Therapists and their professional details are being exploited for SEO, and it needs to stop.
If you are going to create a therapist directory with profile pages for thousands and thousands of therapists without their consent, please stop and ask yourself:
- Is this helping the person seeking a therapist actually find a therapist?
- Do incorrect hours help or hurt their ability to schedule therapy?
- When you offer to "help get in touch" with the therapist, are you hoping the individual may use your service instead? Is there an alternative motive here, that's not helping them get in touch with this specific therapist ASAP?
- Does introducing a layer of communication confusion and friction (since you do not actually have a professional relationship or agreement with the therapist) increase or decrease the chances that the client will quickly get scheduled with the therapist?
Seriously, it's just astonishing that this keeps happening. And happening. And happening.
Therapist directories should only be listing profiles of therapists that have consented to it. Then the profile will have up-to-date information too!
"Claiming" a profile should never be a thing.
Or in summary: Therapists DO NOT EXIST to help companies with their SEO. Stop treating their professional details as magical SEO pixie dust that you can sprinkle wherever you see fit.
In other news, WE'RE BACK with a brand new edition of the Therapist Search Report this week, and I hope you'll read about all of this. We've been gathering data on the ups and downs of therapist directories for almost a year, and unfortunately, there are some newcomers to this space.
It's been a rough few months since Jen's dad died, and so we took a pause on writing this (free) report. You can only focus on so much, and Quill definitely is our priority! But it's nice to start writing it again, keeping tabs on what websites are showing up most when folks search for therapists. It's one way we try to give back to the therapist community that has treated us so well.
Oh, and if you haven't signed up already, check out our free personal search report, which will email you with a weekly report on how your name is showing up in search results. Unfortunately, it's truly up to the individual therapist to fight for accurate results when people search their name.
