Complete Guide to Designing Your Best Therapist Website

Whether you’re just starting a new private therapy practice or you’ve been around for a long time, a website is crucial to the success of your practice long-term. If we summed up the most asked question that psychologists and therapists have asked into one question, it would be something like this: “Now that I’ve finished my website, how do I get new clients for my private practice?” It’s almost like clockwork! At this point, we have to provide a soft response like this: “We’ll need to take a look at your website.” Your website is crucial to your private practice’s marketing success. In this guide, you’ll learn our top therapist website ideas and 9 actionable steps to build your best therapist website design; a website that will set you up to be successful for years to come!

Read the original Complete Guide to Building Your Best Therapy Design post here.

“Your website is crucial to your private practice’s marketing success.”

Building Your Best Therapist Website Design – Table of Contents:

1. Building a Brand
2. Performing Research
3. Creating a Strategy
4. Choosing Your Domain, Host, and Website Platform
5. Designing Your Website
6. Copywriting
7. Connecting 3rd Party Tools
8. Tracking Website Visitors and Leads
9. Starting Marketing

Chapter 1: Building a Brand

The word “brand” is kind of a fluffy term to most therapists and psychologists. However, there are actionable steps you need to take in building your brand before creating the very best therapist website design. Let’x explore 6 key components of your brand strategy:

Therapist Brand Part 1: Creating Your Private Practice’s Purpose

Creating your purpose and boiling it into a sentence or two is an important part of how you want to display your therapy practice to your potential patients.

 

As a therapist or psychologist, what is your purpose? The answer that most therapists provide is the reason BartX Digital loves working with you!

Therapist Brand Part 2: Positioning Your Therapy Practice

Brand positioning means the place a brand occupies or wants to occupy, relative to the competition, in the mind of a customer. Brand positioning takes into account the target audience, competition, and any outside market factors. There are some classic brand battles competing via brand position. One of the most memorable in my mind was Apple trying to differentiate itself from PC in the mind of consumers:

In these Apple commercials, Apple attempts to show their “cool factor” and also the ease of use for every day life. They also portrayed PC as a middle-aged man and Apple as a cool, hip, young adult.

As a psychologist or therapist with a private practice, it’s important that you know how you want to position yourself or your company to target the audience that you want to target. If you’re looking to target athletes, everything that you produce, including your website, should target athletes and display information and imagery that will connect with athletes.

Therapist Brand Part 3: Establishing a Promise

A brand promise is what your customers can expect from purchasing your product(s) or the process of purchasing your products. Some great examples include:

Geico’s, Walmart’s, and Ritz-Carlton’s “promises” clearly demonstrate what consumers can expect if they experience their products and services.

How about your therapy practice? What kind of “promise” could you create that your target customer would connect with?

Therapist Brand Part 4: Summarizing What You Believe

Brand beliefs define how your business makes its decisions. These are your business’ core values and what you stand on. Here’s a great example from Chick-fil-a of a brand’s beliefs, or values, on display:

Whether you agree or not with this viewpoint, Chick-fil-a is not shy in expressing their beliefs. It’s important your brand stands up for what it believes in.

As a therapist or psychologist, you can also create deeper connections when your patients connect with your beliefs, whether that is spiritual or beliefs in treatment approach.

Therapist Brand Part 5: Creating a Personality for Your Brand

Brand personality are the characteristics associated with a brand. It’s something that the consumer can relate to. It includes characteristics such as humor, conservative, innovative, inspirational, and many more.

Under Armour often uses motivation to inspire in its marketing:

Under Armour knows exactly who their target market is and what they like to hear, see, feel, and experience.

What does your target market want to hear, see, feel, and experience? If you treat eating disorders, perhaps an educational, inspirational, motivational approach would connect with your target audience?

Therapist Brand Part 6: Establishing Your Brand’s Book Cover

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” In the marketing world we live in, your potential patients are judging how your brand looks to them. A Brand’s Book Cover are all of the visual characteristics derived from the above 6 components. Things like color scheme, logo, typography, tagline, and brand guidelines are important in visually representing a brand’s purpose, positioning, promise, identity, beliefs, and personality.

In creating the best therapist websites possible, it’s important that your brand speaks clearly to your target audience. If you charge $300.00 per hour, it’s crucial that your website looks extremely professional and connects with your potential patients that you are the best option to help them overcome their difficulty or illness.

Chapter 2: Performing Industry and Competitor Research

In your pursuit of creating your best therapist websites, chapter 2 will focus on researching your specific industry niche(s) and then researching your top competitors locally (and sometimes it might make sense to look at nationally). Here are some reasons why research is important in creating the best therapist website possible:

1. It’s important to know which services you should focus on most
2. It’s important to find out what types of questions your target patients are searching for in each service you’ll offer
3. It’s important to know the strategies your top local psychologist and therapist competitors are implementing
4. It’s important to know how strong your competitors are in terms of content strategy, domain authority, and how visually impressive their website appears

Tools to Perform Industry and Competitor Research

There are an assortment of tools that you as a psychologist or therapist can use to research your industry and competitors. For the purposes of this guide, we are going to show you a completely free tool from Google called the Google Keyword Planner. You’ll need to create a Google Ad account first. After your account is created, you’ll need to navigate to the little “wrench” at the top right labeled “tools and settings.” Next, hover over this and navigate to the “keyword planner” link. Once you click on this, this screen will appear:

Google Keyword Planner is a great tool for your practice to gain insights into what your competitors are searching for, how many times they are searching each month in your city, the value of getting clicks for these keywords, and many other key statistics that can help you build the best therapist website design possible.

Performing Competitor Research

Using the Google Keyword Planner tool, Click on the “Discover new keywords” box. Here you can enter your top ~10 competitors. We urge you not to arbitrarily enter 10 websites. Rather, search on Google for “(city name) + psychologist”. Your psychologist competitors that are listed here in the search results (not the maps) will give you a good idea of the ‘best’ optimized websites in your city. Be sure not to use websites like “psychologytoday.com” and other similar directory sites as they aren’t your local competitors.

Once you have these 10 psychologist sites entered, click “get started.” You should see a bunch of keywords that these psychologists rank for.

Download this list into an Excel sheet. You can do this by clicking the blue link at the top right “Download Keyword Ideas.”

In this sheet, you’ll find all sorts of gems for your business. Take some time to review these in Excel. We recommend lumping similar keywords together. And just like that, you now have hundreds or even thousands of keywords your top competitors are ranking for.

Performing Industry Research

Performing industry research is similar to performing competitor research when using the same Google Keyword Planner tool. If one of the services you perform is “cognitive behavioral therapy” type this keyword in and click enter. You’ll see an assortment of newly discovered keywords you can download to add to your research!

The above keywords are only a small sample of keyword ideas that the Google Keyword Planner generated. Make sure that you compile all the keywords you gain into an excel sheet.

Chapter 3: Creating a Strategy

In chapter 2 we discussed how you can perform keyword research for both your therapist competitors and industry keywords that can give you amazing insight into what your potential patients are looking for on Google. In chapter 3, we will highlight how you can create a website strategy in your pursuit of building the best therapist website design.

Organizing the Data

Using the Google Keyword Planner tool, you should easily have 1000 keywords downloaded. We’d recommend keeping your competitor research and your industry research in separate Excel tabs. For each tab, use the “sort” tool to organize keywords by different criteria including things like: search volume, alphabetically, and cost per click value just to name a few. For each sorting filter that you use, you can create a new tab in Excel so that you can easily switch to different views of the keywords you mined in Google’s Keyword Planner.

Mining for Gold

Now that you’ve organized your data, you can now pull out valuable information. We’d recommend creating a list of all your distinct services that you offer (hopefully you researched each service in Google Keyword Planner!). Start organizing keywords for each service offering. This may take a few hours but it is well worth the time spent when we put it all together in the next step.

Putting it All Together

The final step of creating the best therapist website design strategy is to create what’s called a site map. A site map is simply a basic layout of the pages that your website will contain.

As you can see in the above example, this is a very simple layout of how a client’s site will be built. To the right of the column “permalink”, we highly suggest that you create a new column titled “Keywords.” In this column, you can insert 1 main keyword for each page, as well as keywords that fall underneath that category.

Here is an example:

Main keyword: Anorexia Nervosa

Sub keywords to be included on the same page: Types of Anorexia Nervosa, How to Treat Anorexia Nervosa, What is Anorexia Nervosa. You get the point.

Layout out your strategy with assigned keywords will help you know exactly what you’re targeting with your website strategy. The more pages you have, the more keywords you’ll be setting yourself to target. The more keywords you have, the more opportunities your patients have to find your therapy practice! The best therapist websites not only look beautiful, they have a deep keyword strategy built throughout.

Other Ideas

You should also research other ideas, questions, or things your ideal clients are searching for. For example, if a client searches for “do I have autism“, and you treat autism, that could potentially be a valuable way to introduce your expertise to a great number of people just beginning their research.

Some additional ideas:

• Quizzes
• Blogs about subtopics related to conditions you treat, treatment styles you do
• Gated content (Giving a valuable resource in exchange for their contact information)

Chapter 4: Choosing a Domain, Host, and Website Platform

In chapter 4, we will be discussing some very important aspects that can help you create the best therapist website design possible. This includes choosing a domain name, a hosting platform, and a website platform.

Choosing a Domain Name

Like your psychology practice’s name, your domain name is important. Here are some best practices to follow when choosing a domain name for your therapist website:

1. Choose a domain name that is short, under 15 characters if possible
2. Choose a domain name that ends in .com – This is just a good practice because it is the most common domain extension
3. Choose a domain that represents your brand
4. Choose a domain that is not spammy. Here;s a spammy example: “bestpsychologistmiami.com”
5. Choose a domain that you love! Switching a domain can be a BIG process (especially if done to follow search engine optimization best practices)

Choosing a Host

One of the most important parts of any great therapist website (or any business, really) is the host in which the website resides. According to website.com, “Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed in the Internet. Websites are hosted, or stored, on special computers called servers. When Internet users want to view your website, all they need to do is type your website address or domain into their browser. Their computer will then connect to your server and your webpages will be delivered to them through the browser.”

Now that we understand what a host is, choosing a host is next! While we won’t promote a specific host, let’s highlight what makes a great host:

1. A great host will offer fast speeds – meaning, your provider will allow visitors to quickly browse and load your website
2. A great host will offer “high up-time” – meaning, your provider will be able to keep your website live as much as possible
3. A great host will provide exceptional support – The value of this can’t be understated. One day you will run into issues and will need to contact your host
4. A great host will offer plans that are affordable – Don’t try to go for the cheapest option, make sure you choose at least a decent option

When creating the best therapist websites, your host is an important part of the equation.

Choosing a Website Platform

While your host is important, the platform you choose to build your website on might be even more important. For the purposes of this guide, we are going to only recommend one platform: Open Source WordPress. (Don’t confuse this with wordpress.com). A good host will be able to install a copy of WordPress for you.

WordPress is our number one choice, and for good reason. Almost 30% of all websites use WordPress. In addition, it’s free! You can add on a WordPress site to an existing site (in most cases) or you can create your website entirely on WordPress (like this one). WordPress also has a massive online community to help answer any questions you may have. One of the most important reasons is it’s robust SEO tools (like Yoast) that can assist your business in ranking on popular search engines. You can also easily transfer old posts to a new website if needed.

For most therapists and psychologists, WordPress will work perfectly for you and can be customized to your needs.

Chapter 5: Therapist Website Design

The design and aesthetic of your website is very important in creating the best therapist website design possible. When you purchased or built your psychology practice, did you invest in the interior of your facility? Of course you did! You invested in a high quality waiting room, and a room that makes your patients feel at ease when they speak with you. First impressions make a big difference.

Your website is like your interior, and patients WILL absolutely judge it on how it looks and functions. In fact, 75% of people have judged a company’s credibility based on its website design.

Using Your Color Pallet

In chapter 1 we discussed how to build a brand for your private practice. The last step in this branding process was partially to choose your color scheme. We typically recommend that clients look at colors athletic teams use, or other competitors in their industry. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to your color scheme, but you do need colors that work well with each other. Typically, a dark color and a light color are basic recommendations. BartX Digital has 2 highlight colors (a light blue and a yellow) and 1 darker color (a dark blue). With any color scheme, white, black and shades of grey can be used.

Here’s an example color pallet for the psychologist website image at the top of this guide:

Creating a Great User Experience

Laying out your website so that users can navigate through your website to where you want them to go is an art and a science. The basic principles include:

1. Meeting the users’ needs
2. Creating a clear page hierarchy (we touched on this in the site map above)
3. Making sure consistency is followed from page to page
4. Building a website that is accessible to as many patients as possible
5. Emphasizing usability first
6. Understanding the principle that less is more
7. Using simple language that your target audience understands
8. Using the right kind of typography for your audience
9. Designing your website that appeals to your specific target patients

While there are many more principles, the above user experience guidelines will help you create the best therapist website design possible for YOUR potential patients.

Making it look Professional

Creating a professional website is critical. Therapists with sub par websites do their brand image a major disservice. Quality should be a top priority to give the perception that your products/services are also top quality. With so many people now using mobile devices and tablets, it’s critical to make sure that your website properly responds to different browser sizes and types. It’s imperative to design a website that is responsive.

In addition to how your website looks, your website strategy should be one that functions properly. Make sure all your links are clickable, all your forms work properly, and all your pages load correctly. Very few things frustrate users more than a non-functioning site.

We’d also recommend that you hire a professional (unless you can code). You get what you pay for. A cookie cutter site that costs 20 dollars a month most likely will not reflect well for your brand. Did we mention quality? Pay money to get it professionally designed.

Chapter 6: Copywriting

Great copywriting is critical to creating the best therapist website design possible. As a therapist or psychologist with a doctorate degree, you may fancy yourself a great writer (and you probably are!). However, when writing copy, it is crucial to follow best on-page SEO guidelines. Here are some guidelines you can follow:

• Each page should have 1 main keyword. If you’re creating a page about your cognitive behavioral therapy service, your “umbrella” keyword should be “cognitive behavioral therapy”
• Your H1 (main title) should include the main keyword
• You should only have 1 H1 title
• Your H2 (subtitles) should be ideas that fall under your H1. An example H2 for your “cognitive behavioral therapy” H1 could be “What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?”, or “Common CBT Questions to Ask in Session”
• Your content length should be at least 500 words. Typically, the more thorough the better – you should aim for 1000+
• Your Metatitle should include the main keyword
• Your Metadescription should include variations of the keyword
• You should naturally include your keyword and other keywords similar to your keyword in your copy. DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF (meaning, don’t try to just list out a bunch of relevant keywords.
• Make your copy as natural as possible
• Use “alt tags” on your images on the page

Your writing should be:

Written with a Purpose:

Everything you as a psychologist or therapist does should be done on purpose. Don’t just write to write. Think about who your customers are and what they want. Think about the reasons why this content will help your customers and ultimately your bottom line. Find what your customers are searching for and then deliver the best copy possible.

Targeting Your Patients

Writing your copy to target topics your potential patients want to read about is a great way to attract the right audience.

Adding Value

Writing just to write helps no one. You should write your copy with the sole focus of your target patients. There are many ways to help out your audience, it’s important to learn what your audience wants from you.

Original (Not Copied)

It’s so important to create original content. Copying a is a big no-no unless you give proper credit. If you copy someone’s work and don’t give them credit, not only does it look poorly, but it can hurt your business’ credibility. In addition, if you copy someone else’s words, Google may not index (that is, list your page) on their search engine because it deems that your copy is not the original.

Researched and Informative

Every page you write should be well-researched. A major goal of copywriting is to be an authority voice in your niche/industry. If you post without researching, your business’ reputation may suffer.

Written with a Unique Voice

Finding a unique voice in your copy falls underneath chapter 1 above. There are a million ways to say something, try to find a voice that resonates with your target customers. We suggest not writing complex words or ideas unless that is what your target patient wants. If your audience uses a simple phrase for a service, use this phrase! But don’t guess, let the keyword research guide your decisions.

Organized and Easily Readable

Creating organized content is another element that makes good copywriting. It’s a good idea to create an outline before you start writing so that each section is carefully organized.

Related to Your Private Practice’s Goals

One of the most important factors for creating great copy is making sure that what you write will help you accomplish your private practice’s goals.

Chapter 7: Connecting Third Party Tools

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a great free tool Google offers to anyone with a Google account. One of the best uses of tag manager is to provide someone without coding knowledge the ability to snippets of code to your website. Some examples of code that you might need to put on your website:

• Google Analytics tracking code
• Facebook pixel for tracking advertising
• Google Ad tags for tracking advertising and remarketing campaigns

Google Search Console

According to Google, “Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. You don’t have to sign up for Search Console to be included in Google Search results, but Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site.”

Search Console provides tools to:

• Test if your website is crawable by their spiders
• Fix issues you may be having with indexing, or getting listed on Google’s search engine
• View traffic data for your website and how often your website links were viewed on Google
• Show you when Google encounters errors or issues on your website
• Show you which websites link to your website
• Show you mobility issues

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an amazing tool that every therapist and psychologist should be familiar using at a basic level (at least). To create the best therapist website design possible and improve your overall strategy, you’ll need to be able to understand some of the basic areas of Google Analytics.

Here are some practical uses Google Analytics can provide your private practice:

• You can track how many visitors come to your website
• You can track where your visitors found your website (see above image)
• You can track leads (read chapter 8 for more information on this)
• You can see key demographics on visitors
• You can view tracking campaigns if you create them in a tool like Google URL Builder
• You can see which pages your visitors go to, and where they leave
• You can see real-time visitors and conversions happening

The above features are just the beginning. There are many many many more free insights you can get by using Google Analytics.

Marketing Automation / CRM Tool

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. According to Salesforce:

“Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal is simple: Improve business relationships. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.

When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.

A CRM solution helps you focus on your organization’s relationships with individual people — including customers, service users, colleagues, or suppliers — throughout your lifecycle with them, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship.”

A marketing automation / CRM tool are extremely beneficial for keeping track of your prospect patients, your subscribers, and patients. In addition, you can set up forms on your website to connect to your CRM tool, meaning, contacts can be automatically added. Furthermore, each form fill out can trigger an email or a sequence of emails to be automatically sent. If you’re looking to create a great therapist website strategy that is highly automated, we recommend connecting a CRM tool that has marketing automation capabilities.

Scheduling Tools

Some therapists and psychologists choose to add a scheduling tool to their website. There are some great third party scheduling tools that can give your customers the option to choose a time that works for them and that you have available. However, other therapists we’ve worked with choose not to do this as they don’t want their schedule seen by potential patients.

Chapter 8: Tracking Website Visitors and Leads

One of the most important parts of any website strategy is to be able to track leads. In addition to being able to see which source your leads came from, you can pull out valuable information about those who contact you or call you.

One of the simplest ways to track leads is to use Google Analytics, a free tool. Follow this formula:

1. Add Google Analytics to your website using the code they provide
2. Create services pages with button links to your contact page
3. Create a thank you page
4. Create a ‘Goal’ in Google Analytics using the “destination” type of goal
5. Insert the thank you page URL like this “/thank-you/” if that is how your thank you page permalink is
6. Test your lead form by submitting it. You should see that a goal was “triggered” in your analytics.
7. You can also set up goals for when someone clicks on your telephone number on your website on a mobile device. This is a bit more complex.
8. After goals are triggered, you’ll be able to decipher where the leads came from. For example, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Email, etc.

This is the simplest way you can track your digital efforts including: SEO, social media, email campaigns, advertising, and more.

Chapter 9: Getting Started on Marketing

After you’ve gone through each of the above steps, you’re now ready to start marketing your practice! Here is a high level overview of your marketing options that we use to grow our psychologist and therapist clients’ practices:

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is one of the very best strategies to build for psychologists, therapists, and other medical professionals. SEO takes time to build out, typically 9 to 12 + months. But if you plan on creating a long-term private practice, SEO is a must.

SEO works by creating strategies to rank for more keywords, and then creating strategies to rank higher for those keywords on Google and other search engines. Keywords are simply the queries, or searches, your patients are making to find a psychologist or therapist like you. Here are some search query examples:

• Charlotte Psychologist
• Psychologist near me
• Cognitive behavioral therapy Charlotte
• Best therapist in Charlotte NC

There are hundreds or even thousands of possibilities your potential clients are looking for. The key is to get your website content ranked on the first page of Google for each of these important search queries, where more than 90% of all the clicks happen. In addition, people are searching for psychology practices like yours on their mobile phones via Google Maps. You’ll want to rank for those keywords too. These are two strategies you must do to get maximum results.

Google Advertising

While you’re building out your SEO strategy, you’re going to want to get leads quickly. That’s where Google Ads comes in. You can use the same keywords above and pay for your site to be listed at the top. While ideally, you’d be ranking towards the top without paying, remember, it takes between 9-12+ months to get there with a comprehensive SEO strategy.

Google Ads, like SEO, requires that your website is optimized perfectly and that the landing page your ads send people to match the ads you’re running. For example, if you’re running a first session special on Google, you’ll want the landing page to reflect that concept, not just send them to your home page.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a great medium to showcase your expertise and connect with your potential patients. It can help you as a therapist show a more human and compassionate side of your brand to.your potential patients. In addition, social media can be used to enhance your SEO efforts.

It’s Time to Create Your Best Therapist Website Design

We hope this guide was helpful for you to create your best therapist websites! If you need some help on your therapist website design and marketing strategies, we’d be happy to discuss what success looks like in more detail and how we’ve helped other psychologists and therapists grow their practice. Getting new patients for your private practice is possible, and it all starts by taking a step back, investing in a strategy, and building your best therapist website design strategy!

Need Help? Talk to a Top Therapist Website Design Company

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“X Factor” is defined as “a variable in a given situation that could have the most significant impact on the outcome.” BartX is the “X factor” your business needs to thrive. Our internet marketing company uses the power of the internet to help your business grow by finding a unique marketing formula for your unique business. We know that you’re passionate about your business. That’s why we offer solutions customized to fit your unique business needs, goals, and expectations. Whether you’re searching for a partner to manage your online presence or a full-service digital marketing company to design and boost your website to the first page on Google, we can create a package just for you. Some of the services we offer include web design services, SEO services, local SEO services, social media marketing services, and PPC management services.

Resources for Professional Service Industries:
Dental Marketing Strategies
Psychologist Marketing Strategies
Law Firm Marketing Strategies

Our Other Brands:
TherapyByPro – A Directory for Psychotherapists and other Mental Health Professionals
TherapistX – A Marketing Company for Psychologists, Psychiatrists, and Therapists