Psychology Today vs Google Business Profile: where should the effort go?

If you are choosing between Psychology Today and a Google Business Profile, start with the Google Business Profile. It is free, and it reaches people who are actively searching for a therapist in your area at the moment they search. Psychology Today in Ireland costs €19.95 a month after a six month free trial, and it reaches people browsing a directory. Both can work, but only one of them costs nothing forever, and the free one should be the baseline the paid one has to beat.

Psychology Today vs Google Business Profile: where should the effort go?

Into the Google Business Profile first. It is free, it shows your practice on Google Maps and in local search results, and it is where most people look before they look anywhere else. Psychology Today is worth trying because the first six months cost nothing, but once the €19.95 monthly fee starts, it should be paying for itself in enquiries you can trace back to it. If it is not, cancel it. There is no contract, so cancelling is a two minute job.

That is the short answer. The longer answer is about what each one actually does, because they are not really competitors. One is a listing on the world's default search tool. The other is a niche directory with a strong brand among people who already know to look for a therapy directory.

What does each one actually cost?

A Google Business Profile is free. There is no paid tier for the listing itself, and Google's own documentation is blunt about the ranking side of it too: there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Your position in the map results comes from how complete your profile is, how close you are to the searcher, and how well known the practice is, which in Google's terms mostly means reviews and mentions. You cannot buy your way up, which also means nobody else in your town can buy their way past you.

Psychology Today gives new therapists six free months, then charges a fixed monthly fee: €19.95 in Ireland, £19.95 in the UK. There are no plans or contracts, and you can cancel any time. For comparison, the US price is $29.95 a month, so the Irish and UK rates are the cheaper end of what the company charges globally. They also offer extra free months for referring colleagues, which tells you something about how they grow: therapists recruit therapists.

€19.95 a month is €239.40 a year. That is not a large marketing budget, and if the directory sends you even one client a year it has paid for itself several times over. The question is never whether the fee is affordable. It is whether the effort of maintaining the profile, writing the bio, keeping the photo current and answering directory enquiries is going toward the place your clients actually come from.

Who actually finds you on each platform?

This is the real difference, and it is worth being fair to both sides.

Psychology Today reaches people who have decided to look for a therapist and have found their way to a directory. That is a genuinely useful audience. The site ranks well in search, the filtering by issue, approach and insurance is better than anything Google offers, and for some searchers the directory format feels safer than ringing a stranger from a map listing. If someone searches for a specific specialism, a directory that lets them filter for it does a job a map pin cannot.

A Google Business Profile reaches people at an earlier and larger point in the funnel: the moment they type a search that includes their own area. Those searches happen on the tool people already use for everything else, and the map results appear above most of the regular results. The person searching this way may never visit a directory at all. If you are not on the map, you simply do not exist for that search, and one of your colleagues does.

There is also an ownership point, and regular readers will know I care about this one. Your Google reviews and your profile history are attached to your practice and they compound over the years. A directory profile is a listing you rent. Both are hosted by someone else, but only one of them keeps charging you to stay visible. I wrote about the same pattern with platforms in what you actually own on BetterHelp, and directories are a much milder version of it: you can leave without losing clients, but you take nothing with you when you go.

Is a Google Business Profile hard to set up?

No, and the parts that worry therapists have straightforward answers.

The address question comes up first. Plenty of therapists rent a room and do not want that address published, or work online and have no premises at all. Google's rule is about whether you serve customers at your business address. If you do not meet clients there, you can choose not to show the address and set a service area instead, so you can appear in local results without publishing where you live or which building you rent a room in.

Category choice is the next one. Google asks for one primary category and lets you add more, and its guidance is to use as few as possible and pick ones that describe what the business is, not what it has. Therapy practices typically use categories such as Psychotherapist, Counselor (the picker uses the US spelling), Psychologist or Mental Health Service, depending on what fits. Pick the one that best matches your actual work rather than stacking every vaguely related option.

Verification is the step people stall on. Google decides the method for you based on your category and region. It might be a video recording, a live video call, a phone call, an email or a postcard, and the postcard route can take up to two weeks. You cannot pick your preferred method, and Google itself recommends the video option where it is offered. It is mildly awkward to film your workspace, but it is a one off, and it is the thing standing between you and appearing on the map. One caution: if you move address later, the profile has to be verified again, so set it up at the address you intend to keep.

What about reviews? Can therapists even ask for them?

This is where therapy differs from every other local business, and it deserves a straight treatment rather than a growth hack.

Google actively encourages businesses to ask customers for reviews, with a review link or a QR code. It bans two things: offering any incentive for a review, and review gating, which is inviting only your happy customers to review you while steering unhappy ones to a private form. Either can get reviews removed or the profile suspended.

Therapy adds an ethical layer on top. The Irish and UK codes do not mention Google reviews by name. The IACP code tells practitioners to avoid misrepresentation in advertising and to be acutely aware of the power dynamics of the client relationship. IAHIP goes further, limiting what a psychotherapy advert should contain to name, qualifications, contact details, hours and a description of services, a list that leaves no room for client testimonials. BACP requires accuracy and honesty in how you present your work and does not address testimonials directly.

The practical reading is this: do not solicit reviews of your clinical work from clients. The power imbalance the codes keep pointing at is exactly the problem, whatever the platform. Reviews from colleagues, from supervisees on non clinical matters, or from people who attended a workshop are lower risk, and a complete, accurate profile with good photos does more for your ranking than a thin one with two reviews anyway. Google's own ranking guidance puts complete and detailed business information first.

Psychology Today sidesteps the review question entirely, which for a therapist is arguably a feature. Nobody is comparing star ratings on a directory profile.

So what is the sensible order of operations?

Set up the Google Business Profile first, properly: right category, service area configured, address hidden if you do not see clients at it, hours and photos filled in. It costs nothing but an afternoon and a verification wait.

Then take the Psychology Today free trial and measure it. Six months is a long trial, long enough to know whether the directory sends you enquiries in your area. Ask every new enquiry how they found you and write the answer down. When the €19.95 a month starts, you will have real numbers instead of a feeling, and either answer is fine. Some practices get a steady trickle from the directory and the fee is trivially worth it. Others get nothing from it and everything from the map, and the cancellation takes two minutes.

The mistake is doing neither well: a half filled directory profile and no Google presence at all, which is a common combination. The other mistake is treating the setup itself as the finish line, when the profile needs the same care as the rest of your practice's public face.

If you would rather hand the fiddly part to someone else, Google Business Profile setup is one of the add-ons we do for practice websites, verification and categories included. But whether you do it yourself or not, do it before you spend a cent on a directory. The free listing is the one the paid one has to beat.