My Caseload Has Gone Quiet. Here’s Exactly What I’m Doing About It (Part 1)
April 2026 - The honest truth about neglecting your own SEO and where to start
Can I be honest with you?
My referrals have gone quiet. Last referral was
I’ve spent the last couple of years pouring my energy into Therapists Corner, writing for you (one of my most favourite things to do), I love building resources, writing workshops, doing the Q&As and generally thinking about your private practice. Somewhere along the way, though, I stopped doing the things I tell you to do for mine.
I think it’s important you know that this happens to all of us. Even the people teaching this stuff. Life shifts, priorities change, and before you know it, your own visibility has slipped.
So here’s what I’ve decided: over the next six months, I’m going to rebuild my caseload step by step and I’m going to document every single thing I do, in real time, right here.
Every tweak. Every result. Every enquiry that comes in and what I think triggered it.
My goal is to get back to a comfortable number of clients, 10 a week at £150 per session. Not overbooked, just consistently busy enough that I’m not watching my inbox.
This is Part 1. And I’m starting with: Google Business Profile.
Why Google Business Profile First?
When someone is struggling, anxious at 10 pm, exhausted by burnout, and finally ready to ask for help, they open Google and type something like “CBT therapist near me” or “anxiety therapist Wilmslow.”
What comes up first isn’t always the best therapist. It’s the one with the best-optimised Google Business Profile.
The map pack, those three local listings that appear above everything else, drives the majority of local therapy enquiries. If you’re not in it, you’re invisible to that person at exactly the moment they’re ready to reach out.
I have a profile. But I hadn’t looked at it properly in a long time. When I did, here’s what I found.
What My Profile Actually Looked Like
⭐ 5.0 stars — Great.
📝 7 Google reviews — which is nowhere near enough.
🏷️ Category: Psychotherapist fine, but missing a secondary category.
📋 Services: listed, but without keyword-rich descriptions.
🖼️ Photos: some duplicates, some outdated.
📄 Description: technically accurate, but doing nothing for SEO. No mention of the conditions I treat. No mention of EMDR or CFT. No location keywords.
In short, it existed, but it wasn’t working hard enough.
What I Changed: Step 1 — The Profile Description
The description box on your Google Business Profile allows up to 750 characters. That’s not much, but it’s enough to tell Google and potential clients exactly who you help and how.
My old description mentioned CBT but nothing else. No conditions, no modalities, no location. Here’s what I replaced it with:
BABCP accredited CBT therapist with 30+ years’ experience in mental health, based in Wilmslow, Cheshire. I help adults overcome anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, panic and burnout using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), EMDR, and Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT). Face-to-face sessions in Wilmslow and online therapy available across the UK. Sessions from £150. With a background as a mental health nurse and over a decade in private practice, I bring both clinical expertise and genuine compassion to every session. Ready to take the first step? Get in touch today.
Notice what it does: leads with credentials, names the conditions I treat, names all three modalities, mentions location, mentions online therapy. Every one of those is a keyword someone might search for.
But here’s where I want to be honest with you because writing it made me uncomfortable.
The Niching Problem (And Why I’m Practising What I Preach)
The moment I listed anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, burnout, and panic all in one sentence, I felt like a hypocrite.
Because I tell you to niche. Constantly. It’s probably one of the things you’ve heard me say more than anything else. And yet there was my own Google Business Profile, describing me as a therapist who helps with… everything.
📌
So I want to address this directly, because I think it raises something important not just for me, but for all of us right now.
With the rise of AI search, niching matters more than ever.
When someone typed “CBT therapist Wilmslow” into Google two years ago, they got a list of results and clicked through to compare websites. They had time to discover you. But AI search, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity don’t give people a list to browse. It gives them an answer. One answer. And that answer goes to the most specific, authoritative match for the question.
“Who is the best therapist for trauma in Wilmslow?” A specialist wins every single time.
The generalist gets lost in the noise. The specialist gets named.
This means the old SEO logic of “mention everything so you show up for everything” is becoming less effective, not more. Specificity is now a competitive advantage in search, in AI recommendations, and in the minds of the clients who find you.
So what does this mean for my profile?
I listed the conditions for an SEO reason and there is a legitimate one. The Services section of Google Business Profile is where keyword-rich condition listings do their best work. The description is where your positioning should live.
I haven’t updated my description to fully reflect my niche yet because I’m in the middle of clarifying it. I’ll be honest with you: I’ve been known for generalised anxiety. It’s what I’ve focused on for years, it’s what clients have come to me for, and it’s worked.
But I’m rethinking that.
Because I do EMDR, and EMDR is particularly powerful for trauma. With the right positioning, I could be the go-to trauma therapist in Cheshire rather than one of many anxiety therapists.
This is part of my rebuild. Not just getting my profile in order, but using this as an opportunity to make a deliberate decision about who I’m for, really putting a stake in the ground and making sure everything I put out there reflects that. I think specialising matters more than ever, especially with the growth of AI that can provide generic support really well.
I’m working through it in real time. I’ll share exactly what I decide and the changes I make.
For now, the description I’ve written is better than what was there. But it’s a stepping stone, not the destination.
Want to Do This Yourself?
I’m sharing every single step I take over the next six months the exact wording I use, the decisions I make, and the results I get. No fluff. No theory. Just what I’m actually doing, in real time, so you can do it alongside me.
This series is unlike anything I’ve published before. It’s a live experiment, and you’re invited to follow it from the inside.
Paid members get:
✅ The exact service descriptions I added to my profile (ready to copy and paste and adapt for your own)
✅ The short message I’m sending to past clients to ask for a Google review without it feeling awkward
✅ The Google Business Profile Checklist — a printable step-by-step checklist to work through every change alongside me
✅ Every future post in this series as I move on to the website, directories, and content strategy
If building a consistent, self-referring caseload is your goal for this year, this is the series to follow. Join me.
