Five quick fixes to increase conversion on your therapy website
If you’ve invested time, energy, and money into having a website for your therapy practice, then it make sense to make your website work for you. But first things first - let’s define what that even means!
Just like you probably aren’t in the practice of telling your clients what they should want from their lives, I’m not here to tell you what the goals of your website should be. However, it is wise to have a little heart-to-heart with yourself (or your business manager, or your Quickbooks account) so that you know what you need from your website.
Think of your therapy practice website as an employee. First, you’ll need to decide what you need it to do, then you can give it the foundational tools it needs to perform at its best. With a bit of strategic planning and time investment up front, your website can become a key asset for growing your business!
How can my website support my therapy practice?
I’ve worked with lots of different clients over the years, and while I’ve seen a huge array of digital marketing tactics and strategies, all of them point back to just a few different overarching goals. Of course, there are as many business goals out there as there are businesses. But if you need some help to being the brainstorming process, it’s likely that one of these will connect with you.
Potential goals of a website for your therapy practice:
To bring you more new clients
To serve as a professional hub that helps you get more referrals from other clinicians
To showcase your expertise in the field and help grow your reach as a speaker or thought-leader
To sell products or courses that support your mission as a therapist
If you want your website to bring in more therapy clients, do these things:
Of the potential goals listed above, I’d estimate that 95% of private practice owners I have worked with want their website to bring in more new clients. Maybe for themselves, or maybe to fill schedules of their employees. If this is your goal as well, I suggest you even take it one step further and rather than simply trying to fill your schedule, why not fill it with the clients you love to work with? With the right messaging, it can be done!
Here are a few places to start:
Use content that meets potential new clients where they are.
Think of the clients you love working with and the pain points that bring them into your office. While some people might search directly for a specialty modality you offer (think EMDR or Somatic Experiencing), it’s more likely that someone will be searching via their problem - not the solution.
So while it’s totally ok and encouraged to eventually talk about your unique credentials, certifications, and trainings… save that for a little later. Capture attention in headlines and at the beginning of your content using words and phrases that your favorite type of client will be searching for.
Once you’ve made it clear that you understand the problem they are facing, then it’s time to come in and let them know how you might help.
Have a picture of yourself on your home page.
Let’s face it - the very act of pursuing therapy is one of vulnerability. And when you consider the fact that the person contacting you is most likely going through a challenging time or dealing with a great deal of anxiety, it’s easy to see how they might prefer to opt out of anything that seems intimidating.
By including a photo that clearly shows your lovely, friendly face on your home page you can eliminate a great deal of anxiety around the unknown for potential new clients. The simple act of sharing your photo begins to build that foundation of shared vulnerability and trust which will be vital to establishing that essential connection with anyone who does decide to pursue therapy with you.
Bonus points for a professional photo. But if you don’t have one of those, I still recommend a photo taken with your phone over nothing.
Make it easy to scan.
When someone lands on your website, it takes them .5 seconds to make a subconscious decision about whether they like what they see, and whether they’ll stick around to learn more. And while there’s a LOT that goes into having a beautiful design that captures their attention right away, we’re not here for the in-depth stuff today. We’re here for the quick fixes.
So what’s a great way to not scare them away immediately? Eliminate walls of text. Gone are the days when we all used to be willing to read full paragraphs from anything other than a novel. In fact, I’m preeeetty certain you are not reading this full page. That’s why I broke it up and made it scannable for you with these headlines. And, while I’m sure that you have the most eloquent, genius, informative, and convincing content ever, I can promise you people are not going to commit to reading it without first scanning over your headlines to see if you feel like a good fit for them.
No headlines = nobody is reading. Sorry.
Write headlines that are good for Google and humans.
If you have any part in building or editing your own website, you’ve likely seen somewhere within the content that you can add “heading 1”, “heading 2”, etc. Those are incredibly important both for search engines and the experience of your website users. I’m not even going to scratch the surface of headline best practices here, but at the very least you need to know these few things:
Those headings are a key indicator to search engines to tell them what your website is about. So please, PLEASE include helpful keywords. Something like “I see you. I’m here.” is empathetic and all, but it does nothing to help search engines help you. (Unless you are a peeping tom for hire. In which case I’ve attracted the very wrong audience to this blog.)
On the opposite end of the SEO-keyword spectrum, remember that actual people are going to be scanning your site using these headlines. (Go back to #3 if you skipped it.) So don’t take it too far and keyword stuff your headings with a bunch of words that are intended only to try and convince a search engine to increase your ranking. And, I beg you, if you’ve had an SEO ‘expert’ advise you to use some sort of heading like “Springfield Therapist Provides Therapy Services for Springfield” - by all means do not pay them another dollar. That is not reputable advice. Call me, or even ask ChatGPT to write you some better headlines.
Have a clear, obvious call to action.
Know what action you ultimately want users to take, and give them a clear path for achieving that. In the simplest form this could be “book an appointment” with strategically placed links and buttons making this an easy action to accomplish.
Or, you may want to cater to the many site visitors who want to dig a bit deeper before commiting to an appointment and instead take them on more of a journey through feeling seen and understood, to learning more about you as a clinician, to discovering the ways you can help, to checking out payment options, and then ultimately to booking an appointment. This kind of guided journey requires a lot more nuance and strategy than I can outline here, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the majority of users will want to follow some sort of path like that before booking an appointment.
Regardless of how direct or winding the path to making that call or submitting that contact form, your job as the website owner is to ensure that once they are ready to make that decision, the way to do so is simple and clear.
Want even more personalized tips? Let’s chat.
If you’re interested in learning more about how you could improve the performance of your website, contact me! I offer free, no-obligation website consultations where you’ll walk away with actionable tips for improving your website’s performance.
