Your future clients may have been considering therapy for a while. When they open their phone and type “counsellor near me”, what they initially see is not a list of websites, it’s a map with three local counsellors pinned to it, and underneath, their photos, their hours and how far away they are.
That block is called the local pack, and it sits above everything else. Getting into it does not cost anything. It is one free listing, called a Google Business Profile, and for many private practices it is the highest return hour of work available.
A Business Profile will not fix a website nobody can find. What it does is put you in front of people at the moment they have decided to look for support, which is the moment that matters most in our work. People rarely search for a therapist casually.
Why it does more than a website alone
Three things happen when the profile is right.
- You appear on the map. Google’s local results are drawn from Business Profiles, not from websites. No profile, no pin. Your site could be beautiful and it will still not appear there.
- You answer the questions people will want to know. Where are you? Can I park? Do you see people in the evening? Is your room accessible? A profile with real photos and honest hours settles any small worries before anyone has to make contact, and every barrier removed makes the enquiry more likely.
- It’s an essential step for other services to validate your business. Directories, your website and increasingly AI assistants all cross-check the same details. When your name, address and phone number match everywhere, it makes a massive difference to your general search visibility. When they don’t, you hurt your online authority (More on building backlinks to follow).
Setting up your Google business listing
This will likely need an hour to complete. You will need a Google account that is owned by you and not your web designer, this account will form part of a wider set of Google tools such as Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics (more about these later).
Find out whether you already exist.
Search your practice name and your town. Google generates listings automatically from other sources, so there may be one out there with your old address on it. If you find it, use “Claim this business” rather than making a second one. Duplicates dilute you and are tedious to merge later.
Create the profile.
Go to google.com/business and follow the prompts. Everything after this can be edited later directly from Google Search, which is where the profile now lives. Search your own practice name while signed in and you will see an “Edit profile” panel. There is no separate dashboard to remember.
Use your real business name.
“Your Therapy Practice” rather than “Your Therapy Practice Anxiety Counselling Bodmin Cornwall”. Keyword-stuffed names get reported and edited by Google, and the accounts that lose listings almost always started here.
Choose your primary category carefully.
This one field does more for your visibility than anything else on the profile. Counsellor, Psychotherapist, Mental Health Service, Marriage or Relationship Counsellor and Family Counsellor are the ones that come up for us. Pick the single closest as your primary, then add two or three others as secondary. If you mostly see individual adults, Counsellor or Psychotherapist as primary is usually right. Search your own town and see what the practices already ranking have chosen. That is free market research.
Decide what to do about your address.
If you have rooms clients come to, enter the full address and drop the pin accurately. If you work online, or from home, choose the option to hide your address and set a service area instead. You can list up to twenty towns. Keep them to places you would realistically travel to or draw clients from. Covering the whole of the South West when you practise in Truro does not help, and Google discounts wildly broad areas anyway.
Verify the listing.
Usually a short video showing your premises, sometimes a postcard, occasionally a phone call. Video verification is quicker but wants to see signage, the street and you accessing the space. Nothing appears publicly until this is done, so do it the same day rather than letting the profile sit half-built.
Write the description.
You get 750 characters. Write for the anxious person, not the algorithm. Say who you work with, what they tend to come with, where you are and what a first session is like. Mention your town and your main issues naturally, because Google reads this, but if it reads like a keyword list it will put people off and that costs you more than the ranking gains.
Add photos.
This is where most therapists stop, and it is a mistake. The room. The door people arrive at. The parking. The building from the street, so they recognise it when they pull up. You, looking like yourself. Profiles with photographs get substantially more clicks and calls, and for people who are nervous about walking into an unfamiliar building, a photo of the front door can really help.
Fill in services and links.
Add each thing you offer as a service with a short description: individual counselling, couples counselling, online sessions, walk and talk if you do it. Link your website, and if you use an online booking page, link that as your appointment URL.
The details that actually impact visibility
Set your hours to include evenings and weekends, if you genuinely work them.
People search for a therapist after work and at weekends, which is precisely when most profiles show as closed. Google lets people filter by “open now”, and a closed profile is quietly removed from those results. If you see clients until 8pm on a Tuesday, say so. If you answer enquiries on a Saturday morning, that counts too.
Opening your hours out to cover evenings and weekends can really improve your visibility, but if someone in distress rings at 7pm because your profile said you were open, and gets nothing, you could harm your reputation. Set the hours you can actually be reached, then use the “more hours” fields to add anything specific if it applies. As a sole practitioner, it’s unlikely you will be able to answer the phone during working hours, a voicemail message that is welcoming and friendly, but that may also include signposting for clients in crisis, may be worth considering.
Add holiday hours before you close.
A profile showing “open” on Christmas Eve when you are not, or worse, a red “temporarily closed” flag left up after a break, does more harm than a fortnight of no posts.
Post something once a month.
A short update, a new blog post, a note that you have space. Posts do not transform rankings, but activity signals a live business, and one a month is a habit you can keep. Twelve a year beats four in January and nothing after.
Answer the questions section, including your own.
Anyone can ask a question on your profile and anyone can answer, which is not a comfortable arrangement. Get ahead of it. Post the questions you are asked every week, and answer them yourself: how much is a session, do you offer a free call, do you have a waiting list, is there parking.
Reviews need thought, not avoidance.
Reviews are one of the strongest local ranking signals, and they are also the trickiest part of this for us. Never ask a current client. The power imbalance makes it an unfair request, and it puts their confidentiality in the hands of a public webpage. What is more reasonable is a soft mention at a well-ended ending, or a line in a follow-up email months later, leaving it entirely open. When someone does leave one, reply briefly and without confirming they were a client. “Thank you for taking the time to write this” is enough. Check your professional body’s guidance, because BACP, UKCP and NCPS all have something to say here and it is worth reading rather than assuming.
What to expect
Give it a few weeks. Local rankings move slowly and are strongly influenced by how close the searcher is to your pin, which is a thing you cannot change. What you can impact is how complete your profile is, active ones that have all key details filled in will usually beat abandoned ones consistently.
Come back to it every three months for ten minutes. Check the hours, add a photo, read the questions. That is the whole maintenance job.
Your setup checklist
- Searched for an existing unclaimed listing before creating a new one
- Profile created under a Google account I control long term
- Business name is my real practice name, with no keywords added
- Primary category chosen, with two or three secondary categories
- Address entered accurately, or hidden with a service area set
- Verification completed
- Description written for the client, mentioning my town and main issues
- At least six photos: the room, the entrance, the building, the parking, me
- Services listed individually with short descriptions
- Website and booking links added
- Hours set honestly, including any evenings and weekends I actually work
- Holiday hours added for the next closure I know about
- Five questions posted and answered in the Q&A section
- Read my professional body’s guidance on client testimonials
- Diary reminder set for a ten minute review in three months
I'm a counsellor based in Cornwall and a co-owner of SessionBase. Before becoming a therapist, I spent over 20 years working as a designer crafting brands and websites for clients. I publish guides for counsellors to help improve their visibility online to build a successful private practice.