Did you know that Google has a helpful content system that rewards useful, high-quality content with higher ranking positions and greater visibility in search results?
Why is this such a big deal for mental health professionals?
Simple:
The vast majority of people looking for the services and products you offer will use Google to find them.
Don’t just take my word for it.
With 88 billion monthly visits, Google is the most visited website in the world. It has a market share of around 92%, with its nearest rival, Bing, accounting for just 2.8% of total searches.
So, if you’re going to attract potential clients or customers to your website, you must ensure that your website has maximum visibility in relevant Google search results.
The best way to do that is to give Google exactly what they’re looking for, and the best way to give Google what they’re looking for is to understand their official Helpful Content guidelines.
These guidelines provide invaluable information for website owners and content creators on how to publish the kind of content that Google really likes and is thus most likely to be rewarded with greater prominence in search results.
Unpacking these guidelines can be an extensive job. So, to save you some time, I’ve done it for you.
In this guide, you’ll learn:
- 7 key aspects of the helpful content guidelines that could have the biggest impact on your ability to grow your mental health business.
- How the search engine’s recommendations may change how you develop your content marketing strategy.
- How to craft high-quality content that meets Google’s criteria.
Google Helpful Content Guidelines: What Mental Health Professionals Need to Know
1. Create Content for People, Not Search Engines
Yes, I know I said that the aim of all this was to give Google what they want, but what they actually want is for you to forget about them and focus on your audience.
Creating content for people rather than search engines is the central theme running throughout these guidelines and, indeed, almost everything Google does.
In fact, it’s the very first sentence in the helpful content guidelines:
This doesn’t mean that basic search engine optimization (SEO) strategies like conducting keyword research and optimizing your metadata don’t have a role to play.
Google even clarifies this with the following statement:
There are some things you could do that are specifically meant to help search engines better discover and understand your content. Collectively, this is called “search engine optimization” or SEO, for short. Google’s own SEO guide covers best practices to consider. SEO can be a helpful activity when it is applied to people-first content, rather than search engine-first content.
Source: Google – ‘Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First content’ (Accesed – June 2023)
However, what it does mean is that these SEO techniques should only be used in conjunction with high-quality content that provides an accurate, reliable answer to a user’s question or helps them solve a real problem.
For example, let’s say you’re a therapist who specializes in drug and alcohol misuse.
You decide that one way to attract new clients is to create a blog post that helps people determine if their drinking habits are problematic.
So, you use an SEO tool like SEMRush to identify the kind of search terms people enter into Google when they want to know if they’re drinking too much.
You’d then use those search terms as keywords in your page title, meta description, and sparingly throughout your content. That way, Google understands what your blog post is about and what search terms should trigger its appearance in search results.
If you then continued to stuff your keywords into every other sentence hoping that it will help you rank higher on Google, that means you’re creating content for search engines first.
Doing this will produce the opposite of your desired result, i.e., you won’t rank as well because Google sees that you’re essentially trying to game the system rather than genuinely help people.
Instead, what you would need to do is put all your basic SEO elements in place to help search engines understand your content and then focus all of your efforts on giving your target audience the best possible answer to their question.
This would mean drawing on your personal experience and expertise as a qualified mental health professional to help people determine whether they have an issue with alcohol.
Where appropriate, it would mean backing up your claims and solutions with credible research and accurate, up-to-date statistics from reputable, trustworthy sources.
It might also provide useful information about what to do if a reader does decide that they have a drinking issue and wants help with it, such as links to helpful organizations and, of course, details about how you can help as a professional therapist.
Here are a few quick tips to help with this.
- Put yourself in the mind of your intended audience – Who are they? What problems are they having? What information do they need to address that problem?
- Follow industry journals relating to your niche – They can be an indispensable source of valuable research and expert insights that you can include in your content to give it more credibility.
- Research your competitors – What information are they missing from their content that could be helpful to users? Including this information in your post helps you create a stronger answer.
Do all this, and you’ll ultimately create the kind of helpful content that Google loves and rewards accordingly by making that content more visible in search results.
2. Unique Content Matters More Than Ever
Back when I was a young freelance writer, a lot of my early assignments were on topics that I knew absolutely nothing about.
It didn’t matter.
All my clients wanted from me was to read what other websites were saying on the topic, rewrite it in my own words and hand it over to them so that they could pass it off as their own.
It was a shady practice that I was never entirely comfortable with, but, as the old cliche goes, I was young and needed the money.
Besides, my clients didn’t actually care as long as I got enough SEO keywords in there and helped them game the system.
That worked back then, but it won’t work any longer.
As Google pushes harder and harder on its people-first approach, the kind of content they reward with better rankings and increased search visibility is that which offers unique, original ideas, insights, or information.
Here’s the official word from Google on the subject:
How This Applies to Mental Health Professionals
Say you decide to create a blog post about the mental health benefits of quality sleep.
You type your subject into Google, check what the top-ranking websites say on the matter, and simply rewrite their information into your own words.
That doesn’t help anybody.
It doesn’t help your audience because you’re giving them information that they could read elsewhere, usually on websites from organizations with a reputation as an authority on the matter.
It doesn’t help you either because when search engines see that you’re not bringing anything new into the conversation, they have no reason to feature your blog post prominently in search results.
It makes sense, right?
Imagine if you were at a conference and three leading experts all gave a presentation full of new insights into how sleep quality impacts mental health.
Imagine that a fourth speaker then arrived and tried to convince you that they, too, were an expert despite only repeating what the other three had already said.
Would you trust that person?
Would you see them as someone who really knows their stuff and who you’d be interested in hearing more from?
Me neither.
Chances are, we’d dismiss them as someone who doesn’t have much to offer and focus on learning more from the other three experts.
The same thing applies with your web content.
If you’re only repeating what other people are saying, you’re not providing much value to anyone. Therefore, your blog post will be perceived by search engines as being low-quality and, in all likelihood, stuffed so far down the search results that nobody ever sees it.
Tips for Creating Unique Content
So, here’s the proverbial million-dollar question:
How do you create unique content on topics that have already been covered in-depth multiple times over?
There’s actually quite a bit you can do.
In fact, I’d even go as far as to say that, as a qualified practitioner, you have a few advantages that will make it easier to create unique mental health content than non-qualified creators.
Let me explain what I mean by sharing the following tips:
A. Draw on Personal Experience
Many of us choose to become therapists because we’ve had some level of personal experience with the issues we now specialize in.
If that’s you, and you’re comfortable with a little self-disclosure, that personal experience can be a valuable asset.
After all, nobody has the exact same lived experience as you, which means that even a few lines demonstrating that you can relate to the problems your readers are facing will make your content unique.
Alternatively (perhaps even additionally), you also have unique experiences as a therapist that you can draw on.
Although I definitely do not recommend breaking client confidentiality, there is a way to include general observations you’ve made in the therapy room, for example:
“When clients come to me for help with alcohol problems, I often find that what helps them the most is…”
Here, you’re not throwing your clients under the bus. You’re probably not even saying anything you wouldn’t say to clients themselves, but you are sharing a unique experience that nobody else has and will help you appeal to Google’s desire for new, original work.
B. Show Off Your Expertise
Remember when I said that you had certain advantages as a qualified mental health practitioner?
This is one of the biggest.
As a certified professional, you can demonstrate a level of expertise that many other non-qualified mental health content creators simply can’t.
You’ve been to school.
You’ve done the work.
You’ve sat face-to-face with people who are experiencing the very issues you’re now discussing, and you have personally helped them through it.
Heck, you’ve probably also done a whole bunch of CPD (Continuing Professional Development) to expand your knowledge.
In other words, you know your subject matter really well, so draw on that expertise to include unique insights that help your content stand out.
C. Say What Nobody Else is Saying
Here’s where it pays to check out how others have covered your chosen subject.
Keep an eye out for points that you feel your competitors didn’t cover in enough detail or perhaps didn’t cover at all.
What’s being overlooked or ignored? What’s being undervalued or unacknowledged?
These points will provide valuable opportunities for you to contribute something new to the conversation, picking up the slack and filling in the gaps left by other articles on the subject.
3. Use Multiple Platforms to Demonstrate Experience and Expertise
This next point isn’t actually referenced in the guidelines, but it does feature prominently in another related document, Learn from others’ experiences with more perspectives on Search.
The tweet above comes from Google’s Search Liason account, which shares helpful insights into how their search engine works. In case you can’t see that, here’s what it says:
In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms.
Source: Google – ‘Learn from others’ experiences with more perspectives on Search‘ (Accessed – June 2023)
What we can take away from this is that now is a great time to experiment with expanding your brand on other platforms and incorporating different types of media into your website content.
For example, let’s say you’re creating content because you want to appear in search results for the term “what to do in a panic attack.”
To meet the unique content criteria, you draw on your personal or professional experience, such as:
“When I had panic attacks, I found this was the most helpful thing to do…”
Or, better yet;
“As a qualified therapist, I find the thing that helps my clients most with panic attacks is…”
Instead of simply writing a blog post, try presenting your answer in a video on YouTube, or on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok.
Doing so could land your content in the new Perspectives search results, increasing both your brand visibility and the likelihood that users will click through to your content.
Likewise, providing reliable answers to questions on forum sites and social media groups can likewise enhance your presence in search results by earning Perspectives spots while at the same time giving you a welcome opportunity to showcase your expertise.
4. Page Experience Matters as Much as Your Content
Page experience refers to how your site visitors access and consume your content.
Here, we’re talking about technical SEO factors that ensure your web pages meet all the following criteria:
- Display and function correctly on mobile phones, tablets, and other smart devices.
- Have fast page load speeds, meaning they load on a visitor’s web browser as quickly as possible.
- Are easy to navigate so that your visitors can easily find the resources they’re looking for on your site.
- Aren’t so cluttered with ads that it disrupts a visitor’s ability to read your content clearly
- Are fully secure with a correctly configured SSL certificate in place.
These factors all play an important role in meeting Google’s requirements for helpful, high-quality content, and for good reason.
Think about it:
You could have the most amazing piece of original content packed with new information with the potential to change lives, but if that content takes too long to load or doesn’t display properly on a visitor’s iPhone, it’s not actually that helpful.
In the near future, I’ll be producing some guides on how to optimize the technical elements of your site to provide your visitors with awesome user experiences.
Until then, I recommend checking out Google’s official page experience documentation.
5. Using AI is OK…Kind Of
I discovered this gem hidden away towards the bottom of the content guidelines in a hyperlink to a blog post about how Google perceives AI content.
The key message of that post what matters the most is the quality of the content, not how it was produced, and that AI content is, quite simply, “just content.”
In fact, the search company even use those exact words:
Will AI content rank highly on Search?
Source: Google – ‘Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content‘ (Accessed June 2023)
Using AI doesn’t give content any special gains. It’s just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search. If it doesn’t, it might not.
What we can conclude from all this is that it’s perfectly fine if you want to use tools like ChatGPT to help you create your mental health content, but that content will only be prominent in search results if it meets all the criteria for helpful, high-quality content outlined in the rest of this guide.
The reason I was so excited to unearth this information is that there’s a lot of myths and rumors floating around which insist that Google penalizes websites that use AI-generated content.
As we can see, this isn’t true.
Google penalizes content that is designed to game its ranking system and rewards content that is designed to help people, no matter whether that content was produced by a human or AI.
How Can AI Help?
As far as content creation goes, I personally only use ChatGPT for two things:
- Taking the points I want to make and helping me structure an outline for my blogs
- Helping me figure out how to say what I want to say when I feel all mentally tongue-tied.
I never feature any AI-generated content on Therapist Marketing Tips, but that’s because I love writing, and getting ChatGPT to do it for me would take all the fun out of running this blog.
Still, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it if it genuinely helps you to help your audience.
What you don’t want to do is post a whole bunch of fully AI-generated content with the goal of ranking for more keywords without making any effort to ensure those posts offer reliable, high-quality information for your readers.
6. Focus on Content Quality, Not Content Length
Read any number of SEO articles, and you’ll be told countless times that in order for your content to rank well, it needs to be long. The general consensus is that your posts need to be around 2,000 – 2,500 words to make Google happy.
That’s not true. Google doesn’t care about word count as much as it cares about content quality.
Here’s the official stance:
“Are you writing to a particular word count because you’ve heard or read that Google has a preferred word count? (No, we don’t).”
Source: Google – ‘Avoid Creating Content for Search Engines First’ (Accessed – June 2023)
What I take from this is that we should be focusing on creating the most helpful resources for our audience no matter whether that takes us 800 words or 2,000 words.
For example, the website that ranks highest in search results for the query “ is online therapy safe?” is less than 800 words.
Most of the top 5 results for that search term (i.e.; the one’s most people) are under a thousand words, and only one is over 1,200 words.
These websites have fully answered the question in a way that Google likes without needing a 2,000+ word blog post.
Can longer posts rank well?
Absolutely.
If you feel that’s what it takes to provide value for your audience, go for it, but my advice is to pay no attention to your word count and focus first and foremost on making your content as strong as it can be.
7. Delete or Update Low-Quality Content
So, you’ve read all the above, and now you’re eager to start making amazing, high-quality, helpful content that gets you seen in Google search results.
That’s a great start, but if the rest of your content is pretty crap, it won’t help much.
Here’s Google to explain why:
So, let’s say you’ve spent the past six months churning out low-quality articles that don’t provide significant reader value. After reading this guide, you go out and create an amazing piece of content with the potential to help a lot of people.
Although that’s likely to do better, all that unhelpful content you’ve already created could be holding your new blog post back from achieving the kind of success it probably merits.
With that in mind, it’s a good idea to review your old content and delete anything that Google might deem unhelpful, or, at the very least, significantly improve it.
Doing so could not only improve the performance of new content but also help those older articles to rank better.
Helpful Content for Mental Health Professionals: Recap and Next Steps
First of all, thank you for reading this guide all the way to the end.
As I said at the beginning, there was a lot to unpack here, so I’m grateful that you stuck with me and hope that the seven points discussed above will help you to create better content that genuinely helps people with their mental health.
After all, isn’t that our priority as practicing mental health professionals?
Since we did cover a lot of ground today, let’s finish by recapping the main lessons learned in this guide to ensure you didn’t miss any important details:
- Create People-First Content – Making content for the sole purpose of ranking better in search engines will have the opposite effect. Focus on making useful quality resources that help your audience, and you’ll be rewarded for it with better search visibility and more website visitors.
- Google likes unique content – Drawing on your personal experience and professional expertise and providing new information, ideas, or insights can help your content rank, even if the subject has already been well-covered.
- Don’t neglect your website performance – Content is only helpful if it’s easily accessible. Ensure your website loads quickly and displays correctly on all devices to avoid poor user experiences.
- Don’t believe everything you’ve heard – You don’t have to write a 2,500-word blog post if you can answer the question effectively in 800, nor will you be banned for using ChatGPT to create your content as long as that content is valuable to your audience.
With all that said, I do recommend following the links in this guide to Google’s documentation and learning more about how to give the search engine the kind of content they like.
Doing so will not only help you to grow your mental health business online, but also keeps you focused on doing what matters most:
Helping people.
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