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We Want to Help You Get More Patients and Build Referral Networks
If you provide ABA therapy services and want to continuously gain more patients at your practice, know that our team is here to supply you with the definitive marketing approach, like therapist SEO strategies, needed to achieve that.
From on-page SEO content and link building to campaign creation in Google Ads, we’ve outlined various strategies we use in our SEO services for therapists that can help you increase website traffic, engagement, and beyond. So read on to learn more!
What Makes Marketing ABA Practices More Difficult Than Other Industries
We know that your niche is extremely unique. When we’ve worked with ABA therapists, they are usually set back by things such as the following:
- Ensuring that what you do is under the BACB Ethics Code
- Insurance dependency is the main conversion factor
- Long intake timelines (from lead to customer)
- HIPAA constraints for Google reviews and site photos
- Competition from large, national ABA companies
- Marketing to parents who are searching, not patients
Digital Marketing Strategies Your ABA Practice Needs
With that said, here is what we’ve found really works for ABA therapists:
1. Having a Conversion-Friendly Website
Turn website visitors into valuable clients with a highly optimized website for user experience and conversions. Websites designed for user experience and conversion rate can help customers better perceive your brand, which, in return, can influence engagement and company success on both the organic and paid sides of search marketing.
Just some tips for creating a CRO-focused website for your ABA therapy business include the following:
- Incorporate a clean design and easy navigation on the website menu and key webpages to help drive visitors to convert. This includes pages such as your services, locations, insurance info, and details about your team.
- Ensure page load time is under three seconds to decrease the likelihood of users abandoning your site. We often see oversized photos or videos as a factor in this.
- Parents and caretakers are not only using their computers for research. So, optimize your website design to be accessible on mobile, creating a seamless experience on all screens.
- Strategically place CTAs throughout the website to encourage visitors to call or fill out a form as needed. You can even test out things such as pop-up forms or Live Chats.
2. Optimizing Your Practice’s Service and Location Pages
To increase your local SEO equity, optimizing your location pages can be incredibly important, especially if you have multiple locations. This can include parsing out your ABA therapy services (ex, ABA therapy for girls), writing location-focused pages for each offering, and incorporating area-specific keywords to trigger user signals further.
But here’s the kicker: if you operate in multiple cities, you can’t just duplicate your pages and swap out the city name. Each location page should include specifics to that local area, such as school districts you serve and any other local insurance providers accepted at that location. This signals local relevance to Google
For example, if you’re an ABA therapist based in Atlanta, Georgia, you could use location-based keywords like the following:
- ABA therapist serving Atlanta
- Atlanta ABA therapy for nonverbal children
- Behavioral therapy services near me
- [Insurance] ABA service Atlanta
A variety of these terms can help you gain searches from the greater Atlanta area. Once you determine the best SEO options, you can then use the same or similar keywords in your Google Ads campaigns either as match types or when conducting audience segmentation through geotargeting.
Pro tip: Build out pages to target and reach people who are not parents but who may be searching for the type of services you offer. This includes pediatric offices, school psychologists, and Early Intervention coordinators. This could be something like “Atlanta’s Premiere ABA Practice for EI Coordinators” or even just be something you link off your main navigation as “Who We Work With.”
3. Completely Filling Out Your Google Business Profile(s)
As an extension of your website, your company’s Google Business Profile is a great way to showcase company information on the first page of Google. With that in mind, our team advises doing the following for the best results:
- Filling out all business-related information, such as your business name, address, phone number, hours of operation, and website URL.
- Choosing the most relevant main category (Applied behavior analysis therapist) and adding others that are relevant to your work.
- Crafting a compelling business description, accompanied by service offerings and relevant keywords, to further drive traffic.
- Adding plenty of photos and videos of your services, physical location, and team to humanize your brand and engage with potential customers.
- Asking current and past customers to leave you honest reviews helps future patients learn more about what makes your services different.
Important Note on Google Business Profiles
For ABA therapists, your Google Business Profile will act as a direct extension of your website. This means you have to think of your profile like a secondary website for your practice. This is because, for many users searching locally, they’ll call you without ever even going to your website, so make sure to give them a reason to reach out.
4. Building Credibility on Your Blog
Including a blog on your website can be a great way to establish you and your team as authoritative thought leaders within the field of ABA therapy. Additional advantages of creating and maintaining a blog can include the following:
- Increased website traffic to topically relevant articles
- Boosted conversions and revenue
- Enhanced link-building efforts
- Improved brand awareness
Once the work is completed on the SEO side to build out your ABA therapy blog, you can use your newly optimized blog pages on the PPC side as well. You’ll be able to use these as landing pages that users can visit after they click on the Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) you create. This campaign approach automatically generates headlines to match customer queries to the most relevant content on your website, and your blogs can serve as their backbone.
Some ideas for blog content could be:
- Signs Your Child Might Benefit from Behavioral Therapy
- In-home vs. Center-based ABA in [City]
- The Difference Between ABA, OT, and Speech Therapy
- How to Tell My Child Needs Behavioral Therapy
- What to Expect During Your Child’s Initial ABA Assessment
5. Targeting Insurance-Based Queries
As we mentioned, one of the challenges that ABA therapists face is that the decision between someone reaching out or not mostly boils down to whether or not their insurance is accepted at your practice. This means that if you do not have content on your site that is targeting queries like “ABA therapists that accept Atena” or “Insurance-funded autism services [State]” or similar, you are missing out.
The downside is that, given you likely take a whole variety of insurances, if you were to create content for them, it can be seen as mass and/or duplicate content, since most of the copy you’d provide on the page would just have the insurance name swapped out. To avoid this, start by making sure you have at least a primary “Accepted Insurances” page on your site that is linked in your main navigation and footer. Then, you’ll want to ensure that the page is internally linked from all your service and location pages, for example, under an FAQ area.
What you can do from there is use Google Search Console to monitor what types of search terms are being used by searchers, and if you start to see a trend of searches including specific insurances, those could make for perfect landing pages to further target and capture those queries. They can also become blog content, such as “Does [insurance] Cover ABA Therapy: # Things to Know.”
6. Be Intentional When Running Ads on Google
ABA therapy is a space that benefits from a hands-on, intentional Google Ads approach. It’s both competitive and sensitive, so strong performance really comes down to being thoughtful about how campaigns are built, targeted, and optimized over time.
It’s also worth mentioning that this is a highly competitive market, and that competitiveness can vary quite a bit by location. In many areas, cost-per-click can be relatively high, which means efficiency really comes down to execution. Things like landing page quality, speed to lead, and ongoing optimization have a direct impact on cost per acquisition, so it’s not just about driving traffic but making sure that traffic turns into qualified inquiries.
If you are running paid campaigns for your clinics, your PPC strategy will be quite similar to your SEO approach, as you should be focused on the following:
- Hyper-local targeting – Campaigns are tightly focused around each center’s actual service area, so you’re reaching families who can realistically attend. This helps improve lead quality and avoids wasted spend.
- Bidding on high-intent, local keywords – Prioritize searches like “ABA therapy near me” or “autism therapy in [city]” for parents who are actively looking for help in their area.
- Audience layering – While search intent does most of the work, we layer in relevant audience signals to help guide performance and refine targeting over time.
- Parent-focused messaging – Remember that you are mainly speaking to parents, not clinicians. That means clear, supportive, and informative messaging that addresses things like insurance, availability, and trust both in the ads and on your landing pages.
- Thorough compliance checks – Healthcare advertising requires a thoughtful approach. You need to make sure messaging stays responsible and accurate while still communicating credibility.
Our PPC Director, Andrea Ozello, said it best: “Overall, the goal with PPC for ABA is pretty simple: show up for the right families, in the right place, with messaging that feels trustworthy and makes it easy for them to take the next step in reaching out.”
Frequently Asked Questions About Digital Marketing for ABA Therapy
Want to know more about the factors that play into your online marketing strategies? Here are some frequently asked questions we have received or often see asked online:
What can I do to build trust in my website copy?
Something super important as a behavioral therapist is that you cannot state any sort of gimmicky guarantees to misguide people into reaching out to you. This would be anything like the following:
“Our ABA practice guarantees that your child will speak in 3 months!”
This is a HUGE red flag for both the BACB and search engines. We know you need to create trust with someone, so instead, focus on evidence-based progress and individualized programming.
Do online reviews affect my rankings and online presence?
Yes, online reviews can play a critical role in your off-page SEO efforts, as well as how potential customers and search engines perceive your business’s credibility and trustworthiness. Because of this, our team recommends accumulating as many positive reviews as possible on business listings such as your company’s Google Business Profile. But as we mentioned, we know that patient confidentiality is crucial in healthcare. So instead of asking current patients, focus on ‘unsolicited’ reviews or testimonials from former clients and external coordinators you’ve worked with, such as school counselors, but make sure to include clear disclosures.
Do I need to be on social media?
Social media can be a great way for you to gain referrals and grow your network. Try joining and participating in local parent groups, but be sure not to be too salesy. If you host any sort of Q&A sessions for parents who are unsure if they need to enroll their child in behavioral therapy or similar seminar content, that could be a great place to do so. Again, just be warned about sharing any sensitive information!
How long does it take for me to see the results from SEO?
Since SEO is a long-term strategy for digital marketing, ABA clinics can expect to see noticeable results in three to six months. The timeline can depend on several factors, however, such as industry competition, the effort made to optimize on-page and off-page SEO, and more. And if you are looking for quicker results, we suggest running a PPC campaign while your organic strategies ramp up.
Need More Help with PPC and SEO for ABA Therapists?
Our team of industry experts has decades of combined experience providing health-centered marketing services, such as medical online ads, healthcare website design, and more.
Contact our team today so we can provide you with customized solutions that drive quantifiable results.
But if you are just looking for high-level advice, continue reading on our blog. Some articles that may be of use to you include:
