Google Ads for Therapists. The Ultimate Guide to get Leads for your Therapy Practice (2025)

In 2025, we see a lot of Therapists and therapy practices aiming to get Clients. There could be so many tactics for getting Leads. But, Google Ads for Therapists has been a consistent source of getting new clients. With Google Ads, therapists can scale their therapy practice.

In the United States alone, competition among therapy practices has increased over time. With Referrals and platforms like Psychology Today, Therapists try their Luck with Ads. I said ‘Try their Luck’ because there is a lot of room for improvement in their Google Ads, website, and Landing Pages.

So here, I have used my experience at Scaleket running Google Ads for Therapists to get them Leads. This is the ultimate guide for a Therapist, counselor, or Therapy practice owner. By using this guide, you can setup google ads for your therapy practice. Also, you can audit your google ads expert if they are doing it right or not.

What are Google Ads for Therapists?

Google Ads for therapists is a powerful online advertising platform. Therapists reach potential clients who are searching for therapy services on Google.

Google Search Ads are the most popular for getting leads. It appears when clients type in their required service. This ppc model means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, giving you control over your budget. Unlike organic SEO,, which takes time to get leads, Google Ads offers direct visibility. Ads help therapists attract new clients by targeting individuals in their local area.

How Google Ads helps Therapists to get Leads?

Google Ads offers therapists an advantage in lead generation. Ads connect therapists with individuals who are seeking mental health services. Google Ads places your practice front and center when someone types in the keyword.

Google Ads helps to capture demand in your targeted location. Success for a therapy business needs a consistent client base. And Google Ads is a reliable source to get consistent clients.

By appearing at the top of search results, therapists gain immediate visibility. Google Ads gives more results in less time. Therapists also have the luxury to target specific areas based on Zip codes. The measurable nature of Google Ads also allows for continuous optimization. It enables therapists to refine their campaigns and identify top-performing keywords. It attracts a consistent stream of qualified leads to fill their practice.

Prepare your Therapy website for Google Ads

To use Google Ads, your therapy website needs to be ready. First, create dedicated landing pages for each service you advertise. For example, aba therapy and couples counseling.

Second, optimize these pages for conversion. Include a clear and prominent CTA like “Schedule a Free Consultation”. Ensure your contact information is easy to find. Make your online booking process as easy as possible. Build trust by featuring testimonials and a transparent fee.

Finally, ensure your site loads quickly. It must be mobile-responsive and secure (HTTPS). Relevant, empathetic content with natural keyword integration will also improve your ad performance.

These Landing pages should also match your Google Ads content. It should focus on the specific service and its benefits.

Analyze the metrics of your Therapy business

Google Ads Policies for Therapists: 5 Things to remember

Google Ads for therapists can be tricky. Before you setup therapy Ads, it’s important to understand the policies. By doing this, you can avoid Google Ads account suspensions and Ad disapprovals.

Therapists Are NOT Eligible for Local Services Ads (LSA)

For Other local businesses, LSA is another source of getting Leads. Not all businesses can run Local service Ads.

Mental health professionals, including therapists, are not eligible for LSA. Local search ads are available for selective wellness services. It includes acupuncture, personal training, weight loss centers, and yoga studios.

Therapists or psychologists can run other Google Ads campaign types. All that demand for therapy services is now shifted to Google Search or other Ads.

No Misleading or Sensational Claims by Therapists

Google prohibits ads that make misleading health claims, such as “Guaranteed anxiety cure”. Therapists must use simple and fact-based messaging in their Ads and Landing Pages.

Must adhere to Health & Medical Advertising Restrictions

Google Ads has some restrictions on healthcare-related advertising. These services include Therapy services as well. Advertisers need to meet some requirements. And there are some limitations based on local regulations as well.

Privacy & Data Collection Compliance

Advertisers must follow all applicable laws and regulations on user privacy. This includes adhering to standards like HIPAA in the United States. Therapists and Counselors must ensure that they manage sensitive health information. ​

Follow Location & Licensing Requirements

Therapists must only advertise in regions where they can practice based on license. Google Ads policies ask them to follow all local laws and regulations. These laws include proper licensing for healthcare providers. ​

Best Google Ads Campaign Type for Therapists.

For therapists, google ads search campaigns are a popular option. A lot of different options available on Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords). Here are the Campaigns we recommend to get Leads for therapists or therapy practices.

Google Search (Best for Therapists and Psychologists)

• Appear at the top of Google search results when potential clients search for therapy services.

• Use call extensions and Location extensions to make it easy for clients to contact you.

Performance Max (for cross-channel Ads and Retargeting)

• Reaches potential clients across Google Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Display.

• Best for broad audience targeting and retargeting website visitors.

• Works best when we provide it offline conversion data, which is the converted Leads

Demand Gen Campaigns ( Good for generating demand)

• Builds awareness and nurtures future clients with engaging visual ads across YouTube, Gmail, and Discover.

• Best to run after you capture significant demand on Google Search

Step-by-Step Guide to Google Ads for Therapists

Being the Top Choice for your therapy ads, Google Search Ads have a lot of competition. And in the United States, we have seen high CPC for Search Ads. So, traffic is not cheap at all. But it’s worth it to run google ads considering the return on ad spend.

Google Ads campaign for a therapy practice shoulf follows these best practices. Here is the step by step guide to run Google Ads for therapists and counselors.

Choose Leads as Campaign Objective

Choosing a campaign Objective is fairly simple. Since therapists want Leads from google ads, they would select ‘Leads’ as their business objective.

If that’s confusing for you, you can also choose “Create a Campaign without Goal Guidance”.

Campaign Type

Since you are making a campaign for high-intent text ads on Google Search for therapy ads, select ‘Search’ here and click next.

Here is our detailed guide on google ads campaign types.

Conversion Goals

Based on your Campaign Type and Objective for your therapy ads, Google would recommend Conversion Goals, which are the desired actions you want users to take on your website.

In case of Google Ads for therapists, we recommend having both ‘Phone Call’ and ‘Lead Form’ on your Landing Pages.

These are named ‘Phone Call Leads’ and ‘Submit Lead Forms’. You can choose both and click ‘Next’ if you have both options available on the Landing Page.

When to choose Phone Call Leads Only

Some therapists prefer to get direct phone calls. If you just want to optimize your Ads for Phone calls or you do not have a proper follow-up process for Lead Forms, you can remove ‘Submit Lead Forms’

When to choose Submit Lead Forms Only

In thee same way, if your therapy website may prefer the form submission only. In case you just have a Form on your site and no Phone call button, you can choose to remove the Phone call lead from here.

Check our complete guide on Google Ads Conversion Tracking for Lead Generation.

Select Ways to Reach Your Goal

You’ll be asked to choose the important actions for your campaign. This is just an Optional step. You can choose to skip and continue.

Campaign Name

You’ll be asked to name your campaign here. Though you can give it any name of your choice but we prefer to name it in a way so we can identify the campaign. For example. Couples therapy – Leads – 1000$/D – Clicks

Similary if you are running google ads for aba therapy, you can name it that way.

Bidding Strategy

This is by far the most important setting in your campaign. Have a right bidding strategy is crucial for therapists to get success with google ads. Here, you have some smart bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversions value, and Manual Strategies like Clicks and Impression share.

Let’s understand what each strategy means and find out which one would be best for your therapist’s Google Ads.

 

Maximize Clicks

Here are the Pros and cons of using Maximize clicks bidding strategy for therapist google ads.

• Focuses on getting the most clicks for your budget.
•  Works best with exact match and phrase match keywords (broad match may waste ad spend).
• It can favor cheaper traffic to your therapy website at less competitive placements.
• Ideal for low-competition niches where fewer advertisers are bidding.
• Best for: Testing new campaigns, driving high traffic, and remarketing lists (RLSA).
•  Limitations: Doesn’t optimize for conversions—manual monitoring is required.

Maximize clicks is a manual CPC is a good option to start, especially if your budget is Low. Here, you tell Google the maximum you can pay for a click, and Google places your Ads accordingly.

Pro Tip: Start with a Avg. CPC bid for your Manual CPC campaigns and adjust on basis of results.

 

Maximize Conversions

This bidding strategy Optimizes for getting the most conversions within your daily budget. Here are some point you need to consider before choosing it for running adwords campaigns for therapists.
🔹 Spends aggressively at first and optimizes over time.
🔹 Works well when you have a high volume of conversions (Google’s AI needs data to optimize).
🔹 Google ignores match types, and this is people-based targeting (even exact match keywords get close variants).
🔹 Best for: High-intent keywords, lead generation with sufficient search volume.
🔹 Limitations: Inefficient for low-volume campaigns or high-competition keywords.

Pro Tip: If your campaign has low conversion volume, consider Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC instead.

Maximize Conversions with Target CPA is a safer option for your therapy practice ads. But it’s quite restrictive. It’s good if you have good historical conversion data. Google recommends having at least 30 Conversions in 30 days if you want to shift to Target CPA.

Target Impression Share

It lets you choose the share for the available searches you want to target. It works best when you exactly know your Top converting terms.

But, we don’t use it for our Clients since Google’s Keyword Matching is too broad.

For a brand campaign, it’s the best choice to make. Check which keywords bring clientd for your therapy practice. You can choose to run google ads for those keywords with this bidding strategy.

Which bidding strategy do we recommend for therapy practice ads?

A right Bid strategy would also depend on your Budget, Volume of Searches, and Targeted Location, and a lot of other variables. But for lower budgets, we recommend starting with Maximize Clicks or Manual CPC to retain control.

Remember, there is no right or wrong bidding strategy. Something that worked for one business may or may not work for another. So, we recommend testing all these variables and deeply understanding business goals and competition before you decide to scale.

Pro Tip – Testing different bid strategies is great if you have enough budget

Portfolio Bidding Strategy

At the Account level, you can Option of choosing Shared budgets for your campaigns in Portfolio bidding. You can select this strategy after setting up your campaign, as this is not available at the campaign level.

Customer Acquisition

This Option allows you to exclude existing Clients of your therapy business. But, it requires you to give Google a list of your customers.
We recommend leaving this option at the start.

 

Networks

By default, Google selects Search Partners site (Like YouTube, Amazon) and Display Network and recommends choosing it.
But, in our experience, we noticed a lot of Low-Quality leads for therapists these networks. So, we recommend unchecking both of these.

Locations

Selecting the right Location is the foundation of your campaign’s success. Choose the areas close to you. You can either select cities or do radius targeting.
A little Option below Locations chooses ‘Presence or Interest’ by default. This Option means People who are typing for your services with the targeted city name would be shown ads, no matter if they are inside those targeted Locations or not.
For Example, if you are advertising for the keyword “aba therapy New Jersey” and the Target Location is New Jersey. Selecting ‘Presence or Interest’ will let a person from New York see your Ad if he/she search your target keyword.

 

Our Recommendation.

We highly recommend choosing ‘Presence: People in or regularly in your Targeted Location‘

 

Languages

Language targeting allows you to restrict where your ads can appear based on the user’s language settings and the language of the site. Ads can be shown to people who understand any, but not necessarily all, of the languages you select.

 

Audience Segments

These are the Two Available options in Audience Targeting for therapists.

• Targeting – Let you narrow down your target audience further based on Demographics, Affinity, In-market, and your Custom Audiences
• Observation  – Don’t narrow the reach of your campaign, with the option to adjust the bids on the selected segments

• We recommend keeping it default (Observation) in most cases.

Automatically Created Assets

Enabling it gives Google AI the choice of selecting Ad assets from your therapy website. For better targeting, we recommend turning it ‘Off’.

More Settings

• Choose the date when you want to start running your ads
• Ad Schedule – You can schedule your Ads for just office hours for your therapy practice here.
• Brands – Target or Exclude Competitors services

Keywords

Having right keywords is important to succeed with google ads for therapists.

• Select high-intent keywords (2+ words)
• Keywords like ‘Couples therapy New Jersey’ or ‘Couples therapy near me’ do very well for Therapists
• Use Google Keyword Planner to research your Keywords.

If not sure which keywords to target for your therapy practice campaign, here is our Complete Keyword research guide.

You can choose to segment your Keywords by Ad groups. For example, separate ad groups for ‘Couples therapy’ and ‘teen therapy’ keywords.
This would help having specialized Ad copy and Landing Pages for those keyword themes.

Ads

Ad copy for your therapy ads need to be very concise. Here are best practices while writing ad copy for therapists.

Headlines

• Use your Top Keywords in headlines
• Add benefit-oriented headlines
• Try to use all available headlines

Description

• Reinforce the headline’s message for description and make sure the combinations look great.
• Use the Keywords to create a sense of relevance
• Try to use all 4 headlines

Extensions

Use extensions like Callouts, sitelinks, Structured snippets, and Phone call extensions to improve click-through rates and performance

Location Extension

If you have an Office for therapy practice or a particular location in your Google My Business, this would let you show your ads on Google Maps.

• Connect your Google My Business to Google Ads
• Add Location extension in Assets at the account level

Manage and Optimize Adwords for Therapists

After setting up therapist Google ads, it’s important to manage and optimize your ads. Here are the Top 5 Optimizations we prefer to boost Leads for your Therapy Practice.

1. Optimize Landing Pages for Therapy Ads

   For therapists using Google Ads, landing page optimization plays an important part. At Scaleket, we use Microsoft Clarity for our Clients. Regularly check the recordings and User behaviours to optimize further. A good Landing Page Experience helps with better Ad rank.

   Pro Tip – Identify Top Competitors in Google Ads Auction Insights and check their Landing Page. Provide better offer and better user experience for visitors on your site

2. Keywords and search terms Optimization

   Some keywords convert better than others for therapy ads. Check your Search terms report frequently to identify terms that are top-performing. Add high-converting terms with good search volume as Keywords. Also, update your negative keyword lists to improve traffic quality.

3. Optimize therapy Ads for locations

   For therapists, Google ads have different competition for different locations. Top top-performing Location helps to improve Leads inside Google Ads. Identify the Top-performing locations inside the User Location report. Segment the campaigns by location to spend more and get more leads for your therapy practice.

4. Import Qualified Leads into Google Ads

   Every therapist should import quality leads into Google Ads. It means informing Google Ads about the converted leads and optimizing the algorithm for more quality leads. It not only removes spam leads but also improves the profitability of your campaigns.

5. Ad copy Optimization to filter low-quality leads

   Ad copy is used to convince people to click on your Ads. But we can also use it to filter low-quality leads for therapists. For example, managing ads for a therapy practice at Scaleket, we noticed a high percentage of Leads don’t convert as people prefer Insurance. So, we pinned our  Ad descriptions saying “Private pay and out of Network Only”. This helped us filter out traffic even before they click on our Ads.

Here are a few tips to optimize Google Ads for conversions. Check this to optimize your Ad performance for therapy practice.

Conclusion

Google Ads for Therapists has been a consistent source of Leads. Setting up therapy ads in the way we mentioned above is the first step that is very important. Many Psychologists and therapists run Google ads to get clients.

Following up on your leads as early as possible is also an important factor. It helps in getting new clients for your therapy practice. So, make sure your Sales team is doing a good job as well.

In the end, if you are a therapist, psychologist, or therapy practice owner, you can get a free Google Ads audit. Reach out to our Google Ads Agency for Leads and schedule a Free Session with our Google Ads strategist.