If we have a toothache, we visit the dentist. Got a cough that doesn’t go away? The family physician comes to the rescue. However, when we are overwhelmed by our thoughts and are unable to function as we’d typically, we don’t know what to do. We just wait for it to pass.
That’s how most of your clients think. It’s just a bad day, week, month, and year after all!
And here lies your biggest marketing obstacle. This is where your website comes into play. Don’t see how? Read along, I will show you.
As a therapist, you come across patients who refuse to accept that they need help. Some lack awareness, some lack access, and some lack knowledge. Most of the time, your clients are not in direct contact with you and rely on word of mouth to look for help. Here is where your website and social media come into play to convey what you do.
If you have not set up your therapy website, then here is a list of 7 things that your therapy website needs most. If you already have your website, then use this as a checklist to make sure its job.
1. The Instant Relief:
It isn’t about how good your website looks or how easy it is to navigate. When it comes to great websites, you need to communicate to the visitors the ‘why’ behind your existence.
As a therapist, the problem that you wish to solve is to promote mental health awareness and offer your services to those who need therapy. So, your website should capture the reason why it exists.
You can start by creating a marketing strategy where you write down your mission statement, value proposition, and one clear message that you will repeat on your website, social media and basically everywhere.
Create content that speaks to your visitors and educates them about the problems that you intend to solve. Many times, your visitors won’t even know that they or their loved ones have the problem unless you tell them about it.
Once, through your website content, you can make visitors aware of the problem you wish to solve, and you will be able to convert visitors to leads looking for your expert services.
2. The Acclaim and Accolades:
To humanize your website, you need to appear on it. Put up a page dedicated to your bio that tells people why they should choose you over other therapists.
More than your qualifications, people will be interested in the kind of practical experience you have in solving problems. Write about all your training and real-life experiences.
Make the content of the bio easy to read and relate to. Be personal, but not too personal. Your bio should be authentic. If you are a Speech-Language Pathologist and you struggled with speech as a child, then talk about how that made an impact in your life. If counseling saved your parent’s marriage and led you to become a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT), then mention it. Share your why, but an important note, don’t talk about something you are currently struggling with because that could scare people away. They love hearing that you are human and that you struggled, but they also want to know you can competently help them with their struggles.
3. The Golden Blueprint:
Now that you have the message clearly defined as to why you are offering what you are offering, it’s time to get things together. Logo, brand colors, a crisp and easy-to-understand brand message- you can finalize these three, to begin with.
Next, you can create the wireframe of your website. The pages you want on it, whether you want to add an informative resource section, or whether you want the website to have case studies. You can decide at this stage.
These decisions will help you create consistency and ease of access on your therapy website.
4. The Big Ask:
One of the 7 things that your therapy website needs most is a consistent, clearly visible and compelling call to action. Throughout your website, you need to place call-to-action buttons to let visitors know how to reach you.
Depending on your practice you can go with ‘Book a free consultation’, ‘Talk to me’, ‘I want to know more’ content for your call to action and spread them out properly throughout your website.
Even if your content is amazing, without a call to action, your visitors won’t understand what step they should take next. It would be like having a well-decorated house but not telling anyone the address.
5. Logical SEO:
Since your website is new, you need to plan for its organic growth. You can do this through both on-page and off-page SEO, your target audience won’t be able to discover your website without it.
You can also focus on local SEO. If you are looking for more in-person consultations, then Google My Business (GMB) is an incredible tool. The first step is to create a GMB page, ensure the content is up-to-date and add images and posts to it frequently. GMB is a free and easy tool that can really help your business to grow.
You can also create local content. Choose blog topics that cater to your niche and share valuable information that is relevant to the local community.
6. Smart Functionality:
No matter how good of a website you design, it always comes down to user experience when visiting a website. We often don’t go back to a website that gave us anything less than a perfect experience. In this intensely saturated and competitive market, your website only has one shot to make an impact.
If you want visitors to convert to prospective leads, test your website continually to ensure that there are no broken links and that the visitor’s journey on the website is smooth and hassle-free.
Remember that visitors will come to your website from different devices and browsers. So, test it on all commonly used devices using all commonly used browsers.
7. Speed:
No one has got enough time to wait for your website to load. Visitors who are looking to educate themselves or looking for therapy for themselves or their loved ones want their website experience to be quick.
If your website takes anything longer than 3 seconds to load, you can say goodbye to around 40% of users.
Conclusion
If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you will definitely remember Ronald Weasley’s favorite rant – follow the spiders, follow the spiders! Well, when it comes to marketing and growth, we have a similar rant mantra for you – clarify the message, clarify the message! That’s what your website needs too!
Along with stellar content that showcases the impact you want to create, put emphasis on consistent brand messaging and a seamless user experience for your visitors on your therapy website.