Case study · Mental health
Therapist.com
Therapist Directory Search and SEO on WordPress
The therapist.com build was behind schedule and its search was the problem. We joined the development team for six months, fixed the search in place, and made every location and specialty search a page search engines can find.
Overview
Therapist.com helps people find a licensed therapist near them, and publishes a library of mental health articles. The site is published by PESI and runs on WordPress.
In the spring of 2021 the therapist.com build was behind schedule. We put two developers and a project manager on the project and worked inside the existing development team from June until the WordPress side of the MVP was finished in November 2021.
The Challenge
The therapist search had been built on a WordPress store locator plugin. A punch list of search bugs kept growing: searching a state name returned nothing because the map searched from the center of the state, filters stayed applied after a new search, and after a visit to a profile page the distance control no longer matched the filter actually applied.
Before starting, we reviewed the build and laid out three options: keep the plugin and fix it, rebuild the search front end on top of the plugin, or move search to its own back end. The decision was to keep the plugin and fix the punch list first, so the work had to happen in place, in the existing code, on the existing deadline.
What We Built
Search that behaves the way people expect
We reworked the results page around location search and filters: distance, clinical specialties, online, phone or in person, and profile details such as sliding scale fees, pronouns, an ADA accessible office and a gender fluid option. Filters now clear and carry over correctly, Back to Results returns to the same place, and results load with pagination, a result count and a loading spinner. The mobile layout got its own pass, with filters hidden on first load and a distance slider that works on phones.
Provider profiles people can act on
Profile pages show the details people filter by, and visitors can share a profile by email or use the call, text and email buttons to reach a therapist. Provider records come from a separate .NET application, so we traced data issues across both systems when a field did not appear on the site.
Every search is a page search engines can find
Each search now has a clean URL built from the state, city and specialty, with matching breadcrumbs, page title, H1 and canonical tags, including on paginated results. We generated sitemaps by state, city, county and zip code, each broken down by clinical specialty, split them at 50,000 URLs per file and merged them into Yoast SEO.
A faster site
We audited performance, then tuned WP Rocket, removed unused scripts, styles and Font Awesome, optimized fonts and images, and delayed the HubSpot script until the visitor scrolls. Articles, author pages, related and popular posts, Google Analytics and cookie consent were cleaned up along the way.
Working inside an existing team
Our developers worked in the project's own repository, took tickets from its board and logged time in its system, and our project manager joined its sprint planning. Each ticket went through our own QA before the lead developer reviewed the pull request. Our project manager watched the board and flagged as soon as a developer needed more tickets, and we raised the developers' hours when the deadline required it.
Results
- Location and specialty search pages with clean URLs, canonical tags and sitemaps covering states, cities, counties and zip codes.
- A two-developer team working inside the project's own tickets, code review and sprints for six months.
- The WordPress side of the therapist.com MVP finished in November 2021.