Welcome to our very first edition. We've been working on this for quite a few months! Our goal is to provide insights and analysis on how therapists show up online -- to help improve results and make access to therapists more straightforward for those seeking help. (And also to raise awareness when bad actors enter the scene, misrepresenting therapists and their professional details.)
So without further ado, we hope you'll give this report (including our commentary) a scroll -- and if you want to get analysis on your name, to see how your search results change over time, we're offering that for free too.
Top 30 Websites for Therapists
These domains show up the most when searching for a specific therapist by name.
| Website | Domain Popularity | Search Result Position | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Score | 1 week | 4 week | Average | 1 week | 4 week | |
| linkedin.com |
78.3
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 0.5 |
7.0
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 0.7 |
| psychologytoday.com |
73.0
|
▲ 0.3 | ▲ 0.2 |
2.0
|
▼ 0.2 | ▲ 0.2 |
| facebook.com |
54.0
|
▲ 2.6 | ▲ 0.2 |
17.4
|
▼ 0.3 | ▲ 0.3 |
| healthgrades.com |
43.4
|
▼ 1.9 | ▲ 0.1 |
15.3
|
▲ 0.4 | ▼ 1.5 |
| instagram.com |
39.5
|
▲ 0.3 | ▲ 0.7 |
19.8
|
▼ 1.1 | ▼ 0.6 |
| mapquest.com |
37.1
|
▲ 0.4 | ▲ 0.5 |
20.4
|
▲ 0.4 | ▼ 2.0 |
| zocdoc.com |
32.7
|
▲ 0.1 | ▲ 0.3 |
9.1
|
▼ 0.2 | ▼ 0.3 |
| sharecare.com |
24.5
|
▼ 1.4 | ▼ 9.1 |
22.9
|
▼ 2.0 | ▼ 5.2 |
| npidb.org |
23.6
|
▲ 1.5 | ▼ 1.0 |
23.9
|
▲ 0.1 | ▼ 0.6 |
| headway.co |
20.6
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 1.4 |
8.9
|
▼ 1.0 | ▼ 1.8 |
| yelp.com |
19.4
|
▲ 1.5 | ▲ 0.4 |
28.6
|
▼ 2.7 | ▼ 2.0 |
| therapist.com |
17.6
|
▼ 0.7 | ▼ 2.0 |
12.2
|
▼ 1.0 | ▲ 0.8 |
| rocketreach.co |
17.0
|
▲ 0.9 | ▲ 1.7 |
20.9
|
▼ 0.9 | ▼ 0.8 |
| webmd.com |
16.1
|
▲ 0.9 | ▲ 4.2 |
32.4
|
▼ 4.0 | ▼ 1.8 |
| medicalnewstoday.com |
15.4
|
▼ 0.2 | ▲ 0.1 |
12.0
|
▲ 0.6 | ▼ 1.7 |
| researchgate.net |
14.3
|
▲ 0.1 | ▼ 1.6 |
33.2
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 4.2 |
| idcrawl.com |
14.2
|
▲ 1.1 | ▼ 0.5 |
35.7
|
▲ 2.2 | ▼ 1.0 |
| tiktok.com |
13.8
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 0.5 |
49.0
|
▲ 1.0 | ▼ 1.8 |
| 7cups.com |
13.5
|
▼ 0.3 | ▼ 0.1 |
11.6
|
▲ 2.6 | ▲ 2.8 |
| npiprofile.com |
13.3
|
▲ 1.2 | ▼ 1.9 |
30.9
|
▲ 3.2 | ▲ 1.6 |
| mind-diagnostics.org |
13.2
|
▼ 0.2 | ▼ 0.2 |
4.0
|
▲ 0.1 | ▼ 0.1 |
| zoominfo.com |
13.0
|
▼ 0.1 | ▼ 0.2 |
24.1
|
▲ 0.4 | ▼ 1.4 |
| therapyden.com |
12.6
|
▼ 0.2 | ▲ 0.2 |
13.4
|
▲ 1.8 | ▲ 0.5 |
| healthline.com |
11.5
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 1.1 |
13.5
|
▼ 1.8 | ▼ 2.2 |
| quickcounseling.com |
10.9
|
▼ 0.4 | ▲ 0.3 |
11.8
|
▲ 1.2 | ▲ 2.0 |
| marriage.com |
10.3
|
▲ 0.2 | ▲ 0.2 |
20.6
|
▼ 2.1 | ▼ 6.2 |
| vitadox.com |
10.0
|
▲ 0.5 | ▲ 1.8 |
29.9
|
▲ 3.7 | ▲ 2.3 |
| nih.gov |
9.9
|
▲ 0.5 | ▼ 1.1 |
49.2
|
▲ 1.5 | ▼ 0.1 |
| signalhire.com |
9.8
|
▼ 0.3 | ▼ 0.3 |
26.5
|
▲ 2.6 | ▼ 2.4 |
| helloalma.com |
9.3
|
▲ 0.1 | ▲ 0.8 |
11.2
|
▼ 1.4 | ▼ 3.3 |
In terms of popularity, LinkedIn definitely has the top spot. They've cornered the market on all professionals, not just therapists, when you search for a person by name. Coming in second, which won't shock anyone, is PsychologyToday. And what's important to note here is the difference in their average search result position. LinkedIn might show up in a few more searches, but PsychologyToday's results show up higher -- with an average position 2 vs. position 7.
There are many other well-known websites in this top 30, along with some that were surprising, at least to me. But we'll do some deeper dives into them in future editions of this report.
And to better explain what you're looking at in the above table, we're outlining the popularity and average search result position for each of these websites when people are searching for a therapist by name. We also include the fluctuation of these data points over the last few weeks (with the little line graphs), along with emphasizing their shifts since 1 week ago and 4 weeks ago. Search algorithms change all the time, so random ups-and-downs are expected, but this should help highlight general trends!
Top 10 Biggest Shifts in Domain Popularity
These therapist directories and other websites are now appearing more (or less) frequently when people search for specific therapists' names.
Compared to 1 week ago:
| Website | Score | Change |
|---|---|---|
| todaysnurse.org | 6.25 | ▲ 4.50 |
| facebook.com | 54.00 | ▲ 2.58 |
| healthgrades.com | 43.42 | ▼ 1.91 |
| makertherapy.com | 6.25 | ▲ 1.58 |
| yelp.com | 19.42 | ▲ 1.50 |
| npidb.org | 23.58 | ▲ 1.50 |
| sharecare.com | 24.50 | ▼ 1.42 |
| npiprofile.com | 13.33 | ▲ 1.16 |
| idcrawl.com | 14.25 | ▲ 1.08 |
| rocketreach.co | 17.00 | ▲ 0.92 |
Compared to 4 weeks ago:
| Website | Score | Change |
|---|---|---|
| sharecare.com | 24.50 | ▼ 9.08 |
| todaysnurse.org | 6.25 | ▲ 5.83 |
| yellowpages.com | 9.08 | ▼ 4.84 |
| webmd.com | 16.08 | ▲ 4.25 |
| therapist.com | 17.58 | ▼ 2.00 |
| npiprofile.com | 13.33 | ▼ 1.92 |
| vitadox.com | 10.00 | ▲ 1.83 |
| findatopdoc.com | 7.50 | ▼ 1.67 |
| rocketreach.co | 17.00 | ▲ 1.67 |
| researchgate.net | 14.33 | ▼ 1.59 |
The goal of monitoring the shift in popularity is to help surface websites that are... questionable. Or at least unexpected or surprising and worthy of further investigation into how they're positioning and presenting therapists' details online. Remember, it requires a lot of effort to legitimately build a directory of therapist profiles -- because each therapist would need to manually approve or sign up! So when there's a website that suddenly shows up in a bunch of searches in a matter of weeks, we want to learn more about how and why that happened. It's like a canary in a coal mine, but far less dangerous.
And wow, this is sort of exciting and disappointing, because there's definitely a questionable one in this very first report. TodaysNurse went from basically 0 four weeks ago to showing up in approximately 6% of the searches when we ran our analysis this week. And making me question this website even more is that when I attempt to see what these profiles look like, all of their pages now have 404 errors. Go ahead, try search for it on Google yourself with this search query therapist site:todaysnurse.org
Domain Presence in the Top 10
This is a breakdown of the most common domains found at each search result position. The first 10 positions are the most critical, as they appear on the first page, so this breaks it down for positions 1 through 10.
| Website | Search Result Position | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
#1
|
#2
|
#3
|
#4
|
#5
|
#6
|
#7
|
#8
|
#9
|
#10
|
|
| psychologytoday.com | 49.3% | 23.6% | 5.7% | 4.9% | 5.0% | 5.4% | 4.4% | 5.0% | 5.5% | 4.2% |
| mind-diagnostics.org | 5.4% | 2.0% | 2.9% | 2.0% | 1.2% | 0.4% | 0.2% | 0.3% | 0.4% | 0.1% |
| humantold.com | 1.2% | 3.3% | 0.1% | 0.5% | 0.1% | 0.5% | 0.6% | 0.8% | 0.4% | 0.5% |
| linkedin.com | 1.0% | 5.6% | 10.2% | 11.9% | 11.3% | 10.7% | 7.9% | 6.3% | 5.6% | 6.1% |
| headway.co | 0.8% | 3.7% | 3.5% | 3.0% | 1.6% | 2.1% | 1.1% | 1.7% | 0.9% | 1.2% |
| makertherapy.com | 0.7% | 2.1% | 0.9% | 0.8% | 0.4% | 0.4% | 0.5% | 0.2% | 0.2% | 0.4% |
| therapist.com | 0.6% | 2.0% | 1.5% | 1.5% | 1.5% | 2.3% | 1.6% | 2.2% | 2.2% | 2.0% |
| growtherapy.com | 0.5% | 2.4% | 2.0% | 1.0% | 0.8% | 0.4% | 0.7% | 0.2% | 0.2% | 0.5% |
| zocdoc.com | 0.2% | 2.3% | 7.8% | 5.9% | 4.1% | 4.0% | 3.0% | 3.8% | 3.2% | 2.3% |
| facebook.com | 0.2% | 0.9% | 2.3% | 3.0% | 3.5% | 3.2% | 3.3% | 3.9% | 4.0% | 4.1% |
| mapquest.com | 0.2% | 0.4% | 1.0% | 1.6% | 2.7% | 2.6% | 2.4% | 2.9% | 2.7% | 2.2% |
| instagram.com | 0.1% | 0.6% | 1.8% | 3.1% | 2.1% | 3.0% | 2.5% | 2.2% | 2.9% | 2.6% |
| healthgrades.com | 0.1% | 0.2% | 2.0% | 2.3% | 3.8% | 3.3% | 4.1% | 3.0% | 3.6% | 3.1% |
| medicalnewstoday.com | 0.0% | 0.1% | 0.9% | 1.1% | 1.8% | 2.1% | 1.7% | 1.5% | 1.4% | 0.8% |
| All Others | 39.7% | 50.8% | 57.4% | 57.4% | 60.1% | 59.6% | 66.0% | 66.0% | 66.8% | 69.9% |
This "domain presence" chart slices the data a bit differently, focusing solely on the top 10 results for each of our searches, since those are the most likely to be clicked on by those seeking mental health support from you. (And also, isn't this chart the prettiest of them all?) Each row represents a website, and each column represents a search result position (#1-#10). The colors are weighted based on the website's dominance of that particular position.
Echoing what was mentioned earlier, PsychologyToday absolutely dominates that #1 spot... and also #2. And it's pretty good with spots #3 through #10 too. So congrats PsychologyToday, I guess. Meanwhile, you can see that LinkedIn might be lacking in #1, but it has a solid performance for #2 through #10. There are probably some deep dives needed on a few of these, which will come in future editions of this report!
That's a wrap for our very first edition of the Therapist Search Result. I have a tendency to be long-winded when typing up stuff like this, so thanks for reading this far. If there are other charts and graphs you'd like to see, questions you have about what we've presented above, topics you'd like us to focus on, etc., please reach out -- jon@quilltherapysolutions.com
And if you're thinking to yourself, okay cool, some graphs, but what do I do with this?, that's totally reasonable. And here are some ideas for next steps!
- Sign up for our free personal search report. We'll automatically search for your name every week and compare those results against prior weeks, helping you stay on top of how you specifically show up when people search for you online.
- You want to control those top 10 search result spots. These are the links people will click on. We'll be writing about this more in the future, but here's one quick idea: Take a look at the legitimate websites that are popular in this report. If you don't already have a profile with them, create one! It's bound to be one of the top results for you going forward.
- Create your own personal website. Please, if there's one takeaway -- if you don't have your own personal website as a therapist, you should! Even if you work for a company or group practice, you should have your own! Claim that top search result spot for yourself, not some random therapist directory! Clients need to be able to find you specifically on the internet, regardless of where you happen to be employed at the time.
As I wrote in my announcement post about this launch, we're so appreciative of the therapist community over this past year. This is just a tiny service we wanted to give back to you all.
Thanks so much, and we'll see you again next week!
- Jon at Quill
