If you're newer to private practice, competing with established therapists in search results can feel like an uphill battle. But as more potential clients turn to AI to find therapists who understand their specific experiences, a new opportunity is opening up for clinicians who are willing to get more specific in their marketing.
In this episode, Anna explains why micro-niches are becoming more valuable in the age of AI search—and how they can help your practice get discovered even without years of SEO history. From understanding how AI searches for answers to creating dedicated micro-niche pages on your website, you'll learn how to use specificity to attract right-fit clients, strengthen your marketing, and build visibility over time.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this episode:
1️⃣ How AI search works differently from traditional search engines—and why highly specific website content can help newer practices get discovered.
2️⃣ What a micro-niche actually is, how it fits beneath your broader specialty areas, and why you don't have to build your entire practice around one.
3️⃣ Why micro-niches deserve their own dedicated website pages instead of a brief mention on a general specialty page.
4️⃣ How to choose one or two micro-niches, create compelling pages around them, and start building visibility through AI search and beyond.
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Hey there. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing Therapy. Happy Tuesday to you, the last Tuesday in October. Can you believe it? I know I can't. If you celebrate Halloween, you hopefully have some plans coming up. I have a little Elsa, and a fighter pilot, and maybe a little pumpkin. I don't know, I haven't decided what our little six-month-old is going to be, so I'll report back next week.
But here we are. Hopefully, it's feeling like fall where you are, and we're talking about AI today. It's funny, I was thinking just today about the way that... just about my own AI use, and I remember the first time I tried to use AI to like write something for me. I had no idea what I was doing. I was sitting down with ChatGPT.
I was actually at a Starbucks here in town, and man, what it gave me was terrible. But that was really just my first foray into what AI is capable of, and here we find ourselves today. I mean, just think about how much it's changed even in 2026. There has been so much change, and we are relying on and using AI in ways we just simply could not have imagined in the past.
So anyway, we're talking today about the opportunity that exists for newer therapists because of AI and how exciting that actually is, how excited that makes me and the opportunity available to you that just simply wasn't there before. So every time we start a Confident Copy live coaching call, we always begin with wins.
So we open it up and we share, "Hey, what's gone well this week?" And sometimes that's having gotten a new client, sometimes that's making great progress on their copy. Sometimes it's just showing up that day, you know? Sometimes we have those weeks. But anyway a couple of weeks ago we, we opened up with wins as we usually do, and one of our students shared that a new client had found her through ChatGPT.
Not Google, not Psych Today, but an AI. And what's really interesting is that this client was looking specifically for a therapist that could help them as they navigated a lupus diagnosis. And this person was a handful of miles away from the clinician that ended up working with that client with a page on her website talking about chronic illness, specifically lupus . Someone living nearby, dealing with lupus, talked to ChatGPT and landed in her office.
That's pretty, that's pretty cool. That's what we're talking about today.
Micro-niches, why AI makes them more powerful than ever, why this is especially good news if you're newer to private practice.
All right. So for many, many years, sEO was a long game. The longer your site has been around, the more likely you were to rank. Like, put in the time, put in the effort, age, backlinks, consistency. It's gonna compound slowly over time. Let me be clear, all of those things are still true.
Absolutely. But if you just opened your practice, you were up against therapists who'd been building their sites for five, 10, 15 years. Like I said, this still matters to Google and to AI. Please don't hear me otherwise. But something new is happening alongside of this.
People are having very, very specific conversations with AI in ways we just simply weren't before, and we couldn't with Google in the way that Google used to exist in its older form. Right? They're not typing therapist Nashville into a Claude search bar. They're typing a whole paragraph. They're having an entire conversation about what's going on in their life.
"I'm three months postpartum. I snap at my husband over nothing. Sometimes I feel angry at my baby. What's wrong with me? What do I do? Is this normal? Who can help me?" So how does AI decide what to show her? Through what's called a query fan-out. Query fan-out. Okay, I'm gonna get a little bit technical here so that you can understand what's happening.
So step one is the AI actually breaks down a question, right, this, this postpartum mother as an example, into a bunch of smaller searches, usually like eight to fifteen of them. So what is postpartum rage? Is anger normal after having a baby? Postpartum rage versus postpartum depression.
Therapists for postpartum. It's parsing out her question into smaller searches. Some of them are broader than her question, some are narrower, some are closely related, some are not. So that's what the AI is doing. Step two, it runs all of those searches at the same exact time.
So ChatGPT, we know, pulls from Bing, which is Microsoft's version of Google. Google's AI mode pulling from Google, obviously. Whatever it's pulling from, it's running all of those searches, those eight to fifteen, at the same time. Step three, and this is the big one, it's not judging whole entire websites.
It's judging passages. Not even pages, passages. So pages are broken down into chunks, roughly a few paragraphs each, and each chunk is scored on how well it answers one of those smaller searches. What's interesting here is that one really good, strong, specific paragraph could beat a giant guide, you know, multi-thousand-word blog post on something in these fan-outs.
After that, step four, it scores higher when the same source keeps showing up. So if a website or a page has answered multiple of those smaller queries itself, then that is going to be scored higher. A page that answers several of those smaller searches gets a boost over one that answers just one.
Okay? Step five, it writes the answer from the passages that made the cut and cites them. Everyone else it found doesn't even get mentioned.
So AI isn't looking at who has the biggest website, the oldest website. It's asking who answered the most specific piece the best. Now, what's really interesting, and as I did research learning more about what exactly we know about query fan-outs and, and AI searches right now, because holy cow, is it changing literally every week.
A recent one said that an AI answer pulled from six different websites, so it cited six different websites, but you know what's crazy? None of those six ranked number one on Google for the original question. So what AI was offering aren't even websites that would have ranked in the first position if they had just typed this straight into Google.
What does that mean?
This means that if you are ultra-specific using what we call a micro-niche in your marketing, it's going to be built to answer multiple parts of these questions people are having with AI and increase your chances of being surfaced in those. Look at that list of smaller searches again. So we have things like what is postpartum rage?
Is anger normal after having a baby? Postpartum rage versus postpartum depression, those types of things. They're all about postpartum rage.
If on your website you were talking about just postpartum anxiety and depression or perinatal mental health, a very, very broad one, you might mention rage. Yeah, maybe. But that's one weak passage. A micro-niche page that's entirely about postpartum rage probably has a strong passage for almost every single one of those things.
You're talking about what it is. You're talking about why it happens. You're talking about how it's different from depression. You're talking about what therapy for it looks like, and you're talking about who you are and where you are and how you can help. So that would be, in this case, the same source, you, showing up again and again, exactly what's going to get rewarded by the AI.
That is why micro-niches work so well. On broad topics, the big, established site is still gonna win. Your likelihood of showing up for depression is much more challenging than your likelihood for showing up for something specific to depression. So those broad topics, yeah, the big established sites, they're gonna win, but on very specific ones, the field's a lot less crowded, and a focused page, an entire page, again, not just a statement about it, fits the AI searches way better.
So if your page is the clearest answer, you have a real shot, even if your site is only a year old, even if you haven't been at this for ten years. A brand-new door has been opened marketing-wise if you lean into micro-niches and micro-niche pages. Again, this doesn't replace the long game of SEO and AEO.
Okay? You still need to be out there building authority and showing Google and AI that you are legitimate, but still, a new doorway has been opened here.
Let's talk about now what micro niches actually are and how you can begin to think through this and ultimately implement it in your website and capture some of this opportunity. So first and foremost, what the heck is a micro niche, Anna? I actually had a client come and, and ask this today so I'm very fresh on it.
But I recommend thinking about your niche in layers. Okay? So we're thinking like a layered cake, something like that. Top layer is your red thread. You've heard me talk about that around here. Your red thread is what ties together everything you love to work with, the couples, the kids, the trauma, the CBT, the whatever.
That variety you enjoy, your red thread ties it together. This is the North Star of your messaging. You've gotta have it, or you're gonna appear as either, A, a generalist or, B, a completely disjointed therapist. Next layer, these are your specialty areas. Okay? These are the demographics you love working with, the moms, the LGBTQIA+, the executives, the men.
They might be topics like anxiety or depression, trauma. Okay? These are the things that we're always thinking about when it comes to a niche. Maybe it's a method, EMDR, CBT, IFS. Okay? So that's the second layer down. Now we're going a third layer down to your micro niche. Your micro niche is an ultra specific topic or demographic underneath one of your specialty areas.
So if one of your specialty areas is postpartum as a topic, underneath that, nestled underneath that is an ultra-specific topic, postpartum rage. Or maybe you have a demographic of executives, and then you have an ultra-specific demographic, a micro-niche underneath that, that is lawyers. Underneath trauma, you have religious trauma.
Okay? This is how we think about those three layers of niching and where the micro-niche lives. We don't really get micro methods. Those methods are gonna stay in-- stand alone. But what's clear here, you still gotta niche down. We still need the red thread. We still need the specialty areas. We're not building an entire practice on your micro-niche, although you might, hmm, and it certainly can dictate a lot of your reputation.
But your micro-niche lives at this bottom layer. It's niching the niche. But we can't have it without the two layers above it sort of anchoring that micro-niche. Okay? So that is what a micro-niche is. Now, why do they matter? Why do these matter more right now? Because I've talked about micro-niches for many years, but they're becoming more and more important.
They've always been helpful, but they're increasing your viability as a clinician. One, the focus of today is that they can be surfaced. They can be surfaced in search results, in AI conversations, because they're matching the very specific questions people are actually asking you. I mean, back to that lupus page.
Chronic illness therapist is a very big, broad search, and I would even consider chronic illness as kind of a micro-niche. Lupus, therapist who understands lupus. Now, that's a very, very short list. Reason two, quickly, and I'm not gonna get into that today, but they make your marketing easier.
Y'all, if you have a micro-niche, things get easier. And I don't say that lightly 'cause there aren't many things about marketing that are easy, per se. But they give you something really, really specific to talk about. They direct what you post on social media and who you talk to and how you talk to them.
People are going to remember the therapist who works with lawyers, right? And being memorable is incredible. Memorability and referability go hand in hand. We know that word of mouth continues to be one of the most powerful ways to get clients. The more memorable you are, the more likely people are to refer to you.
We'll go deeper on that in the future. But holy cow, micro-niches make your marketing easier. This is such good news for newer clinicians. If you haven't been at this for five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, you don't always have to beat the established practice down the street as an anxiety therapist, which everyone is.
Right? You can instead claim expertise in more specific areas and end up gaining more traction that way. Now, why does your micro-niche need its own page? Anna, can't I just list that on my anxiety page? Can't I just list that on my executives page? This is where a lot of people stop short.
Like, they love these types of people or these types of demographics, but they don't dedicate real estate on their website to it remember, in that query fan out, the more we can cover, the more that we can be cited in those passages, the more likely you are to be surfaced. It's difficult to do that with a little blurb on a general page.
So for your micro-niche to work for you, it needs a page dedicated to it. That means its own URL. That means its own client language. You're gonna use the same structure as a standard specialty page, just like we teach you in Confident Copy.
Connection, what it looks like, how you help, the next step, all those types of things specific to this micro-niche.
When possible, link it to its parent page. So the postpartum rage, we're gonna link to the perinatal. The perinatal, we're gonna link to the postpartum rage. So we're gonna build sort of that internal fabric with those internal links on your page. But we need to make sure that there is some dedicated real estate related to these specific areas in order for you to increase your chances of being surfaced in those types of results.
Now, you might be tempted to go crazy with micro niches, 'cause you could probably think about six different micro niches under each of your specialties that could work. 20 thin micro niche pages are not gonna help you. The smaller searches that AI runs change every time, so they're not exactly the same every single time. You can't chase every single one. So I recommend starting with one or two micro niches. Lean into those heavily. Let them direct your marketing. Create those really compelling pages on your website for them. Make them as strong as your best specialty page and see what happens.
Okay? Go out and talk about those. Go out and optimize them. That tends to be a lot more productive than creating tens and tens and tens of different pages of work you could do, right? Lean into the areas in which you have the most passion, the most expertise, the most specialization.
So what do you do with all this?
I want you to start laying the foundation for your micro niche right now. The sooner the better, okay? Because authority still compounds. Like I said, this is, is still absolutely a long game. The longer you're in it, the better your results are likely to get, and we're not going to see traction from you making these changes in the next one to three weeks.
We're talking multiple months before we start seeing things happen, which means that a page you publish this month has time to build. Waiting is not gonna make it easier to start this. All right? So a quick exercise. Write down your specialty areas. Think about those three layers of niche again.
Your red thread if you know it. If you don't, jump into Magnetic Niche Method, join us in Confident Copy, get that locked in. Write down your specialty areas. What are the demographics, topics, and methods that anchor the work that you do? And then look back at your favorite clients. Are there any specific subtopics, subgroups, subdemographics that really lit you up?
Pick one or two of those, and those, my friend, are your first micro niche pages.
Criteria for that. Does it fall under one of your specialty areas, ideally. Do you have real experience with it, and would you be excited if you got 10 inquiries?
It's not likely to be your entire practice, so it's okay if you still want variety, but would you be okay with that? Would that light you up? Would that make you excited? Then give it its own page. Write it in your client's language. Link it to its parent specialty page.
Mention it on your homepage. Start talking about it in your marketing and in your networking.
Use this little corner pocket of your website to really deeply lean into specificity where you don't have to worry about being all things to all people. Talk specifically to that client. Answer the questions that are on that sweet mom's brain as she's wondering if this postpartum rage is normal. Sink down into those shoes, answer those questions, and watch what happens.
I'm talking AI and beyond. The opportunity available to you is huge. Remember, the clinician who got that lupus client, that client didn't find her because her site was the biggest, the oldest, even the most beautiful, right? He found her because the page answered the exact question he was asking.
So this week, pick your one or two micro niches. If you need help with this, the Magnetic Niche Method is a great place to start to identify your red thread and some of your focus areas. But Confident Copy is where we go deep in this. We have a mighty micro niche training. We show you how to write these specialty pages in a way that is compelling and client-friendly.
Start getting those out there. Start optimizing for those questions people are asking. Win that query fan out and increase your chances of showing up in these really real conversations that people are having with AI and the opportunity available to you. I hope this one was helpful for you. I'll see you in our next episode.
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About Marketing Therapy
Marketing Therapy is the podcast where therapists learn how to market their private practices without burnout, self-doubt, or sleazy tactics. Hosted by Anna Walker—marketing coach, strategist, and founder of Walker Strategy Co—each episode brings you clear, grounded advice to help you attract the right-fit, full-fee clients and grow a practice you feel proud of.
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