Mental Health Services Search Engine Marketing
When search engine marketing mental health services, look beyond just search traffic levels and think about the kind of traffic you need to support your organisation and keep your services running. This guide provides a summary of SEM tactics for a range of aims that your mental health organisation might have.
Raise Awareness For Your Cause
SEO tactics for mental health services
Google values content that shows Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), so:
- Write case studies relaying the personal experiences of those whom you’ve helped
- Ensure that your partners link to your site
- Increase the number of your backlinks from sites which have a high Domain Authority
- Guest post on relevant sites
- Answer relevant questions on forums to participate in the conversation around mental health while simultaneously increasing your authoritativeness
- Ensure that your website is secure and that your content both on the website, in your directory listings, and in your marketing is accurate and up to date
Identify the relevant keywords for your website that have the highest search volume, and for those keywords research the backlinks on the websites (ones that provide similar services) which rank above you and rank on page 1 of the search results, to quickly find opportunities to add to your own list of backlinks. Don’t neglect to look at sites featured in the AI Overview section at the top of the search results page!
Ensure that content across your website is marked up with schema in order to increase the chances of it being featured in the Knowledge Graph or in your organic listing on the search results page.
- Review your about us content, case studies, blog posts, FAQs, images and videos
Ensure that the internal links within your content contribute to, rather than impede, the user journey to taking action.
Review the header structure of your content – terms that take priority when optimising webpages should be included in the h1 of your body content, and terms with lower priority h2’s, h3’s, etc. The higher the number the lower the priority.
Optimise the alt text of your images and description and meta description of your videos.
Run a technical SEO audit of your website to ensure that there are no issues holding back the site from a high search ranking, such as poor crawlability, content duplication, and errors.
Direct People In Need To Your Services Pages
Keyword research for mental health services
Showcase your expertise with crawlable content on your services pages and optimise them for terms searched for by people who want to recognise the symptoms, understand the different types of a wider issue, and learn how to manage it. These people may have mental health issues, or they may not have mental health issues, rather they know someone who does and want to support them.
- General searches for these types of terms rightly return results from trustworthy medical sources such as the NHS, though non-profit organisations providing mental health services with the broadest audience may also feature. Ensure that your website is linked to from the medical sources where relevant, to increase the authority of your website and improve your organic visibility in search.
- Long tail terms which refer to the defining characteristics of the people who need your services have the opportunity to return your organic listings on page 1 of the search results. For example, are these people men, children, working in a particular industry? Research keywords with this in mind, and optimise your website for keywords with the highest search volume and relevance.
If you have a helpline, ensure that it is optimised for frequently asked questions about the helpline, and that it is linked to from the homepage and the service pages.
If you sell private mental healthcare services, research terms around the services you provide and optimise your website for them. Important features to mark up with schema are product information and reviews, so that star ratings may show in your organic listing.
Drive Enquiries
Ensure that your calls to action are featured prominently throughout your website and especially on your service pages. If you have clinics, optimise your website for location-based terms and optimise the Google Business Profile of each clinic and ensure that the information is up to date.
Paid search marketing for mental health services
Run paid search ads for terms around the paid services you provide and the clinics you have (if any) and ensure that you have enhanced conversions configured to track enquiries for the services and clinic visits, because ads will deliver better results when the ad platform’s algorithm can use the conversion data to make automated bid adjustments to increase your ads’ visibility when conversion rate is expected to be highest.
Drive Donations
Google Ad Grants for mental health non-profit organisations
If you are a non-profit organisation, get $10,000 of ad credit from Google to use in search advertising via their Google Ad Grants program and advertise search ads for terms around mental health charities and workplace giving, making it clear in your ad copy whom your services help. To run ads with the Google Ad Grant, you must have a minimum of 2 ad groups and 2 keywords per ad campaign, and target keywords must not be single word keywords unless they are the name of your non-profit organisation. Moreover, if you want users to land on a donation page, the content on that page must be hosted by a verified donation processor on Google’s list, one of which is PayPal.
- Feature a range of slogans that set the tone of your organisation, and test messages by varying degrees of politeness, urgency, and with different calls to action, and use your insights to inform your onsite content.
- Show how easy it is for people to donate and showcase the different ways in which they can donate in sitelinks which show alongside your ads. Encourage people to take action by featuring a variety of calls to action including but not limited to “donate” in the callouts. Showcase the services you provide using the “service catalog” structured snippet.
- Feature a topical case which is being talked about the most, or the latest report on mental health that was featured in the news, in a sitelink to appeal even more strongly to people.
Sign People Up To Fundraising Events
Search engine marketing for mental health fundraising
Optimise your fundraising pages for terms around mental health fundraising, and don’t forget the terms around the type of fundraising event, as well as employee fundraising.
Important features to mark up with schema are event details such as the time and place.
Use your Google Ad Grant to advertise search ads to people who are searching around mental health fundraising and create different ads for the different interests which these people have and advertise the most relevant type of fundraising event for each of the interests. Include the event time, location and sign-up deadline in your ad copy.
Show how easy it is to sign up with a sitelink directing people to the sign-up page if this exists separately from the event page.
Increase Newsletter Subscribers
Remarket to people who have visited your fundraising events pages but not signed up to an event nor subscribed to your newsletter, using your Google Ad Grant.
Promote Your Store
If you also fund your mental health services via sales from your store, mark up your product pages with schema and set up a product feed to ensure product visibility in search. If your website has ecommerce functionality, you can advertise your products in the shopping results using the product feed and target Google’s affinity audience of “charitable donors and volunteers”. If you have physical stores, optimise the Google Business Profile of each store and ensure that the information is up to date.
Important features to mark up with schema are store details such as the address, to increase your website’s visibility in Maps.
Recruit Volunteers
Finally, you can also use the Google Ad Grant to advertise search ads for terms around volunteering with mental health. Again, you can target “charitable donors and volunteers” to get the highest quality ad traffic to your site as possible.
If you’d like better results from your mental health services search engine marketing, please get in touch.