Four Questions Every Therapist Should Be Able to Answer About Their Website
It can be frustrating for all of us. Over and over we hear how hard it is to find a therapist. We hear that waiting lists for therapy are months long. Meanwhile, the vast majority of clinicians in private practice I hear from have plenty of openings. Too many openings. Industry-wide, there is a reported slow-down in new client inquiries that has only grown over the past 6–9 months. It’s hard to understand how these things go together.
Fewer inquiries can mean many things. The economy plays a role in shaping who can afford private pay therapy — and increasingly, insurance-based therapy as well. Large tech platforms are competing for clients who might have otherwise found their way to a solo therapy practice. And online search — the primary way most clients find therapists — is changing in ways that are difficult to track, and even harder to interpret. As if that weren’t enough, there is now significant confusion and concern about AI: not just whether ChatGPT and Claude are changing how people search for therapy, but whether clients might begin turning to these platforms instead of a therapist altogether.
These are valid concerns, and they aren’t easy to address. The conversation about AI and search rarely centers the concerns of mental health professionals. Our field is unique: people don’t look for a therapist the way they look for a restaurant or a shoe store. The marketing frameworks built for e-commerce don’t always work for a professional service built on trust, confidentiality, and clinical fit.
Most therapists in private practice didn’t train to be business owners. They trained to do one thing exceptionally well, and the system for getting your practice in front of the people looking for it has never seemed particularly clear. What is a keyword? What does it mean to rank? What is a conversion? The tools that are supposed to help business owners get found online weren’t built with therapists in mind, and it shows.
I’m here to help you understand what your website is doing — or what it should be doing, but isn’t. You don’t need a background in technology to make sense of this. Most of these tools have significantly more features than a therapist in private practice will ever need, which is part of what makes them feel overwhelming. I’m going to focus on four free tools and show you only the features that are relevant to a private practice website. Two of these tools come from Google, and two come from Microsoft. Each one answers a specific question: Are potential clients finding you on Google? Are they taking action when they arrive? Why aren’t more of them converting? And is your website optimized for AI search? Taken together, they give you a clear picture of how your website is performing and where you may be losing potential clients.
The Four Questions
1. Are potential clients finding you on Google?
This is a search visibility question, and Google Search Console answers it.
Google Search Console is a free platform that shows you which search terms are bringing people to your website. It tells you which pages appear in Google search results, how often they appear, what position they appear in, and how often people click on them. It is separate from Google Analytics, and for most therapists trying to understand their visibility online, it is often the more useful tool.
Most therapists who open Google Search Console for the first time learn something surprising. They may discover that a page is generating traffic from searches they never intended to target, or that a page they assumed was performing well is barely appearing in search results at all. Understanding how people are actually finding your website helps you make better decisions about where to focus your efforts.
Google Search Console also shows whether Google has successfully indexed your pages and alerts you to technical problems that could limit your visibility in search results. Most private practice websites are relatively simple, and the information you need is usually straightforward once you know where to find it.
I’ll cover Google Search Console in depth in the first YouTube video in this series.
2. Are your website visitors reaching out to schedule?
The process of a website visitor taking the next step — contacting you, scheduling a consultation, or requesting an appointment — is called a conversion. Whether your website visitors are actually reaching out is a conversion question, and Google Analytics 4 (commonly called GA4) can help you answer it.
GA4 tells you how many people visited your site, which pages they read, and roughly how long they stayed. That’s useful context. But for a solo therapy practice, the number that tells you whether your website is doing its job is more specific: are visitors clicking through to request a consultation?
There's one common problem, however. If your website’s booking link sends visitors to a scheduling page through SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, or a similar platform, those clicks often disappear from your data as soon as someone leaves your website. GA4 doesn't track them automatically. As a result, many therapists have no way of knowing whether their website is generating consultation requests or which pages are responsible when it does.
Fortunately, there's a straightforward solution. You can create a custom event that tracks clicks to your scheduling page and designate it as a Key Event in GA4. Once this is set up, you'll be able to see which of your website pages are generating consultation requests and which are not. The setup isn't especially difficult, but Google doesn't make it particularly obvious.
I’ll walk through the setup — including the specific step inside GA4 that’s easy to miss — in the GA4 video in this series.
3. How can you get more of your right-fit website visitors to reach out?
Most therapists think SEO is the key to getting more clients. SEO is important, but it only helps people find your website. Once they arrive, your website still has to guide them to take the next step.
If website visitors leave after a few seconds, can't find what they're looking for, or never contact you, then attracting more traffic won't solve the problem. The issue may not be visibility. It may be what happens after someone lands on your website.
This is a user experience question (often abbreviated as “UX”), and Microsoft Clarity helps answer it.
Clarity is a free tool from Microsoft that records the mouse cursor movements of actual visitor sessions on your website. You can watch how a real person navigates your homepage — where they scrolled, where they paused, what they clicked, and where they left. It also generates heatmaps that show you, across all visitors, which parts of your pages get attention and which are ignored.
I see a few common patterns on therapy websites: visitors sometimes scroll past a contact button without clicking it, spend time on a page that has no clear next step, or leave quickly from a page that ranks well in Google but doesn’t match what they were searching for. These are fixable problems, but you can’t fix what you can’t see.
I’ll cover Microsoft Clarity — including what to look for and what to ignore — in its own video in this series.
4. Can AI platforms find your website?
Bing Webmaster Tools is Microsoft's equivalent of Google Search Console. It allows you to submit your website to Bing, monitor how it appears in search results, and identify indexing problems.
Why does that matter? Because ChatGPT's web search capabilities rely heavily on Bing's index. If your website isn't registered with Bing Webmaster Tools, you're making it harder for AI-powered search platforms to find and understand your content.
If you're wondering how to improve your visibility in AI-powered search tools, Bing Webmaster Tools is one of the few concrete steps you can take today. It's not a guarantee that ChatGPT or other AI systems will recommend your practice, but it ensures that your website is included in the search index they rely on.
AI search is evolving rapidly, and nobody can say with confidence exactly how these systems will work a year from now. But registering your website with Bing Webmaster Tools is free, takes less than thirty minutes, and is a sensible step for any private practice that wants to remain visible as search continues to change.
I’ll cover Bing Webmaster Tools in the final video in this series.
What These Tools Have in Common
None of these tools cost anything. None require advanced technical knowledge. And none of them provide a complete picture by themselves.
Each tool answers a different question:
Google Search Console: Are people finding your website in search results?
Google Analytics 4: What are visitors doing once they arrive?
Microsoft Clarity: Where are visitors getting stuck or leaving?
Bing Webmaster Tools: Can AI-powered search platforms find your site?
Together, these tools give you a practical framework for understanding how your website is performing and where improvements are likely to have the greatest impact.
What Comes Next
The goal of this series isn't to turn you into an SEO specialist or web analyst. It's to help you understand the handful of metrics that matter most for a private practice website so you can make informed decisions about where to focus your attention.
If you're getting fewer inquiries than you were a year ago, these tools can help you determine whether the problem is visibility, conversion, user experience, changing search behavior, or some combination of all four.
This post is the hub for a four-part video series. I'll update it with links as each video is released. Each video covers one tool in depth: how to set up the tool, what it shows you, what to pay attention to, and what you can ignore.
Google Search Console for Therapists — understanding which searches are finding you and what to do with that information
GA4 for Therapists — the conversion metric that tells you whether your website is working
Microsoft Clarity for Therapists — watching your visitors so you can stop guessing about your website
Bing Webmaster Tools for Therapists — an often overlooked tool that’s important for AI search
Clinique Digital Consulting builds websites for therapists in private practice: sites that get found, convert visitors into consultations, and that you'll know how to manage.
