When Every Therapist Site Sounds the Same
Imagine someone looking for a counselor for the first time. They've finally decided to do the thing they've been putting off, and now they're sitting with a search page open, clicking through five or six practice sites, trying to figure out which one feels right.
What they often find is that the sites all sound about the same. A safe and non-judgmental space. Support through life's transitions. A place to explore and process. Help with the challenges of life.
Why so many counseling sites sound alike
Counselors are especially prone to this, and the people writing it are usually some of the kindest, most sincere providers you'll ever meet. They mean every word. But the words have been used on so many sites that they've stopped meaning anything, and the page ends up sounding like every other therapist page open in the person's other tabs. The language is neutral, professional, and warm. On a website, where the reader hasn’t met you and is trying to decide whether ot reach out, the neutrality reads as nearly anonymous.
What the patient does next
When a patient can't tell the sites apart, they tend to do one of two things. They tell themselves they'll come back to it later, and often they don't. Or they go looking for the places where the sites actually differ, which usually comes down to location and cost. So the decision gets made on who's closest and who's cheapest, when fit was the thing that should have decided it. A provider can be exactly the right person for someone and never hear from them, because nothing on the page told that person they were in the right place.
Specific doesn't mean narrow
The worry I hear when I bring this up is that getting specific will scare people off, that naming who you're for turns away everyone you didn't name. It tends to work the other way around. When you name who you understand, the people who recognize themselves finally have a reason to choose you, and the ones it doesn't fit were unlikely to reach out either way.
And being specific doesn't mean narrowing your whole practice down to one thing. You can work with a wide range of people and still give someone a sense of what you're like to work with. What kind of work gets you excited? Is there a focus, or a particular kind of person, you're drawn to more than the rest? Is there something about you, the actual person, that a patient wouldn't find on the next site down the list? That's usually what helps someone feel like they've landed in the right place, and it's almost always the first thing traded away for the smooth, safe, interchangeable language.
Even a referral needs your site to back it up
This matters even when the patient came to you by referral. A good referral carries a lot, but it can only carry so far. Most people still look you up before they reach out, and if the site sounds vague, that referral has to do all the work of convincing them you're a fit. You want your site to confirm it on its own, so the person isn't reaching out on trust alone, hoping the person who sent them got it right.
If you recognized your own site in this
This is one of the harder things to fix on your own. Writing about yourself is hard. Most of the providers I work with know their patients well, they just have trouble getting that onto the page in words that sound like them. Drawing that out is a lot of what the brand and website work is for, so the site can tell the right person they've found the right place. If it's been on your list for a while, I'd love to hear about your practice and see if I’m a good fit to help you.
