Websites for Therapists and Healing Artists: 5 Mistakes Often Made

1. Your website looks like it was designed by an amateur.

If your site was designed by someone who doesn't have graphic design skills, it may look sloppy or unprofessional. Many counselors and holistic practitioners try to save money by getting someone to develop their site as inexpensively as possible. While professionally designed sites can seem like a big investment at the outset, the money you put into them will be worth it in the long run. The more professional your site looks, the more clients it will attract, and the faster your practice will fill. A badly designed site can actually repel clients away from you, costing you more in the end.

2. Your website does not focus on any particular type of client, or client problem.

With competition increasing in the healing arts and therapy fields, it is more and more important that you focus your site on a specific, targeted audience. General, non-targeted web copy (text) simply cannot address potential clients' concerns in a compelling way. If your website visitors land at your non-focused site, they are more likely to leave soon afterwards in the hopes of finding another website that better addresses their needs.

Your potential clients have specific, concrete problems that they want help with. In order to show them that you can assist them with these problems, you need to be specific when you address them in your copy. Moreover, it is also much easier to rank higher in search engines with highly targeted copy.

3. The content of your site is focused on you, as the counselor or healer.

If a visitor lands at your site and they immediately see information about you, your credentials and your therapy or healing techniques, you are off to a bad start. Most clients are pretty self-focused when they land at a website. They are not that interested in your credentials and techniques, as disappointing as that might seem.

I like to compare it to when you take your car to get repaired. Most of us don't care about the credentials of who did the repairs nor the methods used to repair it. If you focus most of your site on the client and save the information about yourself for your "About You" page, you will get a better response.

4. You lack a strategy for getting potential clients to return to your site.

Research shows that few people "buy" on their first visit to a website. It is likely that a web visitor may return to a site at least 5 times (and maybe up to 20 or more) before they decide if they want to hire you. If your website doesn't have rich information that is useful to your visitors, they will not have a reason to come back. Further, if you don't have a newsletter or method of collecting your visitors' email addresses so you can send them back to your site in the future, they may forget you exist.

5. Your site is poorly optimized for search engines.

This is a common weakness of many therapist and holistic practitioners' websites. You may not realize how important search engine optimization (SEO) is and be intimidated by the thought of learning SEO methods. A further problem is that many web designers do not know how to properly optimize websites either. However, learning some fundamental SEO techniques can significantly increase your site's rankings in the search engines, ultimately letting more people know about your services.