What Working on Your Branding and Website Copy With Me Actually Looks Like
Some providers come to me intimidated by the whole process. They’ve never done this before. They don’t know what to expect. They’re worried about all the things they don’t know.
Others assume the project is mostly hands-off. They’ll send me a few basic details about their practice, and I’ll take it from there.
Neither is quite right.
There's more required from you than you might think. But what’s required isn’t that you become a marketer or write polished copy from scratch. It's being the expert on your own business, your patients, and the way you work. That's the part only you can do.
What the actual work looks like
In an earlier post, I wrote about how a brand isn't something you build from scratch. It’s already there. It shows up in how you practice, in the choices you make, and in the way patients describe what it’s like to work with you.
The catch is that it’s hard to see clearly from the inside. When you’ve lived inside your practice for a long time, the things that stand out most to patients can feel ordinary to you. The way you explain things in a session feels like standard practice. The fact that your appointments run on time feels like basic professionalism. The care you take to make sure someone leaves understanding what comes next feels like just doing your job.
To you, that may not feel distinctive. To your patients, it often is.
Where the language is already living
Most providers think writing website copy means staring at a blank page until the right words show up. It doesn’t. Most of the language you need is already there. You just haven’t gathered it yet.
A few places to look:
Google reviews. When patients describe their experience in their own words, what do they mention most? What do they seem relieved by? What words do they use when they talk about why they came to you in the first place? That language is almost always closer to how future patients are searching than your clinical terminology is.
How patients describe their problem when they call to schedule. Front desk staff hear the same descriptions over and over. A patient calling a physical therapist is probably not using the language you’d use in a treatment note. They’re more likely to say, “My neck and upper back feel tight all the time,” or “I keep getting pain between my shoulders.” They’re describing symptoms in plain language, and that’s useful. It’s often the language they’ll use when searching online, and it's what your site needs to respond to.
What patients say in their first visit. Pay attention to how someone explains why they’re there before they’ve learned your language. That’s often the clearest version of the problem they’re trying to solve, and what they’ll recognize on your website when they’re trying to figure out if you’re the right provider for them.
Intake forms and questionnaires. Patients writing about themselves in their own words gives you a window into how they tell the story of what’s going on and what they’ve tried already.
A patient can be highly educated in their own field and still not know yours. The terminology that feels obvious inside your practice is often the same terminology that keeps people from finding you online. The language that gets someone to call is usually the language they use before they ever meet you.
What a questionnaire is actually for
When I work with a client, the first real piece of the project is a brand discovery questionnaire. Its purpose is to surface things you already know but haven’t necessarily said out loud.
It's not a strategy exercise. It's not me asking you to be a marketer. It’s a structured way to get at the things that live in your head and your practice but don’t always come out when someone says, “Tell me about your business.”
The questions are designed to pull out specifics: who you do your best work with, what makes someone a good fit for your approach, what you wish people understood before they reached out, and what you’ve learned about the kind of patient you serve best. Real, specific things you know — but might not be able to turn into website copy without a little prompting.
One specific request: please don't use AI to answer the questionnaire. I want your messy, half-formed thoughts. Sentence fragments. Incomplete ideas. The way you'd actually describe something out loud to a colleague. That’s the raw material I need, and it’s the part that gets lost when AI smooths everything into something polished too early. I'll do the organizing and refining on my end with the full strategy in mind. The questionnaire is where the unfiltered version needs to show up.
What working on the copy actually looks like
After the questionnaire, the copy work happens in a shared Google Doc that I set up for you. It's not a blank page. It's a template with prompts for each page of your site, so you always have something to react to instead of starting from nothing.
The same principle applies here as with the questionnaire: please give me your messy rough drafts. Bullet points. Half-formed sentences. You are not expected to write polished copy at this stage. You're being asked to give me material to work with.
From there, I take what you've written and shape it into actual copy. You review it, edit it, push back on anything that doesn't sound like you, and we go from there.
Where AI fits
A lot of providers are wondering about this, so it's worth being direct.
AI can be genuinely useful in this process. It can help organize and refine information that’s already there. It can take a long answer from a discovery conversation and pull out the patterns worth keeping. It can tighten a draft without flattening the voice.
What AI can’t do is generate the raw material. If you ask a chatbot to write your About page from scratch, you’ll usually get something that sounds polished but has no roots. The words may be technically fine, but they could belong to anyone. There's nothing in there that came from your practice, your patients, or the way you actually work — because none of that was the source material.
My process uses AI, but it uses AI with real inputs. The questionnaire surfaces specifics. Google reviews and intake forms surface patient language. Discovery conversations surfaces how you actually talk about your work. Some clients are good, confident writers and bring their own drafts to the project, and that works too. The starting point doesn't have to be a blank page. What matters is that the material is yours.
From there, AI helps me organize and refine all of it into copy that sounds like you and speaks to the specific patients you want to reach.
AI is not the final word on what goes on your site. I edit what comes out of it. Then you edit. The copy that ends up live is copy you’ve read, considered, and approved. Your name is on the site, and you're the one ultimately responsible for what it says. My job is to get you to a draft that's close enough to right that your edits are refinements, not rewrites.
The line is whether the source material is yours. If it is, AI is a useful tool in the process. If it isn't, you're publishing someone else's voice with your name on it.
The part only you can do
The point of this process is not to make you sound like a marketer. It’s to help you say what you already know in a way other people can actually use. You don’t need to come in with polished copy, know the right structure, or have everything phrased perfectly. What I need from you is simpler than that: your honest thoughts, your rough ideas, your examples, your words. The things you notice every day that are hard to see from the outside. That’s the material I can work with.
From there, I can help shape it into website copy that sounds like you and gives the right people a clearer sense of what it’s like to work with you.
If that’s the kind of help you’ve been looking for, here's where to start.
