A page that says which designations you hold, what a plan typically covers and whether you bill direct answers the question that decides the call.
Virtual therapy widens the map
A registered therapist can see clients across the province by video, so the pages are written for the province as well as the city, and the profile’s service area says so. Nothing claims a province the registration does not cover.
The problem is the page
Anxiety, couples, trauma, grief, ADHD assessment. Each is a search made by somebody who has named their problem, and each needs its own page in plain language, without promising an outcome.
What a month of work covers for therapists in Canada
- An issue page written or rewritten each month, in plain words, checked by the practitioner before publishing
- Google Business Profile: categories, services, session formats, photos of the rooms, questions answered
- Practitioner pages with training, approach and what a first session is like
- Citations on the professional and local directories, identical everywhere
- Technical fixes: booking and enquiry forms that work on a phone, speed, practice markup, privacy
- A monthly Search Console report of the issue searches you now appear for, and the enquiries behind them
The industry page, SEO for therapists, has the
problems and the questions in full; the country page, SEO services in Canada, has the search landscape
in Canada for every trade.
The search landscape in Canada
Seasonality decides the calendar
Pages for a seasonal service need to be written and indexed months before the season. Publishing a snow removal page in November is publishing it late.
Province first, city second
A page per province that a business genuinely serves, with city pages underneath only where there is real service, reads as true to both a buyer and to Google. A footer listing every city in Canada does not.
French is a separate job
Quebec search is a different campaign with different pages, written by somebody who writes French natively. We do the English side and say so plainly rather than machine-translating.
Cities in Canada with their own page
Each is written for the way that city searches and for the trades that search there most.
Working with us from Canada
SEO happens in your accounts and on your website, so nobody needs to visit. We scope the
work on a video call in your hours, send a written quote, and then work month by month
with a call whenever you want one. The result is judged on the enquiries in your own
records, never on a ranking report.
If you would rather do the first part yourself, the Local SEO for therapists guide is
the list we start from.