Marketing for Therapists: An 8-Step Plan (PT, OT, SLP, MH)

More than 2.4 billion people worldwide live with a health condition that would benefit from rehabilitation, and over one billion live with a mental health condition. How do those people find the right therapist?

Marketing.

That word makes a lot of therapy professionals wince.

When I think of marketing, I picture the spammy ads trying to sell me things I don't need. But marketing a therapy practice is a different thing entirely. The people we're reaching are help-seekers. Many are afraid of being judged, or of ending up in the wrong kind of care.

I've come to see marketing as the first step in the therapeutic process. It's where a future client meets you for the first time. It's where expectations get set and where the therapeutic alliance begins.

I've spent years in the therapy industry watching practices start, grow, stall, and close, and helping a good number of them with their websites along the way. This post is my attempt to write down the blueprint I've seen work. It's eight steps, each with a cost attached, and most of them are free. None of the steps is hard on its own. The hard part is consistency.

To keep this from being abstract, I'll draw on a conversation I had with Erica Stevens, OTR/L, owner of Thrive Occupational Therapy Health and Wellness, for our podcast episode, Marketing Your Therapy Practice. Erica built her practice from a town of 5,000 in rural Iowa into four locations. I highly recommend you listen to the full episode for even more context!

This post is for therapists of all types looking to market their practices. Whether you're a physical therapist, an occupational therapy professional, a speech therapist, or a mental health therapist, this plan is for you.

Why marketing is step one in great patient care

Before we dive into the steps, here are three findings from the research on help-seeking that changed how I think about marketing. Together they make the case that marketing is clinical work, not a side task.

1.) Help-seeking is a relationship, and it starts before the first visit. A 2024 review of 18 systematic reviews on help-seeking for perinatal depression and anxiety (Bina et al., 2024) frames the process as interdependent: what the client assumes about the provider, and what the provider assumes about the client, shape whether help gets sought at all. The barriers clients named are sobering. Fear of being judged. Fear of being seen as an unfit mother and losing custody. The expectation that a provider will be too busy, unwilling to listen, or will minimize their symptoms. The facilitators are the mirror image: continuity of care, a relationship where they feel cared for, and a non-judgmental approach.

As therapists, we assume we're the safe place. The people looking for us don't assume that yet. Your website, your Google listing, and your talk at the local hair salon are where they decide.

2.) Many people don't know your service exists, or that their problem is treatable. A mixed-methods review of 86 studies covering more than 20,000 women in 24 countries (Jouanny et al., 2024) looked at why women with stigmatized pelvic health symptoms don't seek help. Embarrassment and shame were the most cited barrier. Close behind: normalizing the symptom as a fact of childbirth or aging, deciding it wasn't bad enough to bother anyone with, and simply not knowing that treatment existed.

3.) Even people who try to get in often can't. This is the finding I most want you to sit with. In a 2025 audit study (Houtrow et al., 2025), researchers posing as mothers of a three-year-old with cerebral palsy called 140 outpatient clinics in Western Pennsylvania, Eastern Ohio, and West Virginia seeking OT, PT, or speech therapy. Across 173 simulated families and 251 calls, therapy appointment access was a problem for 47.4% of families.

Read that again: almost half the people who picked up the phone, already past the stigma and already knowing what they needed, could not get an appointment. Every unanswered call and every "we don't do that here" is a person who stays home.

So good marketing is lowering those barriers before the first visit: being findable, saying plainly what you treat and what it costs, making it easy to book, and signaling that the person will be heard.

How great patient care turns into referrals

Your outcomes are a marketing channel. In the help-seeking research, trust in a provider is one of the strongest facilitators, and trust is transferable: a client who felt heard tells a friend, a sister, or her OB. For a new practice with no track record, this is the only credibility you have, and it compounds.

In my conversation with Erica, she traced her whole practice back to one client. That client found her after a community talk, eight months in. She told friends. One client became two, two became three, and nine years later Thrive has seen thousands. The same mechanism opened the medical community: clients with good outcomes told their doctors, "You have to meet Erica," and those doctors eventually invited her to present to the hospital's nursing and OB departments. Outcomes earned the invitation; relationships kept it.

With that frame in place, here's the plan.

The plan at a glance

The order matters. Steps 1 through 3 are the thinking that makes everything after them easier, and they're the steps most of us skip.

Step 1: Begin with your vision and values

Cost: $0

Everything a client eventually sees, from your homepage to the sign in your waiting room, is a polished version of a decision you made about who you are and who you're for. Make that decision on purpose, in writing, before you build anything. Practices that skip this step end up with a website that describes everything and a message that lands with no one.

There's a second reason to write it down. Running a practice means making hard calls alone, often with no roadmap. Core values are the tiebreaker. They're how you decide which referral partner to pursue, which service to drop, and what to say no to.

When I talked with Erica, she described Thrive starting with a pen, paper, and her backyard. She wrote out a business plan, and alongside it, her core values. Nine years and four locations later, she still uses those values to make decisions.

I did the same for OT Potential. My core values are on my About page, and I reference them nearly every day. When I'm facing a hard call, I'll tell the people I work with, "Look at my About page. This value is going to decide it."

Do this: Write your vision in a sentence or two. List three to five core values. Keep them somewhere you'll see them. Put them on your About page when you have one.

Step 2: Talk to potential clients and referral partners

Cost: $0

The pelvic health review found that many women never sought help because they didn't know treatment existed, assumed the symptom was normal, or decided it wasn't bad enough to mention. The perinatal review found the same pattern for depression and anxiety, plus a layer of fear about what would happen if they spoke up. You cannot fix that from behind a website. Someone has to stand in front of the community and say, "This is a real problem, it's common, it's treatable, and here's what help looks like." Early on, that someone is you.

That's the whole point of this step. Before anyone is searching for you, you're doing the education that makes them search at all.

Erica's early years are the clearest example of this I know. Before she had a niche, a local hair salon let her come to an event with flyers and ask people what they'd want help with. That needs assessment is part of how she landed on pelvic floor therapy in a town where nobody knew what pelvic floor therapy was. She then spent most of her first year speaking and presenting, and her first client came up to her after a talk, eight months in. She told me presentations are still the thing nine years later: people approach the Thrive team afterward, sometimes in tears, saying, "You said something that made me feel seen for the first time in my healthcare journey." That is the research, happening in real time.

There are two audiences, and they need different approaches.

Potential clients. Go where they already gather: community events, parent groups, gyms, yoga studios, the salon. Give a short talk. Answer questions. Name the symptoms people are embarrassed about and say out loud that they're common. You're not selling. You're removing the "I didn't know that was a thing" barrier.

Referral partners. Think about who already sees your future clients: chiropractors, massage therapists, pediatricians, OB offices, doulas, school staff, primary care, counselors. If you're a mental health therapist, the list flips, and rehab providers become referral partners. Remember the pelvic health finding that the biggest facilitator was a clinician who asked. Your referral partners are the clinicians doing the asking. Help them know what to ask and where to send people.

Do this: List 10 places your future clients gather and 10 providers who already see them. Pick three of each and reach out this month. Expect this to take a year, not a week.

Step 3: Claim your professional identity and choose 1–3 pillars

Cost: $0–$30/month per directory

A person in the help-seeking phase is scanning for two things: "Is this for someone like me?" and "Will this person understand my problem?" You answer both with clarity, not breadth. Name your profession, name the one to three things you're best at, and say them in the words a client would use. A practice that lists twelve services signals that it's for no one in particular. In the pelvic health review, not knowing where to go for help was a barrier in its own right. Your job is to make the answer obvious.

Once your pillars are clear, claim them everywhere your name appears, and budget for it. Your professional association's find-a-provider listing and insurance panel directories are usually free, but the directories clients actually search are not. Psychology Today, the biggest player for mental health, runs about $30/month per listing. GoodTherapy is in the $31–$50/month range, and Zencare charges $59–$98/month plus a setup fee. For most practices, one paid directory in your profession plus the free listings is plenty. Make the pillars and location identical across all of them; the SEO guide below explains why consistency matters to Google. [Editor: Psychology Today doesn't publish its price; $29.95/month is widely reported. Spot-check before publishing.]

Shameless plug, with full disclosure that it's mine. The Therapy Directory is open to OT, PT, SLP, and mental health professionals. A profile gives you a page with your credentials, specialties, and an "accepting clients" badge, plus a do-follow link back to your website, which is the kind of backlink a brand-new site has a hard time earning any other way. The Therapy Directory Only plan is $6.99/month, a fraction of what the big directories charge, and a listing is included with the Club plans if you're already here for CEUs. See Plans & Pricing.

Do this: Draw your pillars. Literally draw them. Then write a two-sentence description of your practice that names your profession, your one to three pillars, and your location. That sentence becomes your elevator pitch, your directory bio, and your homepage headline.

Step 4: Build a simple website with easy booking and clear pricing

Cost: $0–$59/month

Go back to the audit study. Almost half of the families who called a clinic could not get an appointment, and the failures were mundane: no one answered, the number didn't work, the clinic didn't offer the service they'd been told it did. None of those families lacked motivation. They lacked a working path from "I need help" to "I have an appointment." Your website is that path, and its job is to make the next step so easy that nobody falls out of it.

That means the site needs four things, in this order of importance: a clear statement of what you do and for whom, a way to book that doesn't require a phone call, your prices and accepted insurances in plain view, and a tone that tells an anxious person they'll be heard. Design, blog posts, and a logo come later, if ever.

If steps 1 through 3 are done, the first of those mostly writes itself. The homepage says your profession, your pillars, and your location. The About page carries your values and a photo of you. Want to see real examples? I keep a showcase of OT practice websites with a short checklist of what makes them work. You don't need a custom build. A single-page site on a template is enough to start.

Let people book without calling. For someone already anxious about seeking help, removing the phone call removes a barrier. It also removes the failure mode in the audit study, where an unanswered phone was the end of the road. Erica told me online booking serves three kinds of clients at Thrive: people who find the practice on Google and book without ever calling, existing clients who get an email when new schedules open and grab their preferred time, and busy people who simply don't want to make a phone call. About 15% of Thrive's new clients now find the practice online, which she treats as a helpful layer, not the engine.

Show your therapists, and let people choose one. People don't want to book "the clinic down the street." They want that one person. Let them book with a specific therapist, not a generic slot. Thrive does this, and I think it's a big part of why their site converts.

Be transparent about price and insurance. Both help-seeking reviews list cost and confusion about the process as practical barriers, right alongside stigma, and rehab professions are not good at price transparency. Show your private-pay rate. List the insurances you accept. Hiding pricing reads as a trick even when that isn't the intent, and clients who know what they're committing to stick with you longer. Thrive goes a step further and calls every new client before the first visit to walk through what their insurance will cover.

Which website tool to use. Every therapy website I've personally helped build has been on Squarespace. The templates look professional out of the box, you can put a Book Now button anywhere, and the Basic plan is $19/month billed annually ($25 month to month) with a 14-day free trial. If you want to embed a booking widget directly on the page rather than linking out to it, you'll need the Core plan at $29/month ($39 month to month), which adds code injection. Prices as of October 2026, from Squarespace's pricing page.

The other option worth knowing about is building your site inside your practice software. Erica runs Thrive on Jane App, which handles her online booking, intake forms, and the review prompts I'll get to in the next step. Jane Websites is a $59/month add-on on top of a Jane plan, and its advantage is that booking, intake, and the site are one system. I wrote a full review with pricing if you want details.

Disclosure: OT Potential is part of the Jane App Partner Program, but the opinions here are my own. Our Jane App promo code POTENTIAL gives you one month free, and if you stay on as a paying customer, Jane pays us a commission at no extra cost to you. Jane had no role in this post or the podcast episode it's based on.

Do this: Build a one-page site that states your profession, pillars, and location; shows your face; lists your rates and insurances; and has a Book Now button. Then call your own number and fill out your own booking form as if you were a client. Fix whatever broke.

Step 5: Claim your Google Business Profile and build a review habit

Cost: $0

For a local practice, your Google Business Profile is usually the first thing a potential client sees, before your website. It's the listing in the map results when someone nearby searches "pelvic floor therapy Omaha" or "speech therapist near me." It's free, and most therapy practices either haven't claimed it or have left it half-finished. Claim it, fill in every field, add photos of you and your space, and make sure your name, address, and phone match your website exactly. If your booking tool integrates with Google, add a Book Now button directly to the listing. The SEO guide below walks through the setup.

Reviews are the part of that listing people actually read, and it's worth knowing what they can and can't tell a future client. A systematic review of 28 studies comparing online ratings to other measures of quality (Guetz & Bidmon, 2023) found that ratings on sites like Healthgrades, Vitals, RateMDs, and Yelp line up reasonably well with what patients report in formal satisfaction surveys, but show little or no relationship to clinical outcomes, peer review, or disciplinary records. In other words, reviews are a credible record of what it felt like to be a patient somewhere, and nothing more. That's exactly what a person in the help-seeking phase is trying to find out. Remember that the research puts trust in the provider near the top of the facilitators, and a future client has no way to gauge trust before the first visit except through other people's words.

Two more findings from that review are practical. The correlation with patient satisfaction got stronger as the number of reviews grew, so volume matters, and the authors' advice to clinicians is to invite patients to post reviews and to link your website to your rating profiles. A handful of specific, detailed reviews that describe the experience will do more for you than a pile of five-star ratings with no words attached.

None of this requires a budget. It requires a habit. While prepping for the episode, I googled "pelvic floor therapy Omaha," and Thrive showed up near the top with 23 reviews, nearly all five stars. I asked Erica how they get them. Here's her list, in rough order of how well each works:

1. Automated prompts after a set number of visits. Thrive's practice software prompts clients to leave a review after a certain number of visits, with encouragement to post it on Google as well. This runs in the background and is the most consistent source.

2. Clients who want to share. Erica's existing clients show up to her community talks just to tell people, "I had a good experience there. You should go too." Those same people leave Google reviews on their own. You earn this with outcomes, not asks.

3. Reciprocal reviews with referral partners. Erica used a doula group for her own births, and that group has used Thrive's services. They review each other, which is a natural way to support like-minded local businesses.

4. A laptop at events. Thrive has tried setting up a computer at events and asking people to leave a review on the spot. Erica says it's the least effective of the four.

Do this: Claim your profile today. Then decide on one review ask you'll make consistently: after a set number of visits, at discharge, or when a client says something kind. Put it in your workflow so it happens without you remembering.

Step 6: Optimize for SEO

Cost: $0

SEO is how Google decides who to show your website to. For a new practice the formula is short: your profession, your specialty areas, and your location, stated plainly on the page. "Pelvic floor occupational therapy in Aurora, Nebraska" tells both a person and Google exactly who the page is for. That one sentence does more than any technical trick, and if you've done steps 3 and 4, you've already written it.

Consistency is a feature here. The practice that changes its message every six months never gives Google, or its community, enough time to learn what it does. Open Thrive's homepage and you'll see holistic occupational therapy, pelvic floor, lymphatic and fascial, mental health and emotional wellness. Those aren't keywords someone picked from a tool; they're the pillars, in the words a client would search.

One more thing a new site needs: links from other sites, which Google reads as a vote of confidence. Your association's directory, your referral partners' "resources" pages, and the Therapy Directory profile from Step 3 are the easiest ones to get. Ask for them.

I wrote a long guide on this, including 55 therapy keywords with search volumes and the pages every practice site needs: SEO for Therapists. Start there when you're ready to go deeper.

Do this: Make sure your homepage title and first heading include your profession, one pillar, and your city. That one change is most of the SEO a new practice needs.

Step 7: Build a culture where everyone describes your work the same way

Cost: $0

Every person a client talks to is either lowering a barrier or raising one. The audit study's failures happened at the front desk: calls that went unanswered, staff who said "we don't do that" when the clinic did. The pelvic health review's most-cited facilitator was a clinician who asked about symptoms and took them seriously. Both findings point to the same thing. Once you have a team, your marketing is only as good as the least-prepared person who answers the phone.

So the goal of this step is simple: everyone who represents the practice can say what you do, for whom, and how to get started, in the same words, with the same warmth.

If you're solo, you still have a culture: it's how you talk about your work at the front desk, in a discharge conversation, and in an email. Write it down now. Your first hire will learn it from you.

Do this: Put your pillars where you and your team see them every day. Write a two-sentence elevator speech and have everyone practice it until it's natural. Then have a friend call your office as a new client and tell you how it went.

Step 8: Stay in touch with past clients and track where new ones come from

Cost: $0 (email tools are free up to a few hundred contacts)

Continuity of care is one of the facilitators the perinatal review identified: people seek help more readily from a provider they already know. Past clients are that provider's best case. They already trust you, they refer their friends, and they come back when a new need arises. Most practices never contact them again after discharge, which throws away the cheapest marketing there is.

A simple newsletter is enough. (I've tried several email services over the years, but have always come back to Mailchimp. Its Free plan covers up to 250 contacts and 500 emails a month. Once you pass 250 contacts, the Essentials plan starts at $13/month. Prices as of October 2026.) You don't need to publish weekly: a note when something changes, a seasonal check-in, a new service announcement. Thrive's newsletter began as a fix for a scheduling problem and became a regular touchpoint, and Erica's patient zero, nine years on, still sends her messages.

The second half of this step is measurement. You can get the most useful marketing data there is for free by asking every new client one question at intake: "How did you hear about us?" Write the answer down. After six months you'll know which of the steps above is working and which one needs attention.

Do this: Add "How did you hear about us?" to your intake form today. Send one email to past clients this quarter.

Later, if you want: social media and paid ads

Cost: optional

Social media and paid ads haven't come up yet, and that's intentional. In the sustainable practices I've watched over the years, growth rarely depended on either one, and Erica's story is no exception. Neither addresses the barriers in the research as directly as the steps above do.

Social media can work if you enjoy it, and it works best as a place to repost what you're already doing: the talk you gave, the pillar graphic, a review a client gave permission to share. If you don't enjoy it, skip it. A practice with a clear website, a strong Google profile, and good referral relationships does not need an Instagram account.

Paid ads buy visibility you haven't earned yet. They can fill a schedule in a new market, but they stop working the day you stop paying. Hold off until the free steps are running, and even then treat ads as an experiment with a budget and an end date.

Erica has a phrase for this that I've adopted: "building in layers." Each step above is a layer. Social and ads are layers you can add on top. They don't replace the foundation.

Help-seeking research for your niche

The barriers to getting therapy are remarkably consistent across OT, PT, SLP, and mental health. They cluster into a few domains: cost and insurance, workforce shortages and long waits, distance and transportation, fragmented care that's hard to navigate, low awareness that the service exists, and stigma. But the details differ by niche, and reading the study closest to your practice is the fastest way to learn what your future clients are afraid of and what gets them through the door. Find your profession below and start with one.

Pediatric and rehab (OT, PT, SLP)

Speech-language pathology

Mental health

Choosing a provider (any profession)

If you know of a help-seeking study for a niche that isn't here, send it my way and I'll add it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I market myself as a therapist?

Start with who you are and who you serve, not with tactics. Write your values, pick one to three pillars, and say your profession and location plainly everywhere your name appears. Then get in front of your community and referral partners in person. A website, Google Business Profile, and reviews come after that, and all three are free or close to it.

Where should I advertise my therapy practice?

For most practices, nowhere, at least at first. The highest-return places to be found are free: your Google Business Profile, your professional association's directory, insurance panel directories, and the Therapy Directory. Paid ads can fill a gap in a new market, but they stop the day you stop paying.

What are some effective marketing ideas for therapists?

The ones in this post, in order. If I had to pick three: present to community groups where your future clients already gather, make your pricing and insurance information visible on your website, and build a consistent habit of asking for reviews.

How long does marketing a therapy practice take to work?

Longer than you want. Erica went eight months before her first client, five years as a solo practitioner, and nine years to four locations. People overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what can happen in five. Plan for the long game.

Why don't people seek therapy even when they need it?

The research points to three things: stigma (fear of being judged or dismissed), not knowing that the problem is treatable or where to go, and practical barriers like cost, wait times, and clinics that don't answer the phone. One audit study found that 47.4% of families calling pediatric rehab clinics couldn't get an appointment. Good marketing addresses all three.

Does online booking actually bring in clients?

It helps. Roughly 15% of Thrive's new clients find them online and book without a phone call. The bigger value is removing a barrier for people who are anxious about reaching out. Word of mouth is still the engine.

Where to go from here

Marketing, to me, is about the right client finding the right therapist. As a field we are not yet good at that, and the barriers are real: stigma, confusion about the process, and an insurance system that makes it hard for clients to understand where they can get care and for us to show our value. I want a future where our scope of practice is fully reimbursed and recognized, not one where "use your insurance" becomes code for lesser care.

In the meantime, every step in this plan is something you can do now, and most of them cost nothing but time. The thread through all of them is connection: with the person in front of you, with the providers who already see them, and with your own reasons for doing this work. Everything else flows from that.

If you're earlier in the process and still deciding whether to start a practice, read Start (and Grow) Your OT Private Practice. When you're ready to dig into your website, the SEO for Therapists guide picks up where Step 6 leaves off. And if you want to see more of Erica's thinking, listen to the full episode. [Episode link]

I'll keep adding to this post as questions come in. If there's a step you're stuck on, tell me.

References

Bina, R., Uka, A., Costa, R., & Tuval-Mashiach, R. (2024). Seeking help for perinatal depression and anxiety: A systematic review of systematic reviews from an interdependent perspective. Journal of Public Health, 46(4), 506–536. https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdae125

Guetz, B., & Bidmon, S. (2023). The credibility of physician rating websites: A systematic literature review. Health Policy, 132, 104821. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2023.104821

Houtrow, A., Silverman, N., Mesoros, M., Felman, K., Fuentes, M., Stover, A., & McKernan, G. (2025). A pediatric rehabilitation therapy audit study: A brief report. Journal of Pediatric Rehabilitation Medicine, 18(3), 244–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/18758894251341160

Jouanny, C., Abhyankar, P., & Maxwell, M. (2024). A mixed methods systematic literature review of barriers and facilitators to help-seeking among women with stigmatised pelvic health symptoms. BMC Women's Health, 24, 217. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12905-024-03063-6

World Health Organization. (2024, April 22). Rehabilitation [Fact sheet]. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/rehabilitation

World Health Organization. (2025, September 2). World mental health today: Latest data. https://www.who.int/westernpacific/publications/i/item/9789240113817