Grow My Therapy
Grow My TherapyGrow My Therapy — website design for counseling practices
Search your own name and specialism. For most LPCs, LMHCs and LPCCs, the first result is not their website — it is their Psychology Today profile, sitting on a domain with more authority than any private practice will ever have, next to eleven colleagues offering the same thing.
That profile is fine as a listing. It is a bad shop window: everyone’s looks the same, you cannot change the structure, and the traffic is not yours. Your own site is the only asset in this business you actually own, and it can be built to win the searches the directory currently takes.
The competitor you are actually up against
A directory outranks you on brand strength, not on quality, and there is no way to out-authority it head-on. What you can do is win the searches it is bad at: specific problems, specific populations, specific towns, and any question that takes more than a paragraph to answer.
A profile has one box for all of that. A site can have a page for each — which is exactly how search visibility for counselors is built, and why the structure of the site matters more than its palette.
Then there is the part a directory cannot do at all: be recognisably you. Almost everyone who reads your profile will search your name afterwards. What they find at that moment is the thing that decides it.
What your own site can do that a profile cannot
A naming problem nobody warns you about
You are an LPC in Texas, an LMHC in Florida, an LPCC in California and an LCPC in Illinois. Same training, same work, four sets of letters — and no client alive is typing any of them. They type “counselor near me”, “anxiety therapy”, and above all “therapist”, which is the broadest and most contested phrase in the field.
This has a practical consequence for how the site is written. The credential goes where it does its job — near your name, in the structured data, on the about page where someone checks you are real. The headings and page titles use the language people search, because a heading is a search term first and a design element second.
It also means the site cannot win on the generic phrase alone, and should not try. Practices that fill do it by narrowing: the population you are best with, the problem you have seen five hundred times, the thing you would still take at 6pm on a Friday. Then the site is built around those, not around a list of nineteen issues copied from a directory checklist.
If your services page lists everything you have ever treated, it ranks for none of it. Three pages that go deep will beat one page that goes wide, every time.
What the page has to do in ten seconds
That is the honest context. They have three other counselors open, they are on a phone, and they will close two of the tabs before they read a full paragraph.
The first question, and the one most sites answer worst. A visible, current availability line — open, waitlist, closed — settles it before anyone invests attention.
A number. Not “contact us for rates”, which reads as expensive and eliminates you from a comparison you never knew you were in. If you take insurance, which plans; if you have sliding-scale places, how many.
One obvious step, repeated: book a consultation. Not five buttons competing. Every page ends somewhere.
One or two sentences describing the problem in the reader’s own words does more than a paragraph of credentials. This is the part we draft from the way you talk in a first session.
A real photograph, taken in this decade, looking at the camera. It is the single most-looked-at element on any therapy site and it is worth doing properly.
Most first visits are mobile and late. The site is built and tested for that first rather than adapted to it afterwards.
What’s included
A practice website is usually a designer, a host, a scheduler, a form tool, a backup service and whoever you call when it breaks. This is all of it, run by one team — see the full service.
Questions we get
Yes — but change what you use it for. It becomes a referral source that points at your site rather than the place where your practice lives. Keep it accurate, link it to your website, and let it do what directories are genuinely good at: putting you in front of people filtering by insurance and location.
What you stop doing is treating it as your online presence. You cannot control its structure, you cannot add a page, and you are one of a screenful.
At zero caseload the honest ordering is: a way to be booked, a way to be found, then everything else. A site does the first straight away and starts the second, which takes months to compound — so the earlier it exists, the earlier that clock starts.
What we would not tell you to do at that stage is spend on ads before the site exists to send them to. We will say that on the call rather than sell you both.
The ones your state uses, once, near your name — and then stop. Long credential strings read as insecurity to clients and add nothing for search. What does help is one plain sentence saying what the licence means: that you are licensed by the state to practise independently, and what you are trained to treat.
You can, and some counselors write beautifully. What usually happens instead is that the site sits at 80% for four months waiting for an About page. So the default is that we draft everything and you correct it — correcting is a twenty-minute job between sessions; writing from blank is not.
Updates are unlimited and they are ours to make. A new specialism, a rewritten home page, a page removed because you stopped offering it — you send a message in the words you would use on the phone, and we make the change and show you a link before it goes live.
We’ll look at what you currently rank for, what the directory is taking from you, and what a site built around three specialisms instead of nineteen would change. Everything else we do for licensed counselors is here.
No obligation · you see the draft first
More for licensed counselors
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