You need to do a lot of work before you build a therapist website. Over the last couple of months I built a website for a solo practice LMFT: https://www.saramillerlmft.com/. We worked through a lot of questions before we even started.
Normally small business website advice focus on marketing to gain awareness. This therapist's successful marketing strategy is through referral. Google analytics, marketing campaigns, ad placement, etc. don't work. Personally I believe it's just creepy in healthcare, especially behavioral health. Having a product management background, I refined those techniques for this project. Here are the steps we took:
- Define the top three client types
- Develop a color pallet attractive to these clients and make them comfortable (this was easier because she is also an art therapist)
- How do you enhance recall? Visual cues, unique characteristics of the practice were discussed. We decided that a stand out logo was needed along with featuring her certified therapy dog
- Determine the purpose of the website. In this case we wanted referrals to quickly access the information they needed to move forward to a free initial consultation. Existing clients need to quickly access the practice EHR to schedule appointments, cancel appointments, have secure messaging and get quick answers over the course of their treatments (including session fees, insurance, directions to office, etc.)
A typical therapist group practice may have 17 pages. By using customer journey mapping techniques, we got the entire website pages down to 4 clean and simple pages optimized for mobile.
Then we built it and went live last Saturday.
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