Mental Health Clinic Website Build

A new site on a domain with no authority reached page one of Google within a month of launch, ranking at position 6 for two non-branded local treatment searches: “ketamine for depression near me” and “PTSD treatment [city].”

I wrote the copy for every page and set the compliance boundaries for the whole site. As a member of our SEO team, I also helped build the strategy plan and fact-checked it independently.

Decisions and what the results show

The qualified wording across the clinical pages (“may,” “eligible adults,” “individual responses vary”) is deliberate. It keeps every claim within what the evidence and FDA labeling support.

Starting point

The clinic had a new domain with no pages and no authority (Domain Rating 0). The client supplied its list of services. Our SEO plan, which I helped build, set the core pages, a primary keyword for each, and a target of 1,200 to 2,000 words per page. I fact-checked the plan before writing, and I built the audience and market picture from my own research.

Alongside the copy, our team ran a citation campaign that began building the domain’s local presence before launch.

Audience

The copy is written for adults who have tried more than one treatment and are tired of starting over. Many of them keep up with work and family while struggling privately, so the pages speak to that directly and put privacy up front: private treatment suites, a discreet location, and HIPAA-compliant handling of records.

I wrote to veterans and first responders by name. That came from my research and my knowledge of the market for SPRAVATO® and ketamine for PTSD, along with the demographics of the region the clinic serves.

Result: “PTSD treatment [city]” ranks on page one.

Site structure

The site is organized around the two questions a patient might start with: what they are dealing with, and what treatment they have heard about. Condition pages explain the condition in plain language before they discuss treatment options. Treatment pages cover what the treatment is, who may be a candidate, and what a visit involves. Both lead to a psychiatric evaluation, the first step for every patient.

• Home
• About
• Treatments: Psychiatric Evaluations, IV Ketamine Therapy, Medication Management, Talk Therapy, SPRAVATO® Treatment
• Conditions: Treatment-Resistant Depression, Anxiety, OCD, PTSD, Bipolar Disorder
• Reviews
• Resources: Resources, FAQs, Our Blog
• Book a Consultation

SPRAVATO® was added after launch as its own treatment page. It is kept separate from IV ketamine because the two have different regulatory status, different administration requirements, and different patients looking for them.

Result: all organic traffic is non-branded and local. Patients are finding the clinic through the condition and treatment they searched for.

Compliance

I set the compliance boundaries for every page. It is a core part of my work, and I have done it for eight years. On this site, that meant:

• Ketamine’s use for mental health conditions is identified as off-label everywhere it appears, in the body copy, the FAQ, and the disclaimer.
• SPRAVATO® is described only by its FDA-approved indications and its supervised-administration and monitoring requirements.
• Research figures appear with the study population they came from and a line stating that they are not the clinic’s patient outcomes.
• No page promises a result or a timeline.
• Candidacy is framed honestly: after evaluation, a patient may be an excellent candidate, a 50/50 candidate, or not yet ready.
• Pages that discuss medication tell patients not to stop or change a prescription without their prescriber.
• The SPRAVATO® page states that the drug does not prevent suicide and gives 911 and 988 crisis information.
• Every page closes with a medical disclaimer, and clinical pages cite their sources, including FDA prescribing information and peer-reviewed trials.

I reviewed each page against these boundaries before it went to the client for review.

Result: the site reached page one with every one of these boundaries in place.

Conversion

Each CTA label matches what the patient is ready to do at that point on the page, so the labels vary across the site: Get Started, Schedule an Evaluation, Schedule a Private Consultation. Placement follows what converted best across eight years of testing on our pages: after the opening and at the close, with nothing mid-page, where a CTA competes with the design’s visual elements. Scheduling CTAs lead to the booking page, and internal links carry patients between related condition and treatment pages.

Results

Before launch, Ahrefs found one crawlable page on the domain. After launch it found 46, and it now finds 53. The first page began ranking within a month of launch, and organic traffic followed a week later.

• All organic traffic is non-branded, transactional, and local: patients searching for treatment near them who did not know the clinic by name.
• Our team’s citation campaign grew referring domains from 34 to 395 in the four months before launch, then to 868 in the first full month after, and to 1,096 since.

These figures cover about a month of live data, so traffic volume is still small. Positions for “near me” searches vary with where the searcher is, and Ahrefs measures from one US location. Source: Ahrefs.

Revision

After client review, I reworked the homepage around the clinic’s core psychiatric services. The revision made psychiatric evaluation the first service listed, focused the conditions on treatment-resistant depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and bipolar disorder, and added detail on talk therapy approaches, privacy, and payment options.