When somebody finally searches for a therapist near them, the listing on Google Maps is usually what they read first, and the decision to call or close the tab often gets made right there. That listing has an unusual job here: be findable, be exact about who you see and where, and never say anything about anyone who has walked through the door. We build the listing out, keep it true as the practice changes, and work inside the rules your profession puts around client testimonials.
Book a free consultation →The listing was designed for businesses that want walk-ins: come in, look around, tell everybody about it. A therapy practice is none of those things. Most of the trouble below comes from a setting built for a restaurant sitting on a practice with a locked door, a waitlist, and a confidentiality obligation.
Say a solo practice renames itself from the founder's name to a group name and moves one suite down the hall. That is two listings: the old one with the reviews and the wrong door number, the new one with the right address and nothing else. Nothing dramatic happened. It never got cleaned up.
Not all of that is listing work. Directory consistency, schema, and where the practice sits across the wider map belong to local SEO for therapists. When the page the listing points at is the weak part, that is websites for therapists. The general-purpose version of this service lives on the Google Business Profile hub, and everything a practice might do past search is on mental health marketing.
This part is not strategy. It is a short list of fields, and each one is a decision somebody has to make on purpose instead of accept.
The site has to agree with all of it, and its structured data carries the practice name, address and phone, which our free local schema generator writes out. The pages behind that link get built the way how we build describes.
A profile is not a project you finish. Left alone it drifts, and stale is the impression it leaves on the person deciding whether to call. The ongoing half is dull work.
On sites we manage, that last part lands where everything else does, so a call from the listing and a form fill from the website get counted together. That reporting side is lead generation work, and the wider program around it is local SEO.
One thing to be clear about before the numbers. We do not charge a monthly fee for watching a listing, and there is no per-listing price on this page. The listing and the website repeat the same facts, and metering one of them by itself would be an invoice looking for a job. The continuing work is carried inside a local SEO engagement instead.
For most practices, ongoing SEO or local SEO runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month. In a competitive metro, or for a group with more than one office and therefore more than one listing, it runs $3,500 to $7,500 a month. The profile work on this page sits inside that, next to the pages the listing points at.
A cleanup can be bought once, on its own, when that is genuinely the whole job. That means getting the listing claimed and the ownership back from whoever set it up years ago, closing or merging what is duplicated, settling the categories and the services list, and filling in hours, photos and attributes properly. We read the listing before quoting and then quote it flat. What we will not do afterward is attach a small recurring charge to it, because holidays, public edits and fresh duplicates are the reason continuing management exists, and on their own they do not add up to a product.
Everything is month to month. No long-term contract, and the profile, the website, the content and every login belong to you. If you want the reasoning behind those numbers before any call, how much SEO costs goes through it in detail, and the free what should you pay tool will size an SEO budget before anybody talks to you.
Google runs the local ranking system and does not take instructions from vendors. Physical distance from the searcher is part of it, and no office is near everybody at once, so a practice on one side of a metro is less likely to be shown to somebody searching from the other side, no matter who manages the listing. There is no position for sale here, from us or from anyone, and hearing one promised is a good reason to end the conversation. What we will commit to is a listing that is accurate, complete, consistent with the website, watched for changes, and reported in numbers you can check against your own phone log.
Two things worth knowing about how we work. We run first-party lead dashboards on more than 20 of the sites we manage, so calls and form fills get counted in one place rather than guessed at. And Kelly Webmasters and Marketers is Orlando-based, working with local service businesses nationwide since 2008, so this gets done by hand for each business instead of pushed out on one schedule to every account.
Ask an assistant for a therapist in your city and it is reading the same fields. When the listing and the website disagree about hours, address, or who you see, neither one is a confident answer for it to repeat, and that side of the work is AI search. Two of our free tools cover part of that without anybody speaking to you: the website report card reads the site the listing points at, and the AI visibility checker looks at whether assistants name you at all. The rest of the free tools are open to use as well. Otherwise request a quote, or call or text (407) 694-2055, and we will start by reading your listing back to you.
Not under Google's own guidelines, which limit profiles to businesses that make in-person contact with the people they serve during stated hours. A practice that works entirely online is not eligible, and a virtual office or rented mailbox set up to qualify is the kind of arrangement that gets listings suspended. If you see clients in person even one day a week, that office may qualify, with hours showing only when somebody is there. Otherwise the local work shifts to the site and the directories.
Google asks many businesses to verify by recording a short video showing the location, any signage, and evidence that you have access to the space, sometimes with business paperwork in the shot. It is awkward for a home office or a rented room inside a shared suite, so it is worth deciding what you will film before you begin. A failed attempt usually means waiting before you can try again.
The one people see in the real world: on the door, on the letterhead, on the paperwork you would hold up during verification. Google's guidelines for a sole practitioner working under a brand allow one listing that pairs the practice name with yours, rather than two listings splitting the same reviews. What the name cannot carry is a city, a specialty, or a phrase like anxiety therapy, which reads as keyword stuffing and can get the listing suspended.
That usually comes from a suggested edit Google accepted, sometimes from a duplicate listing being merged, and occasionally from an old listing under a former name. It is fixable from inside the profile, and worth catching quickly, because somebody looking for a therapist reads closed and stops looking. Checking for exactly this is part of what ongoing management is for, instead of finding out when a caller mentions it.
There are two separate things to sort out. On the practice listing, the name comes out of the description, the services, and the photos. Then there is any listing that existed for that clinician individually, which may need to be closed, moved, or handed over depending on how it was set up originally. Reviews stay attached to whichever listing received them, so this is worth doing properly rather than quickly.
Yes. The new listing gets verified at the office where you see clients in person, under the name on your door, with services, hours and attributes filled in. Any practitioner listing you held at the group gets moved or closed depending on who controls it, and reviews stay with whichever listing received them. That setup is quoted on its own, and keeping the new listing current afterward is ongoing work inside a local SEO engagement.
Google Business Profile services · Therapists and mental health practices: industry overview · SEO for therapists and mental health practices · Local SEO for therapists and mental health practices · Websites for therapists and mental health practices · Reputation management for therapists and mental health practices · Social media for therapists and mental health practices · What should you pay? (free tool)
Call or text (407) 694-2055, or request a quote, and we will hold your Google Business Profile up against the way the practice really runs: the address you want public, the hours the phone gets answered, the clinicians still on staff, and any duplicate left under an old name. No contract, and no obligation to do any of it with us.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.