build a better therapist website
60% of people in a survey say they will choose one medical provider over another because of a strong online presence. 1
Wait. What?
A friend's referral, or that of another therapist, an insurance company listing, aren’t those the kind of places where people start looking for help?
Yes, and after that they go online, experiencing the web widely, punctuated by personal experience.
As market researcher HealthGrades puts it “…the patient journey is not a linear one, but rather a multi-stage journey with many different channels and touchpoints. 2
And while multi-stage, we would add that the patient returns to the Internet, time and time again.
“Doctors’ online reputation: more rate it “very important” than in any other industry.”
Think about this:
91% of patients conduct research on the web, even after receiving a referral for a medical provider. 3
In short, people looking for help are online. If you are a therapist or physician you need to be there with them.
And that starts with your therapist website. See below for the very best practices when building, or reimagining your site.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
HOW A STRONG ONLINE PRESENCE BECAME MISSION CRITICAL
Your website at the heart
At the heart of your online presence: an empathic, effective, quality website.
And here, the key to success is quality, what you can think of as your site’s personality.
A website from a template, or prepackaged service is better than nothing. But consistent bookings can only result if people experience website content that speaks to their needs, in their language, with a rich, authentic picture of who you are.
So that personality…the content of your site…matters.
Please take a moment to look over how our agency creates just such content for our behavioral health partners.
THE PANDEMIC, telemedicine AND "CONNECTED CARE"
Most immediately this seemingly sudden move online has been driven by the COVID pandemic, where almost everyone had few other options than life on the Internet.
Like other businesses, and indeed society-wide, the pandemic has changed our relationship to our clients drastically.
This is most obvious in the omniscience of telemedicine in mental health.
Even as the pandemic retreats, these changes seem very unlikely to return to the past. Call it “connected care“ or “virtual care“ the new paradigm is no doubt here to stay. How it will look exactly, is not yet clear. But your online presence surely will remain critical.
Digital health in an always-connected world
Let’s face it, mental health/behavioral health has been behind behind other parts of the culture in grasping the changes made by technology. The pandemic, by driving a shift to telemedicine, has merely exposed what should have been already obvious.
Most patients, and not just younger ones, have become quite used to continuous connectivity of the sort that you find on social media, or simply the ability to text for information and help at will.
Moreover, telemedicine is one piece, but only one, of a fast-growing technological ecosystem often called digital health. We are just at the beginning of its adoption. (A valuable piece on digital health has been published by the FDA. It is important reading).
Remote patient management (RPM)
Wearables, like fitness watches, are probably the most visible in this trend since they are largely consumer-oriented. But RPM technology is much broader and consists of all real-time monitoring of patients by electronic means. What may not be so obvious as yet is its application to behavioral healthcare in particular.
For example, the ability to communicate in real time while a patient is undergoing a panic attack could significantly change the way acute anxiety is treated.
Online Treatment Delivery
On-line therapy apps like Amwell, MDLive, Doctor on Demand, and chat apps like TalkSpace, have seen very wide adoption, including at schools and in EAP programs.
According to the caps on American Psychological Association, there are now over 10,000 mental health care related apps. While many of these are not evidence-based or even created in partnership with mental health professionals, these numbers ought to be a wake up call: they vividly show the appetite and need for online therapy.
Subscription-Based Mental Health and Wellness Programs Make Inroads
Programs such as the general healthcare company Forward are beginning to attract prospective patients. Or take the Functional Medicine program Parsely Health. Founder Robin Berzin, describes their subscription model this way:
Parsley is able to make health care more efficient, modern and enjoyable for both patients and providers. From backend office services, to patient access to all labs, notes and health care data, to tracking outcomes in real time, technology is the backbone of Parsley’s practice.
And meanwhile, not enough MENTAL HEALTH PROFESSIONALS
Amplifying these trends is the ongoing shortage of mental health professionals.
The National Council of Behavioral Health (NCBH) reports that 77% of counties in the United States struggle with a “severe shortage” of mental health providers.
The shortage has continued even as the opioid crisis and pandemic have caused social need to skyrocket.
Its impact has had social as well a medical effects, disproportionately affecting:
Rural residents
Black and Hispanic communities
Low income communities
All this will inevitably drive patients and advocates to new forms of mental health delivery, including digital health.
All these trends should bring into sharp relief the critical importance of a compelling website and a strong online presence for your practice.
BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL THERAPIST WEBSITE
We strongly urge these basic principles for your therapist website:
Make your website a sales engine
That’s right. Your therapist website is a marketing tool. It is a sales engine, which greatly benefits from marketing principles used in all successful businesses.
The goal of your marketing efforts are to help people who need help...find you. And once they are in touch, decide together with you whether there is a match.
This means your therapist website needs to support the patient’s journey in their search for help, from recognition of a need, to a stage of awareness of your practice, to the act of placing a booking.
The range of patient experience on your website must speak to all of these stages of the patient’s journey. Speak, in other words, to the intent of each visitor, which will be different depending on the stage of their journey.
What you write, the visuals you have chosen for your site, every post and every sentence…matters.
Know your audience
Once you know your audience,your therapist website will naturally connect.
Know your audience: their values, their lifestyles. Their demographics. Their ways of speech.
It is a process of discovering your users’ values and personality traits. In short, painting a picture of the patient who will ideally benefit from your services.
Try thinking about your current patients. How did they find you in the first place? What language did they use to describe their need? How did they search on the Internet? (and, trust us, they did search the Internet).
In marketing, this process is known as audience research and the result is a user persona, a fictional written portrait, or several of them, describing the kinds of people you are aiming to reach.
There is no blueprint, no easy formula for researching your audience. But there are tried and true audience research techniques, many of which can be found on the Hungry Monster blog.
Finally, try to speak in plain language. Be jargon-free, avoiding overuse of all those acronyms we all know and love.
When it comes to professional terminology, be aware, don’t assume knowledge, explain yourself. Use the professional term when it really adds meaning, but even then explain it. Don’t make users figure it out.
(You may want to contact our agency to discuss this stage of your marketing in more detail. We will be happy to talk.)
Branding
Some people think that a brand is simply a catchy logo and your choice of website colors.
In fact, your brand is far more fundamental. It is your identity, the personality of your website.
Your brand includes what you say and how you say it, the voice that you use, its tone, your imaging.
And, yes, your logo and choice of colors.
Your branding choices cannot be subjective. By that we mean that while your website surely does reflect your own style, its personality is designed to appeal to your prospective patients.
It is based on what your prospective patients connect with.
Build your website
HOME PAGE
Think of your own browsing on the Internet. You click on a link on a search page. How long do you stay at this new website you have found?
The average time spent on a newly visited page is counted in seconds.
Takeaway: your home page needs to communicate the main benefit of your practice to that ideal client. Fast.
New users have little time for text. The job of the homepage is largely accomplished in visuals and brief readable bites of text. Your aim: to build interest and trust, and then entice viewers to move further along.
ABOUT US PAGE
Users really do read this page. On a therapist website, trust is all important, and your user is making that trust decision right now, right on this page.
About Us should contain your values (what you and your staff deeply believe in) and your mission (what you will achieve for your patients).
Keep the length to one or two paragraphs.
About reviews and testimonials
It’s a fact that testimonials from others about your practice have the most powerful impact on trust in your practice. Shockingly, some studies find that patients trust online reviews as much as doctor recommendations. 4
To be clear: it is not allowable in most regions to ask patients for reviews, even if given anonymously. This violates the Code of Ethics of the American Psychological Association (APA) and those of the National Association of Social Workers. 5
That said, millions of unsolicited reviews are posted by patients on medical review sites such as Vitals (9 million reviews), Healthgrades (several million reviews), Zocdoc, RateMDs, wellness.com, CareDash (1 million reviews from verified patient accounts). Consumer review sites like Google My Business and Yelp contain numerous medical reviews. 6
The vast majority of these online reviews are positive.
Importantly, although therapists and physicians cannot solicit testimonials from patients, testimonials can originate with people who are not patients: peer physicians, partners in schools and EAP programs as examples.
In these cases, patient confidentiality must still be respected, along with all HIPAA guidelines.
OUR TEAM
In looking at the most visited pages for our healthcare clients, we typically see that, among the most popular are staff bios, sometimes even more than the home page.
This makes perfect sense. Wherever they came from, whether it was a search on Google, or a physician referral or that of a school, they want to know who you are before they book an appointment.
The moral of this story: your bios deserve all the attention you can give them.
SERVICES AND CONDITIONS PAGES
Second only to staff bios, these pages are a major destination for your website visitors. Treat them attentively.
You describe the conditions you treat just as you do in person: with both knowledgeability and empathy. These pages are more than a directory, they establish your credentials. In this way they also build trust.
Each condition you treat and your approach should have a separate page. (After all they speak to separate audiences.)
Granted, that’s a project.
You may need to create these separate pages incrementally. Consider starting very simply, with a single page, including sections per condition.
BLOG PAGE
We’ve pointed out that people have become used to continuous online connections. This goes for their family and friends, but also for the people and institutions on which they depend.
That of course very much includes you. Your patients have come to expect a continuous relationship. And you will benefit from stronger patient engagement.
We believe that a well-written, regular blog sustains that relationship. Much of the time, your blog posts are the only major additions to your website and in your social media. They play an outsized role to keep the attention of your audience. They are resources for the self-understanding of your patients, current and prospective, and can function as outreach to partners such as schools or courts, and peers.
Blog posts are also central in the process of getting you seen on the search engines. Fresh content is highly valued by Google. And since they are the single most consistent place for new content, the Google algorithm pays attention.. (For more, see our post, Can You Survive Google’s Freshness Test?)
CONTACT US PAGE
A friendly contact page, including contact form and phone number should appear on every single page.
A variant of the contact page—Make a Booking—should also appear on each page.
Remember the patient journey. Many viewers of your site are not yet there to make a booking, not on that leg of their journey.
But some are, so don’t make them look around… make it frictionless, make it easy.
FAQ PAGE
Frequently Asked Questions pages are among the most highly viewed. This may be because they are a quick and easy way to get the answers people are looking for.
Some of these questions are no mystery: do you accept insurance? How does therapy work? What does it cost?
But don’t leave it there. Discover also the less obvious questions people may be asking. Make it a project delegated to your front office people. The front line staff are asked questions for a living! It won’t take long for the staff to list the questions they would rather not answer over and again.
Submissions to your Contact Us page may also contain explicit or implied questions. Monitor these and add them to the list from your front office.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
With web pages, it is not the case that if you “build it and they will come.” The pages must be made friendly to Google and other search engines.
SEO. Once an arcane industry phrase, this acronym is getting around. And for good reason. It refers to the competition to appear on Google and it is a skill all its own.
Millions of webpages exist. And showing up on a search results page anywhere past Google’s page 2 is not helpful.
But websites can be made Google-friendly, through SEO.
For behavioral health websites, an especially effective apporach is known as Local SEO. And while Local SEO can mean any of a range of actions, one initiative stands head and shoulders above the rest: a feature called Google My Business.
This feature is totally free with a Google account. So if you already use Gmail, for example, you are ready to open an account.
Google My Business is designed to respond to searches such as “Therapy offices near me.” Or “Therapists in Brooklyn.” After a search like that, Google My Business can pinpoint your practice on a map, and even, with some work, may even include a link to a sort of mini site, highlighting your news, events, and most critically, reviews.
Of course, succeeding in Google My Business takes knowledge and effort. Hungry Monster will be glad to discuss this further, with no obligation to you.
Start with these basic elements, and your website will begin to connect. Start with the orientation that your website is the hub of all that you do. And you’re well on the way to a true 21st-century practice.
Interested in digging deeper?
Hungry Monster Content and Design can provide unique and effective written and visual materials for both website, social media, and internal use.
Footnotes
1 Binary Fountain Healthcare Consumer Insight Report 2019 https://www.binaryfountain.com/blog/patients-find-doctor-reputation-online/
2 Healthgrades.com
https://partners.healthgrades.com/blog/why-is-patient-engagement-journey-important
3 Kyrus Reports, “The Patient Access Journey [2018].”
4 NRC Health
https://nrchealth.com/patients-trust-online-reviews/
5 Business and professional legal practice Zimmerman Attorneys, https://www.attorneyzim.com/blog/2020/05/mental-health-providers-soliciting-online-reviews/
Hungry Monster receives no compensation for mention of third party companies, nor are we an affiliate of any.