Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 24: Why Your SEO Isn’t Converting (It’s Not AI…)

Released: 04/17/2026

Show Notes:

In this episode, Amanda breaks down one of the most common questions therapists ask when client inquiries slow down: is it a traffic problem or a conversion problem? She explores why more visibility alone doesn’t guarantee more bookings, how to tell the difference between needing more website traffic versus better messaging, and why SEO is still working even in the age of AI. Amanda also dives into the deeper, often overlooked factor of embodiment—how your belief in your work, your clarity, and your ability to communicate value directly impact whether potential clients choose you. She shares practical ways to refine your messaging, build trust, and turn existing visibility into actual client inquiries without burning everything down and starting over.

Register for the free training on 4/22: How to Work Less and Earn More with Therapy Intensives

3 Key Takeaways:

1. When client inquiries slow down, the issue isn’t always visibility. Many therapists have a conversion problem, where the right clients aren’t choosing them after finding them.
2. Clear, specific, and relational messaging, not perfect copywriting, is what builds trust and turns website visitors into actual client inquiries.
3. Beyond strategy, embodiment matters, clients can sense your confidence and belief in your work, which directly impacts whether they feel safe enough to reach out.

Connect with Amanda:

• Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
• Check out the Amanda KB Coaching website

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Sponsors:

• This episode is sponsored by Alma – learn more here
• This episode is sponsored by Jane – use code: AMANDA2MO for a 2-month grace period

Resources & Links:

SEO for Therapists Membership

Therapy Intensives Academy

Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Mastermind

Free Training: 3 Steps to Booking Your First Therapy Intensive

Free Guide: 3 Steps to Double Your Income

SEO Freebie

Just a quick heads up, everything I share in this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, financial advice, or tax advice. Every practice and every state has its own rules. So if you’re wondering how something applies to your situation, make sure to check in with an attorney, accountant, or another qualified professional who can give you guidance based on your specific circumstances.

Transcript:

Amanda (00:00)
Hi everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the happy, healthy and wealthy therapist podcasts. I have been talking with so many therapists who are at different stages in their practice, whether they literally just opened the doors to their private practice or they’ve been doing this for 15 years or they’re at the spot where they’re starting to look at diversifying their income stream outside of therapy because their therapy practice is going so, well. So

Now, regardless of what stage you are at in your business, there has definitely been a time where things didn’t feel so easy. There’s definitely been a time where things were slower than you would have liked them to be. And I think right now, given everything that’s happening in the United States specifically, that’s where I’m located in Seattle. So I feel the context of what’s happening there. But I think, you know, other countries, other places experience.

this at times too, depending on what’s going on globally and politically. But I’m hearing a lot of therapists talk about right now in 2026, this slowdown of, you know, all of a sudden, like referrals were coming in and I had excessive clients, I even had a wait list and now all of a sudden, like things just kind of stopped. Or, you know, I think the most important thing.

to really name I’m a private pay out of network therapist, but even in network with insurance therapists I’m hearing are having a hard time getting clients these days. And I wanna talk about this because obviously the more that this kind of fear gets spread of like people just aren’t going to therapy these days or should I actually go back to agency work because this is just too hard. I wanna have this conversation because

Really what I wanna do is ask a question that I think is gonna immediately clarify a lot for you when it comes to like, what is actually the problem here? Because when we’re not getting clients, when things have slowed down, naturally we start to ask this question of what’s the problem, but we kind of answer it with, well, clearly like, my website’s not working or.

You know, I’m not posting enough on Instagram. I haven’t gone viral recently. I’m not getting enough real views story views, whatever it might be we immediately go to It must be a traffic problem, right? Like my stuff is just not getting in front of enough people but what I really want to ask is is your problem actually traffic or is it conversion because what I see a lot of therapists doing is assuming they just need more people

on their website, right? I mostly do website stuff. You see me on social media for my coaching business, but I do not do it anymore for my therapy business because it never worked for me. Everyone who found my website, everyone who became a client even for high ticket therapy intensives found me and reached out to me because they found my website. So I’m gonna talk more about website than I’m gonna talk about for Instagram, but there’s a lot of parallels, right? So if you think I am just not getting clients,

clearly what I need is more people on my website, then what do you start doing? Right? Okay, I guess I need to write more blogs. I guess I need to improve some SEO. I need more visibility. I need to put more content out there. And yeah, it’s not that traffic doesn’t matter. Traffic does matter. But here’s a really uncomfortable question I want to ask. And I think it’s really important to consider. What if more people are seeing your work, but what if more people isn’t actually the problem?

What if getting more of that traffic doesn’t actually change your bookings? Right? Your website traffic could be up hundreds of people per month. You could be getting, you know, 30%, 50 % more clicks into your website than last month, but maybe you’re still not getting people reaching out. So what if the issue is not not enough people are finding me, but instead the right people aren’t choosing me once they do find me?

Now those are two very different problems and they require completely different solutions. So I wanna clarify something before we go deeper into this because I know…

In addition to all the things that are changing when it comes to marketing and private practice these days, surely you have heard of AI optimization or AIO. And I know I’ve seen a ton of ads or blogs or sign up for my free webinar on why SEO is dead and now we have to do everything for AIO. And here’s the thing, SEO still works. People are still Googling things like

Proma therapists near me, EMDR therapy in my city, where can I find a couples therapy intensive? That hasn’t gone away. People are still using Google. They’re increasingly using AI, but AI has not replaced Google. If anything, what AI has done is made clear, well-positioned content even more important than ever before. AI still at its foundation.

works on the same principles as search engine optimization. And so if your brain is going to maybe SEO doesn’t work anymore, that’s usually not the actual issue because in my own practice, again, the majority of my clients have come from my website. And I say majority because I technically can’t say with 100 % certainty. If I look at my website data, I do see things like psychology today still brings in some traffic.

When I ask clients how they hear about me, sometimes they’ll say, my provider blah, blah, blah recommended me to you, but you know what I don’t do? You know what I’ve always said I don’t do as an introvert? I don’t network. So these people don’t know me. These people aren’t referring to me. They are Googling or going to an AI search and they’re looking for who offers the safe and sound protocol near Portland, Oregon. And then they’re finding me because of my SEO work. Right? So can I say with a hundred percent certainty people have only found me from the internet?

Specifically my website no, but historically anecdotally that has been my experience in my own practice My clients do not come from Instagram They do not come from referrals alone. And this is actually why inside my therapy intensive Academy I don’t just teach SEO in isolation Because traffic alone doesn’t build a business traffic is super super important You want to get as many eyes on your stuff as possible

because it is going to increase the likelihood that you can confirm our clients, but you also need to know what happens when people land on your site. So often inside of the VIP community for my therapy intensive Academy program, that’s what we’re doing on the calls is we’re pulling up the data of let’s look at what is happening when people land on your site. Okay, they got to the homepage. Did they go anywhere else after that?

Were you just getting clicks into your blog because you wrote an amazing blog? Fantastic. But did your blog have calls to action of working with you as a therapist? Obviously, if the person reading the blog is in your state or, you know, can you promote something else if you do coaching? But we need to know what is happening when people get to your website. What is not the metric to shoot for alone is how much I’m getting to my website. So we have to tend to both.

So here’s another thing I think gets over complicated, right? We all know, unless you also happened to just be really good at writing, maybe you have a writing career, I’ve worked with therapists who, you know, actually their bachelor’s was in creative writing or English lit or something like that. And actually they are good at messaging on paper and verbally too.

But a lot of us don’t have that skill. I know I certainly don’t. I am much better of a verbal communicator than a written communicator. If I write something, I will think about it forever. I will be like, no, that’s not the word. Or like, God, there’s another run on sentence. It gets overcomplicated. And I think then, again, because we get all of this messaging and all of these ads and all of this marketing that is clearly working on some level of, well, just hire a copywriter. But then you look at copywriter fees and you’re like, I can’t afford.

$3,000, $5,000, $10,000. But that, again, not the right problem necessarily to be solving for. Your messaging on your website does not need to be perfect. It doesn’t need to be genius level copywriting. It doesn’t need to be super clever or overly polished, but it does need to be specific. It needs to be clear, and it needs to be connected to a real person’s experience.

And this is a lot of the feedback I give to the therapist that I work with, either in one-to-one coaching or in either of my group programs, is, you who is this for? Can we make this more specific? Like, you know, is it that you want to break free from people-pleasing behaviors or this is one of the best things I’ve ever read on a therapist’s website is like, how nice would it be to finally tell the pizza delivery person, well, I guess you don’t place the order.

with them, but like, how nice would it be to finally say, no, you don’t want that topping on your pizza? Like that is so, so specific instead of just like, stop people pleasing, but like, what’s an example of that, right? What are the small to big things that people are sacrificing because they haven’t worked through this challenging thing in their life yet? The challenging dynamic, this emotion that feels too big to carry. So specific, clear, connected to real.

experience, not this vague, fluffy stuff. I am pro using AI as like a starting point if you’re like truly, truly stuck and you have blank page paralysis or writer’s block, but you got to change it up. You have to look into it. You have to think about what would we actually talk about in a session because that is one of your website’s many jobs is not just to attract people.

track the right people, but keep them there too. And how you keep them there is the same way that you keep someone in a therapy session. You build a relationship with them. You talk to them like they’re a real person, right? We have to develop those kind of relational copy frameworks on our website, right? You are a therapist. You know how to listen deeply. You know how to understand patterns. You know how to reflect language back to people.

You know how to name what someone is experiencing in a way that really makes them feel seen. That is what messaging is, right? You automatically have all these skills as a therapist. Those of you who are maybe emotion-focused or relational or cognitive behavioral, you’re all going to have your own way of reflecting back that language and naming that experience. But we all have the ability to do it, right? And you can…

write that in a way that’s not overly clinical and like distancing of, well, what I hear you saying here is an alignment with this ADHD diagnosis. Like, obviously that’s not how you want to show up on your website, but you do need to bring that humanness and that realness that clients are seeing in session to your website. So if you’re a therapist and you’re saying, I’m bad at marketing,

What I usually actually hear is I haven’t learned how to translate what I already know into my website yet. Right? That’s a strategy gap. It’s not a capability gap. The one of my favorite things to do either on a group coaching call or a one-to-one call with a therapist is to say, like, tell me about it. Right? Talk to me right now. How would you describe this problem? And then I usually will like take notes as they’re talking and be like,

Perfect, I’m gonna send you these notes and that’s what you’re gonna put on your website. Because when we talk through things, usually that is enough to break that barrier. Now sometimes of course, there’s still like copywriting marketing versus just copywriting just to write copy. But again, strategy gap, not a capability gap. And honestly, that’s why I bring a copywriting coach into my Therapy Intensive’s Academy program because you don’t necessarily need to know just the like theory of

how to write copy, but you probably need help taking what you already know and turning it into words that actually convert. And sometimes we need outside eyes on that. Like I know I could look at my own copy all day long and be like, yeah, people know what I’m talking about. It wasn’t until I joined a mastermind, I think this was maybe like mid 2025, I joined a mastermind that was all about your unique messaging. And I learned a lot of things from that, but honestly, one of the biggest takeaways

because this coach was not a therapist, they were just like an online coach for any coach. She was like, what even isn’t therapy intensive? Like all you write about is therapy intensives, but does your audience automatically know what that is? And so I had to change my info page on the Therapy Intensive Academy to actually include a definition of what’s an intensive you ask, because some people may not know. I’m saying, here’s the solution to your problem. But people are like, what is this? I don’t know.

sometimes just like outside perspective can be super helpful. So back to this conversation around traffic versus conversion. So breaking this down really simply, if you have low website visits, right, if like 20 people a month are seeing your page, you likely have a traffic issue. But if you have a high number of visits and low inquiries, no one is calling, no one is emailing, no one’s booking, no one’s submitting a contact form.

That is likely a conversion issue. But here’s where it gets really tricky. You have choices here, right? Because you can work on improving your SEO. You can get more traffic. You can do all the right things digitally when it comes to your visibility. And you can still not see an increase in your bookings. And that’s when people start spiraling into like, well, maybe I need to redo my whole website or maybe my niche is wrong and not specific enough. Maybe I need a different strategy.

Should I just write like three blogs this week? Should I get licensed in another state? We think again the problem is the number of people who are seeing our stuff and that we might be able to work with, but sometimes the problem isn’t visible on the surface, right? Sometimes it is that conversion piece of something in the messaging that is not specific enough, something about the client journey once they get to your website, like can they clearly find what it is they’re looking for? Are you clearly articulating

why you are the therapist for them compared to other therapists, are you also saying who you are not a good fit for? Because I think that is different and unique too, as opposed to, this is different from the niche conversation of, you can’t speak to everybody, no, you’re not speaking to one person if you’re trying to speak to everybody or however that like phrase or quote goes. It’s different from that conversation. And this is more about if I know you specialize in working with my type,

of trauma and for me that’s complex PTSD. It’s not acute single incident kind of stuff. If I know you get the complexity of my emotions, if I know you get how my inner voice shows up and can take over, if I know you get why I know things but I don’t always feel or believe things, that is going to make me trust you more than someone who’s like, I’m a trauma specialist and I can see you regardless of any type of trauma you’re going through. I don’t really believe that.

Right? Like I want someone who accurately and specifically conveys, they get me, not they get everyone that could potentially fall in my bucket of stuff. And so this again is exactly why in my therapy intensive academy program, we focus on SEO. Yes, a ton because therapists don’t often have any idea where to start with that. And SEO is still relevant. And yes, I teach about AIO too, but

SEO without focusing on conversion is just visibility without results. It’s the Instagram equivalent. If you do this, it’s like, I had a real, get hundreds of thousands of views and 50,000 likes and all of this, but you didn’t get a therapy client from it. So like, yeah, it’s exciting. It hit our dopamine receptors, but does it matter ultimately if you didn’t get anything from it? So you need both.

We need the visibility, but we also obviously need the results. That’s why you are probably listening to this episode because you’re like, why is my SEO not working and what should I change to get results? So this again is the thing I think is harder to talk about. The thing when it comes to this hidden reason for like, why might we not be converting? And again, it’s not your traffic.

It’s not even maybe like basic messaging of how can we tweak and make things more specific and show people why you’re the one for them. But the real third hidden reason why things may not be converting for you is embodiment. And I know that word feels abstract, so I’m going to ground it. I’m going to break it down a little bit. Embodiment is do you actually believe what you’re saying? Can you hold the value of your work?

are you aligned with what you’re offering? Because your website can say all the right things, but if there’s any kind of hesitation underneath, like, I don’t know if I’m actually good enough, like, does anyone actually wanna work with me? I don’t know if this therapy intensive is worth the price. Is anyone gonna pay that? Well, I sure hope this works, but I don’t know, I’m just putting anything out there. People are gonna feel that, right? Like,

Number one, if your copy is entirely written by AI, all of this copy is gonna be way too fluffy and light. And we all kind of know the cadence and the traditional things that AI is saying. So if people are reading just pure AI, they’re gonna know, they’re gonna assume you don’t care, right? You didn’t care enough to put you in it. You didn’t believe in your ability to write your own copy, to speak to me. So why would I hire you as my therapist? If people are hearing you show up on your intensives page,

as kind of being apologetic about it of like, I know this is a hefty price, but really like I promise it’s worth it and here’s what you’re get out of it. Like if they feel like they need to be convinced, then it might come across to them like you need to convince yourself. So people can feel things implicitly even by reading something and that might cause hesitation in then submitting that contact form or booking that consultation or getting on the phone to call you.

they’re especially gonna feel that in therapy and that starts with the consultation, right? Even your website, your messaging, maybe you nailed that part of it and then you do get people on consults and then they’re not converting from there, something happened again, right? There’s another point of conversion that needs tending to and fine tuning because this is where I think most of the therapists I talk to, that’s really where they get tripped up is how do I talk about myself confidently?

How do I say the fee that I want to charge? How do I explain why a therapy intensive costs more per hour than a regular therapy session? So if we are not confident in that, if we are not embodied in what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and why it serves us and the clients, our clients are gonna pick up on that because they are usually very highly attuned.

they’re usually pretty sensitive to cues for safety and they’re picking up on subtle cues, right? And so you can have the right SEO keywords, you can have the right niche, you can have the right structure for your intensive, you can do all the things right on paper and something’s still not converting, something’s still not working. But again, something…

I think what’s helpful to really name is that something isn’t landing at the level of someone landing on your site and saying, I can trust this person. And this is also why just learning SEO from a checklist on the internet doesn’t always work. It’s why some people do all the SEO things and have an amazing amount of traffic. And again, are super stressed about feeling their caseload, whether they’re private pay or whether they take insurance. So

If no one is helping you bridge the gap between strategy, right? Do all these things for visibility and how you actually show up inside of it. Now that all the right people have found you, what do you do with the people that have found you? Then that gap is just gonna continue to exist if not widen, right? You’ll continue to get the views, but you’re gonna continue to not get the clients. You’re gonna continue to not get the results that you want. Sorry, my cat jumped up on my desk and she kind of…

scattered my brain for a second. So what I really want to come back to is this is not an AI problem. You are not having the lack of results you’re experiencing right now because AI is taking over and SEO is dead. And this is not because you just like missed your window of, I guess now I’m behind on things and I’m never going to be able to figure this out or I have to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars on

learning and implementing this new tech thing. If anything, again, AI is surfacing the same thing humans respond to. Clarity, specificity, trust. Those are the biggest things. All of these have been going to a ton of SEO and AI webinars lately. And they all say the same thing is AI isn’t just scanning for any content. They are looking for quality content from trusted sources. So how is your website conveying that?

How is your writing conveying that? And then how are you conveying that on a consultation call? Because trust is not going to come from, wow, like this therapist has 150 blogs on this topic, whereas this therapist only has five blogs on this topic. Trust is not going to come from more keywords. I’ve targeted trauma therapist and trauma therapy and CPTSD therapy and PTSD treatment.

It’s not gonna come from how many keywords you use. It’s gonna come from this alignment between I’ve written the content I’m an expert in, I’ve targeted the keywords for that, and I’ve written and conveyed my messaging and myself from this place that aligns with that. That is how we build trust, and that is what is gonna help people actually start to reach out to you, regardless of what is ever going on in the economy because

Yes, just because people are struggling does not mean all people are choosing to forgo therapy. I have worked with so many therapists who have had to ground themselves in the fact of, you know, they themselves as therapy clients have had to prioritize mortgage or rent and therapy, right? Like those were their, those were their focuses. I guess we’re not focusing on paying off credit cards or other things. And clients are capable of making that decision for themselves, right? There are still people looking for therapy. There are still people who

whether we like it or not, aren’t suffering at all financially right now. And they’re still looking for therapy, right? So they’re out there. It’s a matter of having them find you. Yes. So if they’re not finding you, you need to work on your SEO and your AIO. But if they’re finding you and not converting, then we need to take a look at that messaging and that positioning and what cues of trustworthiness are you putting out there. So if you are listening to this and

really trying to think about and discern, okay, so how do I know which problem I actually have or how do I fix conversion if my strategy looks fine on paper? These are some of the things I’m gonna be talking about in my free live webinar on April 22nd. I’m gonna go deeper into how can we tell what’s happening traffic-wise and conversion-wise and I’m gonna show you my behind the scenes of what is actually happening.

website wise when I get traffic and when I am converting clients. So what is it that actually makes SEO convert how to refine your messaging without over complicating it so that you can book, you know, whether it’s your insurance clients, whether it’s your private pay services or your premium fee therapy intensives, we really need to figure out again, like what the problem is, what needs to shift both strategically and internally for this to work.

So I’m covering all of this and so, much more in the webinar. The link is in the show notes if you want to register for that. And you are going to want to register for that because one lucky winner who attends the live is going to get a free coaching intensive with me. So if these are things that you are struggling with, we can deep dive and look at all of that together of let’s look at the SEO, let’s look at the copywriting, let’s look at the positioning, let’s make it so that you’re actually booking clients more easily.

So again, what I really want you to leave with is that you do not need to burn everything down and start over. You don’t need to try 15 different marketing strategies. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on ads or whatever you might be considering overspending your money on right now. What you need to do is just adjust what is already there in a way that actually connects and converts. So again, we’re gonna talk about this more on the live training and…

Again, just a final reminder, you do not need to be a marketing genius to be successful in private practice. You already have the skills. You just might need some structure, some support, and some strategy and clarity to really bring it all together. So I hope that this episode was helpful. I will look forward to seeing you live if you show up live. Otherwise, leave a review on this episode. Let me know what questions, comments, or things are coming up. Let me know if this was helpful. Let me know what else you want to hear about this topic. I am going to be

reaching out to more experts in this field to kind of get their take on things to bring you all some more helpful information. the more I know of what you are looking for, the better I can serve you. But thanks so much for being with me today and I will talk to you next week.