Does Your Therapy Practice Need a Blog?
You’re a therapist. You provide 1:1 therapy services. Do you need a blog?
We work with a lot of therapists over here at Crown Creatives. It’s become a little bit of an accidental niche–we got lucky & on the day our website launched our first client reached out to us on our contact form and she just happened to be a therapist. Then, through the power of word of mouth, we started building a client base made up of her referrals and before we knew it, our client base was 90% therapists.
Building our business by working with therapists put us in a unique position–we had the responsibility of creating thoughtful, accurate content that reflected the ethics of the treatment practice for each business we worked with. Which, let’s face it, it’s not often how digital content is crafted. There’s a lot of noise online, a lot of attempts to steal your attention, and a lot of grabby messaging that’s good at getting you hooked, but not great at delivering anything substantial.
As people in therapy ourselves, we understood the responsibility of what we were doing in developing digital content for our therapist clients.
All of us deal with daily management of various mental health conditions, so mental health and wellness is something we’re super passionate about–and as folks with marginalized identities (Emily and I in our queerness, and Gil as a man of color) we’ve seen how difficult it can be to find valuable mental health resources created with people like us in mind.
Many of the therapy practices we’ve been working with since we launched are queer centered or concerned specifically with minority mental health, so we’ve had the chance to help develop blogs as resources specifically for these communities. With our noses in the industry over the years, we’ve seen really effective uses of blogs and other digital content in mental health spaces–and really, really ineffective ones.
And when I was in the process of looking for my own therapist, I remember clicking over to the blogs on each website just to see what sort of information they felt was important to share. (Or if there was any language that indicated that their office wouldn’t be a safe or affirming space for me.)
What’s the purpose of a blog for a therapist?
There are some basic SEO benefits to a blog. You want to keep your website updated, and a blog is an easy way to do that. It can help you rank higher for certain keywords in your industry if you use them frequently and well within your blog. But as a therapist, those might not be enough of a reason to put time and effort into maintaining a blog.
Just like our advice for determining whether or not you want to build an email list, we have some questions for you to consider while deciding if a writing a blog supports the purpose & goals of your practice:
What’s the mission of your practice?
Who are you trying to reach and why?
How are you trying to support your clients?
How do you provide that support?
What are your core areas of expertise?
Are there any fundamentals clients could benefit from knowing before starting working with you?
Are there common misunderstandings or stigmas your work aims to investigate and address?
These questions can help you get to the core of what your blog could be a space for: somewhere to showcase your knowledge, provide resources to direct community members to, showcase your qualifications and passions, and make the values and practices of your business clear.
Rather than existing as another space hosting weak content, (click through the link for SEO expert Mariah Liszewski’s explanation on what weak content is and how it impacts SEO) your blog can be a reliable hub of information and resources for both your existing clients, as well as your larger community.
What could a therapy practice blog about?
Obviously, therapy is a very personal experience. And your blog isn’t going to be able to provide the care that regular one on one sessions or your other services will. But that doesn’t mean that a blog is useless for a therapy practice. Mental health is so highly stigmatized and mental health care itself is often inaccessible–an intentionally crafted blog can work to address both of these issues. Some other points a therapy practice could touch with a blog could be:
What issues your practice aims to address
The beliefs or experience that inform that work
Addressing misinformation/common misconceptions about your work/modality
Foundational knowledge that can improve the therapy experience in your practice
Recommended resources
General practices that people can use between/outside of therapy
But we know jumping in without a plan can be overwhelming. So we’ve gotten even more specific. With those touch points in mind, here are 20 topic ideas for your therapy practice blog:
Questions to ask your therapist in your first session
How to find a therapist that’s right for you
What to expect from a therapist-client relationship
How the the therapeutic relationship helps facilitate healing
What is active listening & how can you practice it?
How to support a partner with depression/PTSD/etc.
Easy anxiety grounding techniques to use at home
What is emotional self-regulation?
Tools to help facilitate difficult conversations
Turning off your inner critic
What happens when my therapist hurts my feelings?
How to evaluate if your boundaries are serving you
Daily habits to help manage anxiety in a healthy way
Explaining your modality
How to practice checking in with your body
A letter to your 20 year old self
No your therapist doesn’t hate you: what it means when you see your therapist checking the clock & other things clients wonder about in session
Favorite affirmations & how to use them
What your therapist wishes they could tell you
How to talk to your therapist when you feel like you’re not getting what you need from therapy
Can I just use AI to write my blog for me?
You can. We don’t recommend it, but technically yeah, you’re able to.
Why don’t we recommend it? Well, first of all: mental health care is already stigmatized and we live in a time where digital content is rife with factual inaccuracies. Where do AI tools learn from? Largely existing digital content. Do you want to risk giving your community inaccurate or potentially harmful information, especially as it concerns their mental health? Our opinion is it’s better not to have a blog at all if you’re not going to be thoughtful about the content you’re sharing.
And from a potential client perspective: I would be a bit skeptical of the ethics of a therapy practice that used AI to develop and communicate their messaging and resources.
(Plus, not for nothing, we’ve heard a lot of cases of plagiarism through AI writing. We’re not anti-AI in its entirety, but we need to figure out legal and ethical concerns of the tools we’re using before we incorporate them into our business. We still manually develop all our own content over here.)
(Plus plus, AI generated copy falls under that weak content thing we mentioned above.)
That’s why we got the ball rolling for you! Hopefully this is enough to get you thinking about what your blog could do for your community, and the type of content that feels most important to you to share–if any at all.
