Q&A was part of Next Level Practice, the most supportive community for therapists starting a private practice. In this video, Joe answers the question based on tips to improve your website.
Question
Stephanie: Would love some feedback on my website.
Answer
Joe: So, good, right away I know if I want to work through anxiety, that’s what you do. It’s always good to see the symptoms and then the outcome of counseling. In general, we typically, on the menu, only have four or five options. If you just think, statistically, you really want people to go for ‘Contact’. You don’t care so much about ‘Leaflets’, etc. So I would put ‘Client Login’ and ‘Office’ under ‘Services’ to reduce the number of tabs. Also, there are a lot of colors going on here. It seems like purple and green are your theme. I’d say pick one accent color, something a little more subdued, just to clean it up a little bit.
So, the first question in your ‘About’ section is ‘what do you want to get out of counseling?’ So I would expect that you would ask that. I might start with something like, ‘the questions I get most from people are…’. Then, right away, your reader is going to say, ‘Oh my gosh, I totally resonate with Stephanie and the people that are asking her those questions’. We want to really differentiate you, so have maybe three questions here that are the most common questions you get from people. For example, ‘can change really happen when I feel this anxious?’, ‘is there really hope at the other side of this?’, ‘how hard is this going to be to work through my anxiety?’
In your ‘Contact’ section, I would put a couple of lines like: ‘reach out to me if you’re ready to schedule your first appointment to figure out if this is right for you’. Then, I would change ‘Leaflets’ to ‘Blog’ or ‘Resources’, or something like that. I expected that to be like handouts or something. I would also name your blogs to be more things that people are going to Google. You really want to optimize your header ones for the things you want to rank for. Finally, there would be a section to at the end of each blog post where you have a little picture of yourself with a bio that links back to your home page. You may even then have a blog post on each of these five things that you then link to. You would want to have at least three different links here within your blog post.
Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC
Joe Sanok is an ambitious results expert. He is a private practice business consultant and counselor that helps small businesses and counselors in private practice to increase revenue and have more fun! He helps owners with website design, vision, growth, and using their time to create income through being a private practice consultant. Joe was frustrated with his lack of business and marketing skills when he left graduate school. He loved helping people through counseling, but felt that often people couldn’t find him. Over the past few years he has grown his skills, income, and ability to lead others, while still maintaining an active private practice in Traverse City, MI. To link to Joe’s Google+ .
