New Website SEO Checklist for a Therapy Practice: Before, On and After Launch

A new website SEO checklist for a therapy practice has three stages. Before launch, make sure search engines are allowed to index the site, your license details appear on every page, and your contact form vendor will sign a business associate agreement. On launch day, verify Search Console and submit a sitemap. In the first month, check what Google indexed.

This is the launch checklist only. For the ongoing work after launch, and what it costs to hand it over, see SEO services for therapists.

How Do You Do SEO for a New Therapy Website?

In a fixed order: settle three decisions before the site is built, run the pre-launch checks, do five things on launch day, then watch indexing for a month. A site can have good pages and still never appear in search because one launch setting tells search engines to stay away, so the order matters more than the keywords.

Google's own hiring advice says a small local business can probably do much of its SEO work itself, and calls planning a new site a great time to bring help in if you want it, because the site can be designed search friendly from the start. Either way, the list below is the same. It assumes a solo or small group practice with a site on WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or a practice-management builder.

Before You Build: Three Decisions That Shape SEO

Three choices are hard to undo once the site is live: the domain, whether you will list a physical address, and which services get their own page. Get these right and the rest of the checklist is routine. Get them wrong and you end up redirecting pages or rebuilding listings a few months after launch.

1. The domain. Pick a name clients can remember and spell. Google's SEO Starter Guide says keywords in a domain name have hardly any ranking effect beyond appearing in breadcrumbs, and that the ending (.com, .org, .health) only matters if you target a specific country. There is no reason to squeeze your city and specialty into the domain.

2. Address or online only. This decides whether you can have a Google Business Profile at all. Google's eligibility guidelines require a business to make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours, list online-only businesses as ineligible, and exclude any address that is a P.O. box or a mailbox in a remote location. If you see clients in an office, use that address on the site, the profile and every directory, written the same way each time. If you are telehealth only, leave the street address off and build around the state or states you are licensed in.

3. Which services get their own page. Write down the three to five things a client would type to find you, such as a modality, a population or a presenting concern. Each one that you actually offer gets its own page at launch. A single page listing everything gives someone searching for any one of them a page that is mostly about something else.

If you share an office with other clinicians, read the practitioner rules in Google's Business Profile guidelines before launch. A practitioner can have their own profile if they can be contacted directly at the verified location during stated hours, and should not create several profiles to cover different specialties.

What Must Be on Every Page of a Therapy Website?

Your licensing board's advertising rules come first. In California, the Board of Behavioral Sciences treats Internet communication as advertising and requires your full name, license title and license number in any advertisement. After that, each page needs its own descriptive title and an obvious way to contact you. Put the license line in the site footer.

California is a clear example of how specific these rules are. Under 16 CCR § 1811, anyone the BBS regulates who advertises must include their full name as filed with the board, the complete license title or an approved abbreviation (LMFT, LCSW, LPCC), and the license or registration number. The board's own summary of its advertising law explains that advertising includes any public communication as defined in Business and Professions Code § 651(a), and that definition lists the Internet. Associates have more to add: an AMFT advertisement must say the person is a registered associate, give the registration number and employer, and state that they are supervised by a licensed person.

Other states write their own rules. Look up your board's advertising section before launch rather than after a complaint. For a California licensee, a footer line such as "Jane Doe, LMFT 123456" puts all three required items on every page at once.

The other two items are quick:

• A unique title on every page. Google's title link guidance asks for a title on every page, written to be descriptive and concise, and warns against vague ones like "Home". "EMDR Therapy in Sacramento | Jane Doe, LMFT" tells a searcher what the page is. "Home" tells them nothing.
• One contact path that works. Phone, email or form, visible on every page. Test it from your phone on launch day.

Is Your Contact Form Ready for HIPAA at Launch?

Check before launch, because swapping form vendors later means rebuilding pages. If HIPAA covers your practice, any vendor that receives client information on your behalf needs a written business associate contract, and tracking code on booking pages can expose health information. Choose a form and scheduling tool that will sign the agreement.

Start with whether HIPAA applies. HHS counts a health care provider as a covered entity only if they transmit health information electronically in connection with a transaction HHS has adopted a standard for, The same page links a CMS tool that settles the question for your practice. If you are covered, HHS says the arrangement with a business associate must be a written contract that requires the associate to safeguard the information.

Analytics is the second launch decision. The HHS guidance on online tracking technologies says tracking on a page that lets someone schedule an appointment may have access to protected health information. In June 2024 a federal court vacated one part of that guidance, about linking an IP address to a visit on a public health information page, and the order was limited to that point. The simple launch rule: no advertising pixels or analytics tags on intake, booking or thank-you pages. The HIPAA website checklist for therapists walks through the full setup. This is a summary, not legal advice.

The Pre-Launch Technical Check

Two settings decide whether Google can index a new site: the "do not index" switch most builders turn on while you work, and, if you are replacing an old site, the redirects from old addresses to new ones. Both take minutes to get right and months to recover from if missed. Check them the day before launch.

The noindex switch. WordPress has a "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" box under Settings, Reading. The WordPress documentation says that checking it adds a noindex, nofollow robots tag to every page. If it was ticked during design and nobody unticks it, the site stays out of search after launch. On another builder, find its setting for hiding a site from search engines and confirm it is off. Write "turn off noindex" at the top of your launch day list.

robots.txt is not a hiding tool. Google's robots.txt introduction says the file is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google, and recommends noindex or a password instead. Its noindex documentation adds that a page blocked by robots.txt cannot have its noindex read at all. If you want a draft page hidden, password protect it.

Redirects, if this replaces an old site. List every address on the old site, including anything a directory profile links to. Google's site move guide recommends permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308) from each old address straight to its new one, no chains, kept for as long as possible and generally at least a year. If the domain itself changes, it also asks you to file a Change of Address in Search Console for the old site.

The rest of the technical layer (speed, mobile, HTTPS, schema) is covered in the technical SEO checklist for therapist websites. Work through it once the site is live.

Launch Day SEO Checklist

Launch day is five tasks in a fixed order, and none of them takes more than half an hour. The point is to remove anything that blocks indexing, tell Google the site exists, and connect the new site to the profiles that already send people to you. Do them in this order on the day the site goes live.

1. Turn off noindex. Untick the search engine setting, then open any page, view the source and confirm there is no noindex robots tag.
2. Verify Search Console. Search Console is a free Google service for monitoring your presence in search. Google's verification help notes that a Domain property, verified with a DNS record at your domain provider, covers every protocol and subdomain variant of your site at once.
3. Submit your sitemap. Google notes that some content management systems generate one automatically, so check yours first. Its sitemap documentation calls a submitted sitemap a hint, not a guarantee, so treat it as a signpost rather than a switch.
4. Request indexing for your key pages. In the URL Inspection tool, request indexing for the homepage and each service page. Google's recrawl guide says there is a quota for individual requests, and that requesting the same page repeatedly will not get it crawled faster. Once is enough.
5. Update every profile that links to you. Your Business Profile, Psychology Today and other directory listings, insurance panel listings and your professional association profile should all point to the new address, with your practice name, address and phone written the same way the site writes them.

Should You Set Up a Google Business Profile Before You Open?

Yes, if you will see clients in person at a new office. Google lets you add an opening date up to a year ahead, and after verification the profile appears 90 days before that date. Clients cannot post reviews until you are officially open. If your practice is online only, Google's eligibility rules leave you without an address profile.

Google's opening date help page sets out how it works: only the year and month are required, the profile shows up 90 days before opening once verified, and you can publish posts before you open. Once you open, the profile carries a "Recently opened" tag for 90 days.

That gives a new practice a useful sequence. Sign the lease, create and verify the profile with the opening date, then launch the website so its address matches the profile exactly. The full setup, from categories to photos, is in the Google Business Profile guide for therapists.

What to Check in the First 30 Days After Launch

Whether Google has found and indexed your pages, not whether clients are calling. Google says crawling a new page can take from a few days to a few weeks. Check the Page indexing report once a week, inspect any service page that is missing, and fix whatever the report names before you write anything new.

The Page indexing report in Search Console shows which pages Google can find and index and why others are excluded. Searching site: plus your domain gives a rough view, but Google's site: operator documentation warns that it may not list every indexed page. For a single page, the URL Inspection tool is the reliable check.

• Week one: inspect the homepage. If any page shows as excluded by a noindex tag, the launch day setting did not stick.
• Weeks two and three: check the service pages. Inspect any that are not indexed yet and read the reason given.
• Week four: open the Performance report. Impressions on searches that match your services mean Google is showing the site. Clicks and inquiries come later.

After the first month, launch is over and the ongoing work starts. The 90-day SEO plan for private practice therapists picks up from here, and the SEO budget guide for therapists helps you decide how much time or money it deserves.

What to Leave Off a New Therapy Website

Five things often suggested for new small business sites either break a platform rule or your ethics code when the business is a therapy practice. Leaving them off at launch costs nothing. Adding them means removing them later, and some can cost you visibility in the meantime.

• Client testimonials you asked for. APA Standard 5.05 bars psychologists from soliciting testimonials from current therapy clients. ACA C.3.b covers current and former clients, and NASW 4.07(b) covers current clients and others vulnerable to undue influence. A testimonials page is not a launch requirement.
• Star rating markup for your own reviews. Google's review snippet rules make a business's pages ineligible for review stars when it controls the reviews about itself.
• FAQ markup for rich results. Google's documentation changelog records that FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Search from May 7, 2026. A plain FAQ section is still useful to readers.
• A page for every nearby town. Google's spam policies list pages targeted at specific cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse.
• Bought links or launch link packages. The same policies list exchanging money for links as link spam.

Content written for AI search does not need its own launch step either. Google's page on AI features and your website says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible to show with a snippet.

A Seven-Day Launch Plan You Can Start This Week

If your site is built or nearly built, you can work through the whole checklist in a week, in about an hour a day. Each day below finishes one stage, so a week from now the site is indexable, compliant with your board's advertising rule, connected to Search Console and linked from every profile you control.

1. Day one: look up your licensing board's advertising rule and add the required license line to the site footer.
2. Day two: confirm whether HIPAA covers your practice. If it does, get the business associate agreement from your form and scheduling vendors.
3. Day three: give every page a unique, descriptive title. Check each service you offer has its own page.
4. Day four: if this replaces an old site, list the old addresses and set up a permanent redirect for each.
5. Day five: launch. Turn off noindex, verify Search Console, submit the sitemap and request indexing for the key pages.
6. Day six: update your Business Profile and every directory listing with the new website address.
7. Day seven: put a weekly 15-minute Page indexing check in your calendar for the next four weeks.

FAQ

How long does it take for a new website to show up on Google? Google says crawling can take from a few days to a few weeks, and requesting indexing more than once does not speed it up. Being indexed is only the first step. Showing up for searches that bring clients usually takes longer.

Can I do SEO for my own therapy website? For a launch, yes. Google says a small local business can probably do much of the work itself, and every step on this checklist uses free tools. Where people tend to need help is the ongoing work after launch.

Does my domain need my city or specialty in it? No. Google says keywords in a domain name have hardly any ranking effect. Choose a name clients can remember, spell and say on the phone.

Should I wait to launch until every page is written? No. Launch with your homepage, an about page with your license details, a contact page and one page per core service, then add pages as you write them.

Do I need a blog before launch? No. Google's starter guide says content length alone does not matter for ranking. Service pages that answer what clients search for come first. Articles can follow once those pages are indexed.

External Resources for Therapists

• Google SEO Starter Guide
• Google: Site moves with URL changes
• Google Business Profile eligibility guidelines