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Abundant Practice Podcast
Episode #755: What Website Features Actually Get Therapists Clients (& Which Are a Waste)
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Hi, welcome to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm Alison from Abundance Practice Building. I have a nearly diagnosable obsession with helping therapists build sustainable, joy filled private practices. Just like I've done for tens of thousands of therapists across the world. I'm excited to help you too. If you want to fill your practice with ideal clients, we have loads of free resources and paid support. Go to abundance practice building.com Links all right, onto the show. So I've talked about therapy notes on here for years. I could talk about the features and the benefits in my sleep. But there are a couple things I want you to know about therapy notes that doesn't typically make it into an ad script. First is that they actually care if you like their platform. They don't only make themselves available on the phone to troubleshoot so you don't pull your hair out when you get stuck. They also take member suggestions and implement those that there's client demand for. Like Therapy Search, an included listing service that helps clients find you internal and external secure messaging, clinical outcome measures to keep an eye on how your clients are progressing. A super smooth super bill process, real time eligibility to check on your client's insurance. In my conversations with the employees there at all levels, they all really believe in their product and they want you to love it too. Second, they are proudly independently owned. Why should you care about that? Because as soon as venture capital becomes involved, the focus shifts from making customers happy to making investors happy. Prices go way up. Innovation plateaus. Making more money with as little output as possible becomes the number one focus. With over 100,000 therapists using their platform, they've been able to stay incredibly successful and they don't have to sacrifice your experience to stay there. You can try two months free@therapynotes.com with the coupon code Abundant. Welcome back to the Abundant Practice Podcast. I'm your host, Allison Per, founder of abundance practice building.com I'm here with my friend Kat Love. Y' all know Kat from katlove.com empathy sites. Kat has been a consultant and website builder for therapists specifically for a really long time and she's going to tell us a lot about what we should not be wasting our time and money on feature wise on a website and what's actually helping get clients in the door. So thanks for being here Kat.
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A
Yay. Thank you so much for having me.
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B
Yeah, yeah. So we were talking before we hit record about some of the baseline information we probably need to provide before we start diving into features. Do you want to start us off with that.
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A
Yes, I would love to. Yeah. Because when I was thinking about this question of the features to kind of spend on and the features to save on, something that came up for me when I was like kind of. Yeah. Thinking through, my answer was maybe it's important to establish that there's actually two kind of jobs that your therapist website can take. One is it can help you get found, and the other one is that it can help you get chosen. And I think a lot of times it's very easy for therapists to get confused and kind of feel like you have to do both and you have to do both at the same time. And just to explain what I mean by that, if you were to build a website that is optimized for being found, that's the types of stuff that we're talking about when we're talking about SEO and now in 2026, AIO AI optimization as well. But then if you were just to build a website that is optimized for being chosen, which means that when people land on your site, they are like, wow, you are an excellent fit for me. I'm going to reach out. If you're optimizing for that, then you're going to be focusing on other things and those things are going to be generally things like writing, design and how you compel them to reach out. So that's very different thing that you have to do on your side if you're focusing on let me build this website to fulfill its job of being found versus let me do the things to get people to choose me when they're on the site. And so features, for me, as a website designer, when I think of features, it's more in that second category of what you're doing on the site to help people choose you. Because features would be like on the site. But I just wanted to establish that right out the gate. Yes, you can do stuff to help, you know, boost SEO and AI optimization, but those aren't really, in my world, considered the features of the site as much as they are like tactics that you would wield.
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B
Right, right. And if somebody has had an SEO company, SEO, SEO their website, I think we should probably also address the fact that gets you chosen on a website is sometimes in conflict with what SEO wants to read and see.
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A
Yes.
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B
So I want to name that. That's tough because also when we throw AIO in, AIO is more interested in kind of they being chosen language because they're given. AI is given a lot more information than just one SEO question. So these things can feel like they're in conflict. There are ways to finesse it. So just we wanted to say that before we get started on these features just to make it really clear what we're talking about and what we're not talking about.
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Yeah, no, I totally agree. Yeah.
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So where should we start, feature wise? What is, should we start? Let's start with like where not to spend your money.
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Yeah, that's a good idea.
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Or your time. Yeah, yeah.
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So I have a whole list of things you should skip. Yay. So I think one of the first things that comes to mind is different types of animations. When I say animations, I don't mean like a cartoon. I mean animation in website land is anything that moves. So it can be a carousel of images, like a sliding thing of images. Or very often I see as you scroll down the page, you know, the text isn't even there, but then as you scroll it, like swipes in from the right. I think that a lot of these types of features, they actually kind of slow your website down. And I don't mean in terms of your human browsing the site and being like, oh, this is slow to process, which is also a thing we should talk about. But the first thing that came to mind was these actually slow your page from loading quickly. And what we know about, you know, positive user experience research is that the time that it takes to load can really affect people's, you know, ability to enjoy the website and to find the information that they need quickly. But then to that other point that I kind of just brought up in passing, I think it's always safe to assume that the person landing on a therapist website is in some type of emotional distress. And so again, it's like, why put something on there that's going to make your website load slower and then also possibly add to the cognitive load that this distressed visitor is already going through. If they're anxious, they're depressed, you know, they just got into a fight with their partner at 2am and are on the brink of divorce. You know, it's like they're not going to be like, oh yay, I'm so happy this thing is sliding in. I'm going to pick this therapist more than the one that doesn't have that right. And so there's a lot of reasons to skip things that are just animated all over your site.
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Absolutely. And I'll say too, as somebody who can't look at a ceiling fan without getting dizzy, all these like swoop ins or like, not like Kind of flashing things. I have to get off a site.
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Yeah.
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If there's a carousel of pictures that goes on its own, I can't look at it.
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Yeah.
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For those of us with strange inner ear eye situations going on, that could be helpful. Yeah.
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And I think, I mean, so interestingly there's actually some research around that that things that move. The reason that people started using them on the Internet is because people, humans are wired like biologically to pay attention to things that move. But the reason is because we look at things that could be threat. So we look at things that could be a threat. So it's actually by design that we are using moving things. Sort of like you're driving down the street and there's like the hot dog stand guy that's dressed in hot dog costume and like swinging the sign. He's doing that because your eye can't help but look there.
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Right.
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Because you're like, oh, like someone's going to drive out in front of my car. It's like, oh no. Haha. It's just the hot dog stand guy. But now who, who knows about the hot dog stand? Everyone.
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Right, right, right.
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So anyway, there's some interesting like psychology behind all of that, but it's like not the psychology we want to leverage when selling mental health.
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Right, right. It's kind of using it for evil.
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Yeah. Or yeah, just tapping into.
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Yeah, yeah. All right, cool. What else can we skip and save time and money and energy on?
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So another thing that is a little bit in the realm of HIPAA digital security, all that fun stuff that we love is contact forms. So contact forms are something that fall into this kind of gray area of digital security because we don't know if somebody walking down the street who intends to get therapy. Right. Maybe there's just asking a question or putting something into that contact form where they're just like, okay, curious about, you know, when's your next group or whatever. It kind of falls into a gray area as to whether or not that information that they're putting in should be considered protected health information because they're not yet a client. Even though it falls into a gray area. From my research, I feel like my suggestion has become just not skip, but consider it phi. Like the wisest thing to do is to be like, okay, we should protect this information to the same level as our clients. And given that it makes contact forms a little bit more complicated because you can't just use the boilerplate Squarespace1 or the one that WordPress plugins usually use because these Companies don't execute business associates agreements. And even if you're just listening to me starting to talk about this and your eyes are glazing over, you're starting to dissociate, that's like a good sign that you can just agree with me that you should just skip it. This is why I'm saying skip it. It becomes too overwhelming, for what it's worth. So yes, you could navigate all of the stuff that I'm saying, do a risk analysis, try to understand all of this stuff and then have a contact form. But the end effect isn't that they're going to choose you because you have a contact form.
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Right, Right. Yeah. And if you're using a contact form, most of the big ehrs have contact forms you can put in and then it's protected. Yes, Hushmail. If you use Hushmail, they have forms as well. So there are ways to do it if you feel kind of passionate about a contact form for any reason.
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Yeah.
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What would the alternative be if not a contact form? Like just phone number and email address that you click on and it goes to the right place.
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Exactly, exactly. And I think the other nice thing about the. I do love Hushmail. I love the simple practice features. There are a few others that are within HIPAA compliance to use if you research. I think the thing that's really nice about encouraging website visitors to use your email is that if there were a technical issue, they get notice notified that their message didn't send. And I think for a lot of contact forms, especially the ones that are like there's the squarespace form or like a WordPress form or other ones that are on your website building platform, unfortunately they fail some of the time and sometimes quite a lot. Like we did some testing on WordPress forms and they were sending like half of the time. And so what that means is that someone could come to your website, fill out their very important question to you, send it, and then it looks like it sent, but it didn't. So it just kind of poofs into the technical cosmos and you're never going to see it and you're never going
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to know, which really sucks for that client. It also sucks for the therapists who are trying to get clients both.
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Skip them.
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Skip them. Yeah. What else?
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So I think another thing that I see a lot that can be skipped is a lot of the directory badges. And I'll put directory badges into the same category as social media menus and social media like integrations. So like you're on Instagram and you Put you want to post like a carousel of all of the latest Instagram posts or something. At first, these seem like a really good idea. You're like, okay, you know, the Psychology Today certified badge, and it's going to link back to my Psychology Today. Or, you know, oh, well, yeah, I am posting all the time on Instagram. I want people to go there and see, you know, what I'm about and everything. But I think that these features often are in the wrong direction.
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Yeah.
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So we want people to stay on our site and have the chance to get to know us and then the attention of their action. Next step should be on reaching out for a free call, reaching out for a first session, getting scheduled. You know, if you're a group practice, reaching out. So their intake coordination, your intake coordinator can match you to the right therapist. Right. So these are the types of things and languaging that you would want to have all over your site rather than, hey, go over to Facebook where there's kitten pictures and you're going to completely forget about me.
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Yeah.
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So I think that you can have these features, but they need to be very de emphasized and very strategic. So, you know, having a small Instagram link in the footer could be appropriate if you're posting. Right. If you're posting regularly, but otherwise skip these. Just turn them off your site.
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Yeah. So I'm guessing in the same vein, those resource pages that some of the, like, website builders for therapists. And it would have like a million links and they were so generic. Yes, same problem.
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Exactly.
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Let's not give people an excuse to go elsewhere. And I think a lot of people will justify it with SEO. Right. Of like, oh, well, it's. Outbound links are good for SEO, but this person already found you. Yeah, let's keep them.
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Yeah.
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I don't think the outbound links are powerful enough to, on their own, to draw a bunch of people in.
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Yeah. I don't know that outbound links have a big SEO impact anyway. To be honest, I feel like mostly you want links to you, not links going out.
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Yeah.
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So again, it's like the arrow pointed in the wrong direction.
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Yeah. And so I think the resource pages that are super generic, I also will see people be like, you know, here's where I studied. Like, I studied under this masterful IFS person or whatever. And linked to them.
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Right.
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Stop.
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Yeah, no, exactly.
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First of all, people don't usually care. And second of all, like, then they're going to be like, I want to see the masterful IFS person you Know, not their student.
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Right. You're advertising for them. Yeah.
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Awesome. What else can we skip?
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So I think another, I mean this might sound kind of strange because I'm literally a website designer selling website design. But something you can skip is a luxury level redesign. So what I mean by like a luxury level redesign is I feel like sometimes I've witnessed therapists going for like the very high boutique website designer and they are doing a very high level of redesign. Usually, you know, so. But I'm talking about projects that are like, you know, 25000 for a website, 30,000. You start to get up into those numbers and all of a sudden that doesn't seem to make sense for the goal anymore.
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Right.
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Like, it's just. Even if you're making.
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Yeah, yeah. If you're making. I have a student making half a million dollars right now and she could afford that in a redesign, but like she's making 500000 without having to do that. Yes.
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Yeah, yeah. Right.
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Sometimes you get to this point where you're like, I guess I should up level because I'm doing really well. But you don't need to up level like that.
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Yeah, it's the, it's like kind of the, what's the appropriate spend for the impact? And I think, you know, you're, you're talking about someone having half a million. But I've known multi location, multi million dollar practices that have been perfectly fine on their original WIX website.
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Right, right.
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And so when you see that you're like, wait a minute, like do you really need that, you know, $30,000 bill redesign even at that scale? And the answer is not necessarily right.
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Yeah.
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Sometimes though, to be honest, I do say like, okay, if it's just fun, like you know, you know, do, do you. But if we're talking about what is going to help a website visitor choose you when they land on your site, that luxury redesign isn't going to be the deal breaker between you and other options. It's not going to be like, oh, wow, they had such and such agency do their website. I can see their credit in the byline. And the design is so good that I'm going to have to choose them now. Right. It's not going to differentiate you as much as the investment that you're putting into it. And there are other things that you could invest to in your marketing that will yield a much higher impact.
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Absolutely, yeah. Should we talk about those things?
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Yeah. You mean the things that you do want to do? Yeah.
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Look at all this Time, energy and money, they just got saved. Where are we spending it now?
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Yeah, I mean, I think so. When we're talking about those like, choose you factors, the one thing that you can definitely spend on is copy. So copywriting, especially if it's not something that you love doing yourself, it's, it's a learnable skill, but it is also like an entire field of work.
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Right.
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So it's like, you know, if you need a heart surgery, you're not going to be like, oh, let me go to art school. You can hire someone who's done that. And I think that's the same with copies. And I think the quality of copy does kind of go by the investment point. If you hire someone on fiverr for a hundred dollars, you know, it's, you're gonna get something, but it's not going to level as someone experienced at sales copywriting, but then especially niched in therapist websites specifically because it's different to sell therapy than it is anything else.
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B
Yeah, it's wild, y'. All. I have had numerous, numerous students come to me having paid kind of a generic copywriter. Like somebody who like worked at a marketing firm or had their own shop. It wasn't a five or higher. They spent a lot of money. And it's like this person doesn't know your client's pain points in the way that somebody who works with them or somebody who works with therapists knows those pain points. And so it ends up not hooking people. It's too generic. Even if there's a niche, it's like you're not talking about the things that your ideal client is struggling with day to day. And that matters deeply. Yeah, that's the whole point.
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Yeah, the whole point. I agree. The whole point of the effect of copy would be to connect into the, your ideal clients, you know, desires and, and challenges so that they can really feel seen.
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Yeah. So there are not a lot of people who do that copy from a therapist, like know how to do therapist copy. You're one of them. Yeah, there are a couple other people I can think of, but it's, it's a niche.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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And just like if you've got perinatal mood disorder, you don't want to just go to like a generic therapist because most of us aren't trained in perinatal mood disorders. Like, you need to see a specialist if you're going to outsource your copy.
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Yeah. And I think the other problem that I've seen with other generic copywriters, when they're hired is that they don't understand the client not only in terms of what we were just saying about the pain points, but also in terms of their level of consciousness about their pain.
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Right.
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So that's something very specialized that I don't even know that a normal copywriter would know to think about. Because what a normal copywriter will do is they'll interview you and you're going to be saying, like, oh, you know, I do somatic experiencing. And so I'm going to work with clients who want to, like, feel their body. And, you know, maybe they feel like they're unsafe or they feel ashamed. And so it's like they're going to be interviewing you about your understanding of the client rather than the client's understanding of themselves. Right, right.
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So that same client before they come in. Right. Yeah, yeah.
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And so the copywriter is going to write what you told them, but it's not going to be tuned into. Wait a minute, pause. Does the client actually feel scared in their body or do they just feel stressed out?
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Right, right. And, like, you're a trauma therapist, but your clients come in for anxiety because they're not linking the trauma to the anxiety.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I call that the level of consciousness. And I have a whole framework for, like, figuring out. You can find it on my blog. What level of consciousness your client actually is in versus, you know, what you might naturally start talking about if you were to write your website yourself or work with a copywriter.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right. What else? What else makes sense to spend time, money, energy on?
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A
So a little. This is also going to be a scary one that the next one that I'm going to recommend, but I'm going to recommend that you get a photo taken of you.
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Please do. Yes.
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This looks. It's. It's fascinating how important it is, but then also how challenging it is for a lot of therapists because it's really like, the literal definition of being seen.
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Yeah.
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You actually have to, like, you know, get in front of something. Yeah.
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So many of us are also not, you know, super comfortable with how we look.
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Yeah.
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And so people will put it off like, once I lose X number of pounds or, I don't know, once I find the magical face cream that makes me look less old or whatever. As opposed to, like, your clients don't really care how cute you are. They really care that you look safe and you look smart and you look warm.
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Yes.
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Like, if you have that competent face which all of us have when we're Feeling confident and it's warm at the same time. I would so much rather people choose the photo where they're looking confident and warm than where they're looking their prettiest or cutest. And that's a hard choice to make because we all have egos.
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Yeah.
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A great branding photographer, if you're in a place where you can do that, is great. Otherwise, like sometimes just like somebody you love taking your photo in great light with an iPhone, you know, those cameras are better than the cameras were, you know, back when I started my practice. Like top end cameras weren't as good as that, so.
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A
And it makes such a difference to people choosing you. Not necessarily like, oh, again, it's not like about the luxury level of the photo. It's about the humanity, like the ability to connect to you as a human being. If that quality of seeing you is there, that's going to be so much more. Right. Fit Identifying quality. I want to come up with a word for that, but it's, you know, it's like that thing where when somebody lands on your side and they're like, oh, yeah, this is the therapist for me. Yeah, you, you can only get that by being human as well as being a clinician too.
- [25:23]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And don't catfish your photo if it's super old. I remember seeing a therapist once who was at least 15, 20 years older than their photo. And I was, it was fine for me, but I was like, oh, this is like an adjustment in my brain to what I thought I was going to be, you know, to who I thought I was going to be seeing.
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A
But it's worth it.
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B
Yeah. Where else should we spend our time, energy and money?
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A
Feature wise related to that, I actually also think video. So that's kind of like taking it up, even like turning up the volume on that. All that stuff you're probably scared about. But again, video is so worth it. It's not only a photo. It's like the vibe your energy can come through. Like, you know, is this therapist more the type that is really calm and I'm gonna feel like, oh, like I can finally calm down and a session with them. Or are they more like energetic and motivating? I once chose a therapist, my previous therapist, from the one that I have now because she had the most awkward video of herself on her website. I was like, oh my God. I can tell that she does not want to be doing this, but she was like still being courageous. And I feel like I actually saw myself in that. I was like, oh my God. Me too. Like this is. This stuff is hard. You know what I mean? But I just appreciate it. Like I could tell that she was a little nerdy and so I was like perfect. That's like the exact. And like out of you know, you know, 20 websites that I had open, I chose her because she was the only one with a video. She gave me such a good sense of, of who she was through that. And it wasn't perfect. It wasn't like a, you know, big production quality. I think it was just her with a zoom video or something like that. But it just reduced the amount of fear that I had about what if this person isn't a good fit and I'm reaching out to them and I'm wasting their time and because it's kind of scary on the client side to have to reach out to essentially strangers.
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B
So absolutely.
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A
If you take. Have the courage to create a video that's definitely a feature, very worth it. And it will help people choose you over others.
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B
Yeah. And we have in the abundance party we have a whole training on how to do videos. So I'll just say right now some very like high level things from that is like you will suck at first. Your first take, you're going to be like this is the worst thing I've ever done in my life. And that's okay. That it really is just practice. And also everybody should probably turn their energy level up like 10% because even if you're like, if you're a very calm person, you might come across as very flat.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Even if you're energetic like me, you come across is not very energetic, just normal. Something about video takes away some of your energy. So play with it. Maybe try 10%, try 30%. Just like you're still, you still be. You just have a little bit more energy in your voice. Sometimes that means standing up and doing it from a standing desk. But just play with it. Yeah.
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A
Love that. I love anything that gets therapists doing more video.
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B
Yay.
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A
Good. Awesome. Yeah.
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B
Is there anything else we should be considering feature wise?
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A
I think one, we kind of mentioned it a little bit in the reverse of the things that you shouldn't do like with the contact form and stuff. And we kind of were touching on how should people reach out to you. So I think one of the things that you definitely want to invest in and this is more of an investment of time to really map out what the call to action needs to be on each page and make sure that that's very clear. And what I mean when I say call to action is the languaging and the options for contacting you around what that next step is that you want your website visitors to take. So it could be free consultation call, it could be a first session or in the case of group practices, it could be get matched. So I think those being all around your site is going to make a difference as to whether or not someone chooses you because it's not just presenting, you know, hey, we, you, we can help you and then just dropping them and them not knowing what the next step is, that's, that's going to reduce the number of people who reach out if you don't tell them what to do to reach out.
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B
Exactly.
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A
So make sure you don't miss that. It, it's definitely, definitely important to have that on every page.
- [30:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Amazing. Kat, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. You're doing a more in depth training for us in the Abundance party, so. So for folks who are already in there, be on the lookout for that in the portal and in our group. And if you're not already in the party, come join us. We would love to help you build your practice. So yeah, Kat, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
- [30:27]
A
Thank you.
- [30:29]
B
If you're ready for a much easier practice, Therapy Notes is the way to go. Go to therapynotes.com and use the promo code abundant for two months. Free. If you're listening, you probably need some support building your practice. If you're a super newbie, grab our free checklist using the link in the show notes. I'd love for you to follow rate and review but I really want you to share this episode with a therapist friend. Let's help all our colleagues build what they want.