how to build a therapist Web Site FOR great outcomes
Building a therapist practice is different today.
Not so long ago, people who needed your help, found you through referrals, reputation, and word of mouth.
More recently, it seemed enough to add a Psychology Today page, or other professional listing, and contacts from your payer’s healthcare database if you are in-network.
But today, these are far from enough. Your prospective patients are online, and you must be too. Be online in a prominent, wise, and patient-sensitive way. But online.
Jump To:
Everything you do online should lead from or to your website.
Let’s take a simple example: a prospective patient is referred by a past client. It’s unlikely that this leads to an immediate booking
Instead, chances are that your referred patient has then checked out your bio online, searched for reviews on Google or Zocdoc, or, yes, heaven help us, Yelp.
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.
Let’s face it, mental health/behavioral health has been far 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).
This ecosystem is still fragmented, because it is just emerging. But even at this early stage, it is producing valuable data. Some highlights:
Remote patient management (RPM). Wearables, like fitness watches, are probably the most visible in this trend since they are largely consumer-oriented. RPM conists of real-time monitoring of patients by electronic means and has clear benefits to healthcare in general. 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 through 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 community mental health organization Valley Oaks, there are currently (January 2021), over 10,000 mental-health 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, such as the general healthcare company Forward are beginning to attract prospective patients. Many of these are online and especially app-based.
Amplifying these trends is the ongoing shortage of mental health professionals. This shortage has continued as the opioid crisis and pandemic have caused social need to skyrocket.
The impact of this shortage has had social as well a medical effects. It has, for example, highlighted and inflamed the disparity between urban and rural mental health resources.
This shortage will inevitably drive patients and advocates to new forms of mental health delivery.
All this is catching up to us.
We strongly urge these basic principles for your therapist website:
1 Make your website a sales engine
That’s right. Your website is a marketing tool. It is a sales engine, which greatly benefits from marketing principles in all business.
To be sure, its job it is 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 the 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 patient’s experience on your website—in often brief but intense interactions—must speak to each of these stages of the patient’s journey.
What you write, the visuals you have chosen for your site, every post and every sentence…matters.
2 Know your audience
If your practice is mature, you know your patients well.
If you are a new or changing practice, you are systematicaly building this knowledge.
But how did your audience 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 on the Internet).
What are their values, their lifestyles? Their demographics? How can your treatment modalities help them?
Your website must reflect all of that: speak to them, in a way with which they connect and find valuable. Furthermore, try to be jargon-free, including the overuse of the acronyms we love to use. Overall, when it comes to professional terminology, be sensitive, and explain yourself.
Use the term, but explain it. Don’t make users figure out what are, say, “co-occurring symptoms.”
How to discover these values and personality traits? How to paint a picture of the patient who will ideally benefit from your practice? In marketing this picture is known as audience research and, the truth is, there is no blueprint, no easy formula.
But there are tried and true audience research techniques, many of which can be found on the Hungry Monster blog.
(You may want to contact our agency to discuss this stage of your marketing in more detail. We will be happy to talk.)
3 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.
Your basic website pages
4 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.
So your home page needs to communicate the main benefit of your practice to that ideal client and your brand. 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.
5 About Us Page
In looking at the most visited pages for our healthcare clients, we see nearly always that, after the home page, the most popular are staff bios.
This makes perfect sense. Wherever they came from, whether it was a search on Google, or a physician referral or 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. Keep in mind the work you did in branding your site, and understanding your audience.
Now you know why it’s so important to deeply understand who you are speaking to.
6 Conditions Page
You describe the conditions you treat just as you do in person: with both knowledgeability and empathy. This page is more than a directory. Your conditions pages also need to establish your credentials. In this way they also build trust.
7 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 patient relationship is not occasional, but continuous.
We believe that a well-written, regular blog sustains that relationship, in ways that are invaluable. Much of the time, your blog posts are the only materials which are changing on your website and in your social media. They play an outsized role keep the attention and also the self-understanding of your patients, as well as prospective patients, partners such as schools or courts, and peers.
Blog posts are central in the process of getting you seen on Google. Because they are the single most important place for new content, the Google algorithm pays attention. Fresh content is highly valued by Google. (For more, see our post, Can You Survive Google’s Freshness Test?)
8 Contact Us Page
A friendly contact page, including contact form and phone number should appear on every single page without fail.
Separately, but also on every page, should be the straight out call to action: Make a Booking.
Remember the patient journey. Most 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.
9 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.
That being the case, as we’ve noted before, make it easy. 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. Make it a project delegated to your front office people. The front line staff are asked questions for a living! Many are predictable. 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 are valuable in the same way. Monitor these and add them to the list from your front office.
The FAQ page is simply a compilation of those.
10 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
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 anywhere past Google’s page 2 is not helpful.
But websites can be made Google-friendly, the meaning of SEO.
For behavioral health websites, an especially effective apporach is known as Local SEO. And while Local SEO can mean anh of a range of ations, one 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, you are ready to apply.
Google My Business is designed to respond to searches such as “therapy offices near me.” After a search like that, Google My Business can pinpoint your practice on a map, and 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 work. Hungry Monster will be glad to discuss this further, with no obligation to you.
Start with these 10 basic elements, and your website will begin to connect. Start with the orientation that your website is the center of all that you do. And you’re well on the way to a true 21st-century practice.
Interested in digging deeper? Talk to an expert.