Nine Tips For A Successful Therapist Website Design

Declare Your Specialty

Looking for a therapist is a daunting process. Prospective clients often work better with a therapist who is tuned into their needs and the issues that bring them to a counsellor in the first place. Define your specialty – and your ideal patients – and find ways to speak to them. As you build up a list of successes, your referral network will help bring new patients to your practice.

Make sure you list your specialties prominently on your website, and make sure to use the correct copywriting techniques to help you attract your ideal clients.

Let’s say, for example, that you are a marriage counsellor and you want to attract the attention of couples who are struggling with infidelity. You can create a landing page on your website dedicated to couples struggling with infidelity and then use marketing techniques like PPC to drive traffic to that page.

In short, if you want to attract your ideal clients, you need to be able to show them that you can provide them with the treatment they need.

A Great Logo

The header of your website is the topmost section of your site: it’s the first thing you see when you land on the site, and it’s likely the last thing you see when you depart.

The header is one of the most critical sections of a website design because it’s where you place your logo (and any additional branding elements) and site navigation, a key element of good user experience.

The header should be designed in a way that immediately tells the reader what your site is about.

Your logo needs to be clear at a distance. It should use a colour scheme you can get behind. In other words, the logo colours should be attractive, and something you like. While on the topic of colour: use colours that evoke certain concepts. For example, yellow and red are often associated with food, so those colours may not be ideal for most therapists.

Clear Navigation

More choice = less satisfaction. Good website navigation has six or fewer main navigation destinations and those sections may each need sub-sections.

On our websites, we typically put these elements into the navigation:

• Home
• Services
• About
• Blog
• Contact

Calm, Inviting Photography

There is one constant of therapy: therapists work to get people to a better place. Counsellors help their patients work through trauma or address other issues through therapy. The key is to put people at ease and make them receptive to your intended message. All of your image assets need to be calming – even at the risk of making your website look similar to those of others in the field.

Sources like Pexels, Pixabay and Flickr have great available images for no cost. Clients who work with us can tap into our supply of royalty-free stock images.

Headshots

Therapy is all about people. It’s classic marketing to use photos of people to build a connection with potential clients, patients, and customers. The counsellors in a practice are the key to the success of that practice. A good headshot goes a long way to building trust with prospective clients. Work with a skilled photographer to capture the essence of your practice.

Expert Opinion Articles

Speaking on a specialty topic, called “authority marketing”, can help you build trust with your audience. A therapist can share their insights into issues. They can even give away critical pieces of their expertise. The best thing about good advice: it still takes expertise to execute it. If clients can see themselves in an article, they are closer to engaging a therapist for what they need to work through.

Contact Information

Make it easy to find your office, phone number, email address and business hours. We will usually set up a Google Business account for a client; this ensures Google has all of this information so that people can find it easily. We will usually put the contact information in the footer of the therapist’s website to make it easy to find.

A Booking System

The back-and-forth of availability can be painful, requiring a receptionist (or the therapist themselves) to run interference. Why do all this when technology is available to let patients self-select their sessions through a booking system? For WordPress, there is the Amelia booking system. Calendly and the Jane App booking system integrate well on websites. The bonus of something like Calendly is it can tie into Google & Outlook Calendars. This allows it to show your availability and lets people self-book appointments where you have free time.

Get Discovered

Thousands of websites go online every hour. How could any new website compete? There are ways to get discovered. We go through rounds of getting therapist websites listed in key places: Google, local and regional directories. We look for opportunities to connect the dots between prospective patients and therapists looking to take on new clients.

Building up the the position is especially hard for therapists working with addictions counselling as Google AdWords prohibits advertising for a number of topics. Getting strong organic growth is key to getting discovered and we help with that.

Getting discovered is key to getting patients into your practice.

Bonus Tip

Work with a web design firm that understands what makes a therapist’s web design work well. Shameless plug: that’s Web321.