The Google Business Profile setup that fills a therapy calendar
Categories, services, hours, photos, posts and Q and A for a private practice, plus the address question every home-office and telehealth therapist runs into.
A prospective client types "therapist near me" or "anxiety counseling [city]" and Google returns three listings in a box above everything else. Those three get most of the calls. Which three appear is decided mostly by distance, category match and how complete the listing is. Distance you cannot change. The other two you can finish in an afternoon.
The field is unusually soft. Among 171,610 listings, 22.7% publish no hours, 18.5% have no rating, and 17% link no website. A finished profile is a real competitive advantage here in a way it no longer is for restaurants or plumbers.
The address decision comes first
Google requires a verified address, and it will show that address publicly unless you tell it not to. Three situations:
If you have a commercial office, use it, keep the suite number consistent everywhere, and set a service area only if you also travel to clients.
If you work from home, you can hide the address. In the profile, set the business as a service-area business, list the cities or counties you serve, and Google will show your service area rather than your street. Verification still requires the real address, and Google may still mail a postcard there. Do this before verification if you can, because hiding an address that has already been public for months does not scrub it from the caches and directories that copied it.
If you are telehealth only across a whole state, Google Business Profile is a poor fit. Google wants a physical presence in the area served. Practices in this position usually do better putting the effort into their website's location pages, Psychology Today, and their association directory. See the website guide.
Categories: the single highest-leverage field
Your primary category is the strongest ranking signal you control. Pick the one that matches your license and what people search, not the one that sounds most professional. In practice the useful primaries are Psychologist, Counselor, Mental Health Service, Marriage or Family Counselor, Family Counselor, Psychotherapist, Child Psychologist, and Addiction Treatment Center.
Then add secondaries, up to nine. Every secondary is another set of searches you can appear in. A licensed marriage and family therapist who also treats trauma and teens might run Marriage or Family Counselor as primary with Counselor, Psychotherapist, Mental Health Service and Child Psychologist behind it. Do not add categories for services you do not provide, both because it is a policy violation and because it brings calls you will spend twenty minutes turning away.
Check what your three closest competitors chose. In a browser, open their listing and look at the label under the business name. That is their primary.
Services and specialties in the client's words
Under Services you can add custom items with a short description. This is where most practices write clinical language and lose. The person searching does not type "perinatal mood and anxiety disorders". They type "postpartum depression help". They do not type "adjustment disorder". They type "counseling after a divorce".
Write fifteen to twenty-five service entries in plain words, each with two sentences of description. Good ones for a general practice: anxiety therapy, depression therapy, couples counseling, teen counseling, grief counseling, trauma therapy, EMDR, ADHD evaluation, postpartum counseling, therapy for first responders, telehealth sessions, medication coordination.
Then fill the attribute checkboxes Google offers for health and wellness listings: online appointments, wheelchair accessible entrance, LGBTQ friendly, identifies as woman-owned or veteran-owned if true, gender-neutral restroom. Every checked box is a filter a searcher may use.
Hours, including the ones that make you unusual
Publish real hours. Google renders an hours-free listing as unreliable and a "closed" listing as a reason to call someone else. If you take clients at 7 a.m. before their workday, put 7 a.m. in the hours, because that is a differentiator worth more than any tagline.
Weekend availability is scarce: 28.4% of practices publish Saturday hours and 14.5% publish Sunday. If you hold two Saturday morning slots, listing them puts you in a small minority in your city. Only 2.8% list 24-hour availability, which for a therapy practice is usually a data error rather than a real offer.
Set special hours for holidays and for the two weeks you take off in August. A caller who reaches a closed office they thought was open rarely calls back.
Photos, and what they should show
96.8% of listings have at least one photo, so photos are table stakes rather than an advantage, but the specific photos matter. Upload, in this order: the building exterior from the street so a nervous first-time client can find the door, the entrance and the suite door, the waiting room, the therapy room itself with a chair and tissues, the parking area, and a professional headshot of each clinician. Ten to fifteen images. Shoot them on a phone in daylight with the lights on. No stock images of couples on beaches.
The single most useful photo in this category is the street-level exterior. First sessions are stressful and being lost in a parking garage makes it worse.
Posts and Q and A, the two fields almost nobody uses
Google Posts expire after roughly a week for most types, which is why practices abandon them. Post anyway, twice a month, ninety seconds each: a note that you have openings on Thursday afternoons, a new specialty, a workshop you are giving, a change in insurance panels. Posts do not appear to move ranking much, but they appear in the profile and they signal an active business.
Q and A is public and anyone can answer, including a random stranger with a wrong answer that then sits there for years. Seed it yourself. Post six to eight questions from your own account and answer each: Do you take my insurance? What is the fee for a session? How long is the waitlist? Do you offer telehealth? Do you see teenagers? Where do I park? Then upvote your own answers so they display first. This is allowed and it takes fifteen minutes.
Verify, then check monthly
After verification, set a fifteen-minute recurring task. Google merges duplicate listings, accepts user-suggested edits to your hours and category, and occasionally swaps your primary category on its own. Check that the category, hours, phone, website link and address are still what you set. Check for duplicate listings under an old office address and request removal.
Where this fits in the wider picture is on the benchmark report, and the reviews question, which is genuinely different for clinicians, is covered in the reviews guide.
Frequently asked
Can I list each clinician in a group practice separately? Google allows a practitioner listing for an individual practitioner at a location alongside the practice listing, if the individual is publicly reachable at that address. It works but it doubles the maintenance, and duplicate suppression sometimes hides one of them. For a two-clinician practice it is rarely worth it.
Does adding my license number help? Put it in the business description and on your website. It is a trust signal for a reader and a verification signal for the answer engines, and it costs nothing.
How long until profile changes show up? Category and service edits usually publish within minutes and start affecting what you appear for over two to six weeks. Address and name changes trigger review and can take a week.
If you want the profile built, seeded and monitored without doing it yourself, it is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.