How To Get More Clients From Your Therapy Website

Uriah Guilford
Hello, and welcome back to the Productive Therapist podcast. I'm so thrilled that you're here. I just feel so honored when anyone listens to the show, and there's a lot of you out there. So thank you, thank you, thank you. Today is actually a pretty cool day because this is the 200th episode of the Productive Therapist podcast. And to celebrate that, I'm joined again by Lucy Curio. Hello.

Luci Carrillo
Hello. 200 episodes. That is amazing.

Uriah Guilford
Yes.

Luci Carrillo
You're doing something right, Uriah.

Uriah Guilford
Thank you so much. Yeah. And for people who haven't pieced this together, Lucy is the amazing voice of the intro for the podcast. For your listening pleasure, she has actually been editing the podcast and has been my producer for a long time. So thank you for that, Lucy.

Luci Carrillo
You're very welcome. It's a pleasure. Absolute pleasure.

Uriah Guilford
It's been a fun project. It's been a fun project. A lot of people are coming to us and telling us that they've been listening and they want to use our services or they're just appreciative of what we've been putting out there, which is so cool. In fact, I was earlier this month, I was at a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. I think I already told you about this, but I'm going to tell everybody else. There was a really nice man that came up to me and said, Yurai, I'm a huge fan of the Productive Therapist podcast, and I've actually been listening to every episode from episode one, and I'm working my way up to the current episodes. I was just blown away. That was so cool.

Luci Carrillo
That is very, very cool. I heard that you were slightly star struck as well, which is really awesome. And if you're listening to this, hello, we are so happy you're here.

Uriah Guilford
Yes. Welcome. Yes. Welcome back. Welcome back. Yeah, it's funny. I like to joke with my kids and some other people that I'm super famous in a very small corner of the internet. But I'll take it.

Luci Carrillo
I'll take it. Yes, exactly.

Uriah Guilford
It's good. It's good to be a productive therapist. So today we are coming back to you with the second installment of our intake series, which we're very excited about because honestly, this is one of our favorite topics to talk about, is how to help you streamline your intake process. So so you can turn more calls and clicks into clients. In fact, that's pretty much all we do around here. I mean, there's other things that we do, but that's our main focus, isn't it, Lucy?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, we are the intake experts.

Uriah Guilford
We are the intake experts.SelfProclaimed. Proclaimed, yes. But it's also true. Yes. What's exciting today is we're actually going to be talking about websites and specifically how to build or create a conversion-optimized website. I thought it'd be fun to just chat for a minute our different experiences building websites. Do you remember the first website you built? Tell me about that. I do.

Luci Carrillo
The first website I built was for a wheel repair company. They also did refinishing for wheels. And it was a friend of mine, is a friend of mine, who really wanted me to build this website. I'd never done it before. I was absolutely really terrified. But my husband said, You can do it. You can totally do this. Because I already had marketing knowledge and experience. I knew exactly how I wanted it to look. It was just the technicalities of building the thing. So I used Squarespace, which was brilliant. I absolutely love Squarespace. I had tried to build a WordPress site years before, and I just couldn't it out. It was too complicated, and they weren't easy to access guides. Squarespace has... I feel like they should be sponsoring this episode. My goodness. We should. Yeah, their guides were absolutely fantastic. They taught me everything I needed to know at every step of the process. I remember at one point, I know you know this, Uriah, Squarespace uses blocks. You work with blocks to build out a page. And I accidentally erased a spacer block block, which if you build a Squarespace site, you know what I'm talking about.

Luci Carrillo
If you don't, there's a guide for that. And it made the entire landing page go completely wonky, and I was just in an absolute fit of anxiety. I'm not going to be able to fix this. It's going to look terrible. His website is going to go wrong. But of course, they had a guide for that as well, and I was able to fix it really quickly. So, oh, my goodness. I had so much hyperventilation during that process. But yeah, Squarespace, it's the way to go.

Uriah Guilford
And you enjoy building websites now, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yes. Yeah, I do. I love it because now it's a known entity, it's a known skill, and I know how it should look. I know how the marketing should be set up, the client journey or the visitor journey when they're going through the website. So being able to make that a reality is incredibly satisfying. I feel like that's accessible to basically anyone with those guides.

Uriah Guilford
It's so easy. It's just so easy. I started building websites back in, it was probably 2008, right around the time when I was starting my solo practice. And at that point, I had three jobs. I was juggling three different things. And one of those jobs was actually a part-time job working for my friend's family business. And they did digital marketing, built websites, helped people with social media marketing. They were using an old platform. Well, it wasn't super old then, but it was called. Net nuke. It was very-Oh, my goodness. It was very dated at that time. But that's how I started learning about how to build websites. And then about six months, 12 months later, I built my first website for my practice. And I don't know if you'll remember this, but the Apple had a tool called iWeb. It started in 2006. Oh, yeah. And it was a software that you would put on your computer that would allow you to create a website. It was like $97 or something like that. So I created my very first website, which was... Are you ready for this? Helpthiskid. Com. That That was my practice name for a number of years.

Uriah Guilford
I love that.

Luci Carrillo
That is a very cool URL.

Uriah Guilford
It worked pretty well for a while, yeah. At some point, I'll have to show you the wayback machine and show you what that first website looked like. I was very proud of it, but it was super basic.

Luci Carrillo
But it clearly worked.

Uriah Guilford
You're here now. I know, it did. It helped me launch my practice, yeah. I want to say this was free Squarespace, so I don't think Squarespace was even a thing then. I just really I enjoyed learning how to build websites. I never learned how to code. I don't know if you did.

Luci Carrillo
No, me either. I can copy and paste code.

Uriah Guilford
You can pop on to ChatGPT and have it write your code for you, but you don't need to. Because you can use Squarespace. That's great. I love it. Let's dive into a couple of different recommendations. We're not going to talk about all the things related to building a website because there are a lot of things to talk about.

Luci Carrillo
We could be here all day talking about that.

Uriah Guilford
We would love to do that. But today we're going to talk about how to build or tweak your website to be more conversion-optimized. That simply just means, what can you change on your website to make it more likely that more people are going to take an action and hopefully, fingers crossed, become a client. That's the goal. As you all know, anybody listening to this, there's a lot of... I don't like to use this word, but there's a lot of competition. There's a lot of noise in in the world in general, online, specifically. For you to stand out and for people to actually land on your website and then become a client, you actually have to do a pretty good job of, number one, communicating to them clearly, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, absolutely. If you're listening to this and you're suddenly feeling really intimidated, that doesn't mean that you need to use lots and lots of words and lots of pictures and fancy things. You really don't. Like you said, Jurya, there is so much noise. One of the easiest ways you can stand out is by being simple, having a simple website that does hit those points, that does communicate clearly.

Uriah Guilford
We're not going to go deep into copywriting and messaging because that's a whole other avenue that's fascinating to both of us. But we want to just tell you a little bit about how to write a headline for your website. When I say headline, I just mean the main largest words at the top of your homepage. I remember back in the day, this doesn't happen very often anymore, but back in the day, a lot of therapists would write, Welcome to my website. Yeah, I know.

Luci Carrillo
That's awesome.

Uriah Guilford
The most important real estate on the homepage, right? Welcome to my website. And then it would go into like, I graduated from Stanford in 2003. Oh, goodness gracious. And I got my certification and I got my license.

Luci Carrillo
Let me tell you all about myself.

Uriah Guilford
We don't want to do that. We want to make most of your website, to be honest, client-focused and benefit-driven.

Luci Carrillo
Aren't they coming to your website because they want to learn all about you? What's the reasoning for that?

Uriah Guilford
Good question, Lucy. Thanks for the setup. Yeah. No, I think- You're welcome. Anybody searching for something online, they're either looking for, number one, entertainment, or they're looking for a solution to a problem. Yes. And as therapists, we're not really very good entertainers. Yeah, some of us are dancing on TikTok, but not most of us.

Luci Carrillo
Thankfully.

Uriah Guilford
So what we're wanting to do is present a solution to a problem. So you want to be clear, clear enough so that somebody can land on your website and in five seconds or less, probably less, they will know quickly who you serve and what problem you solve. That's really it, isn't Yeah.

Luci Carrillo
And once they have that clearly in mind, they'll know whether they need to keep reading or whether you're the wrong fit, and they'll move on.

Uriah Guilford
I'm obsessed with evaluating people's headlines and tweaking them because I think it's like low-hanging fruit, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah. An example that I see a lot in practice websites is that they will use the header to say something like, We are a therapy practice in San Francisco, California, just to pluck somebody out of the air, and we serve individuals, couples, and families with general and complex therapy issues like anxiety. It just goes on and on and on and on. And that is not the purpose of a header at all.

Uriah Guilford
Think about a potential client. Let's say they go to psychologyoday. Com, and they click on 10 different profiles, and they click through to 10 different websites. Which one of those is going to stand out? It's probably going to be the one, not the prettiest one, although it might... When you look at a website, you might notice the design first. But pretty quickly, you're going to look at the words and then see if it resonates or not.

Luci Carrillo
Yeah. Who's got the solution to my problem?

Uriah Guilford
Definitely. I was talking to one of our members, and maybe she might be listening to this, and I was telling you this earlier, Lucy. We were talking We were talking about her messaging. We were talking about her homepage, and I'm not going to read her headline. It was a nice headline, and it talked about providing transformation, and it used some really nice words. Then the subheadline talked about EM EDR and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the words on the page. But as I scroll through her website, I could see the actual person and problem, the person that she served and the problem that she solved. I actually pulled something. I noticed this a lot. I pulled something from far down on her website, and I was like, this should be at the top. I just gave her an example of something that you could read and then immediately grasp it and visualize On her website, she had this really cool graphic of two dials, and it was about, and she was talking about dialing down the intensity of emotions. I was like, oh, that's really good. And dialing down the intensity of anxiety.

Uriah Guilford
I was like, Well, what if... This might not be the answer, but what if your headline at the top of your website said, Helping moms turn down the dial on their anxiety. Oh, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, I like that.

Uriah Guilford
Isn't that interesting? Because you could put a picture of a dial. Everybody Nobody knows what it means to turn down the volume. So that's like a metaphor that you quickly... You're like, I'm in. I get it. And if you're experiencing anxiety, what do you want to do? Tone it down, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah. I think that is a really great example. And That's awesome that you were able to pull something that she already had on her website. She just didn't realize the value of it in that context. But it really is as simple as clearly identifying what is the biggest pain pain point for the vast majority of your clients, the demographic that you said. What is the biggest pain point? How do you solve it? Do you solve it? And then putting that thought into the fewest number of words possible so that when they come to your website, the first thing that they see is, Okay, they solved my problem, my exact problem. That's what they do. I'm going to keep reading.

Uriah Guilford
Definitely, yeah. Sometimes we complicate things. I don't know about you, Lucy, but I always I find myself trying to be clever with my words.

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, that's a challenge.

Uriah Guilford
It's better to be clear. If I saw a website that just said Counseling for Teenage Boys, that's not terribly punchy or interesting. It's not really anything fancy. But guess what? I know exactly what that is. For myself, I can ask myself, Do I have a teenage boy? Actually, no, I have a teenage girl. Maybe this isn't the therapist for me. But if I do, and if I'm looking for counseling for my teenage son, then I'm immediately drawn in, and then I want to read the next bit. I want to scroll, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah. One of the phrases that I loved that you created for your practice was, it was something like restoring harmony in your family or restore harmony. Actually, I think it's got to be that because that makes the visitor the hero rather than the practice. Restore harmony in your family. And that's the outcome that that demographic wants. They want peace in their family. So telling them that that is what you're going to give them through services. Yeah, it's very valuable. Being clear, not clever.

Uriah Guilford
Yeah. I don't know what Let me think about this. Thanks for bringing up that example. So my practice is called Intune Family Counseling, and we have a strong music metaphor that we're using. And I think it's a great one.

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, it works. It works for your demographic.

Uriah Guilford
Yeah. The original headline that I wrote and put on postcards and on the website... I might have to go grab the postcard because I think I'm getting it right, but it was close to what you said. But it's actually, I think it's helping families find their rhythm. Rhythm being a musical term, obviously. Then on the homepage, you see... If you want to go to intunefamily. Com right now, you can go check it out. But you see a family sitting around and the dad's playing the guitar and the kids are dancing. I thought that was really good. But then at some point, I doubted myself and I thought, Is that too clever? Because if you just read that headline and you didn't see anything else, would you think that we were offering drumming circles? What do you think about that? Because then I did actually change it. If you go there now, I think it says counseling for Families or something like that.

Luci Carrillo
It's such a difficult balance, and I think that both headers are great and both work. But it is a difficult balance when you start trying to be fun and clever about the word use because you can lose people in the process. Not everybody gets various analogies or idioms, and you could lose people because of that. But also, by being fun and a little bit clever with the header, are you attracting the clients that you actually want to see in your practice? So that is a consideration, too. Either one, I would say, is great. It's just as long as you're clear about what you do.

Uriah Guilford
I think our recommendation here is take a fresh look at the headline on your website, and even whatever you put underneath that main headline, and ask yourself a couple of questions. Is it clear who we serve? Is it clear what the solution is, whether it's counseling or EMDR or something else? I think a third question might be, can you visualize it? Can you see it? We were I'll talk about that before we hit record on this episode, but can you close your eyes and visualize something, even if it is just... I'll tell you this one real quick. I went to a networking event recently, and I was asking a therapist, So who's your ideal client? Something like that. Very therapist-like networking question. She said, You know, I work with a lot of blue-collar men. For me, at least in that moment, and I think for most people, I immediately had a picture in my head of a blue-collar man looking for a therapist who was down to earth and who would get get them and their life. I remembered that person and that niche, if you will. If her website said, Therapy for Blue-Collar Men, oh my gosh.

Luci Carrillo
I think that's good. Yeah, it's great. It's really great. That visualizing aspect of it is so important. It's one area where your header image, if you're using an image or it could be a video like you have, can be so important, but it needs to be complementary. It can't replace the It has to be complementary because if you had on your website, it would be like the drum circle. If there's no frame of reference and you see a family playing drums in a circle, that's what you're going to think it is. So it has to be complementary. But absolutely helping them to visualize that whole section of your website, the header words and the header image is supposed to be aspirational. What does my life look like on the other side of services with this practice? That's what you want them to visualize and feel.

Uriah Guilford
Couldn't agree more. Once you have clear messaging and a really solid headline on your website, you want to make sure that you have a clear call to action. And that's just marketing speak for, what are you telling people to do next? What do you want them to do? And the issue that I see often is that either it's not action-oriented enough, it's not direct enough, or there's way too many different calls to action. It's like, read my blog, request an appointment. Then as you scroll down the page, there's five, six, seven different things people can do. And then they have to figure out, Well, which one of these is the most important? Those are two things that I see commonly happening.

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, I would agree with that. Absolutely. I don't know if... Well, it's definitely not unique to therapists, but I think a lot of therapists are, I don't want to say afraid, but nervous about being too direct, being perceived as too direct. But the reality in this situation, maybe when you're in therapy, when you're in a session, yes, you're helping them to tease things out. But in this setting, they're not dealing with you as a therapist. They're dealing with your website, and they want information, and they want to know what they need to do to get that aspirational result that you've highlighted in your header. So being very specific with them rather than having a call to action button that says, learn more or find out more here, it needs to be direct. Schedule now, book now, get your first session, whatever it is, be direct. And some interesting numbers on that. People who are visiting a website need to be told on average seven times the exact same message before they will actually take action. So like you were saying, having multiple calls to action going down the same page, that is just going to confuse people, and they'll end up not taking any action because they're confused.

Luci Carrillo
So when you decide what your direct call to action is, if that's schedule now, just go with that, you need to have every call to action button going down that page being exactly the same. Looks the same, same words, same color, same button size, everything at least seven times. So you give them the opportunities they need to take the action you want them to take.

Uriah Guilford
Definitely. Yeah. Learn more is not a very powerful invitation, is it?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, it's vague.

Uriah Guilford
I mean, Learn More is appropriate for some parts of your website, right? If you have service pages, in the middle of my website, there's options to learn more about family therapy and teen therapy. I think that's totally fine.

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, it's appropriate.

Uriah Guilford
The one on my website right now, and I still like this one, I don't know what you think, but it's a get help today.

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, I do like that one because it includes the solution in the action.

Uriah Guilford
Yeah, feel free to steal that one, please. I'm a little bit obsessive about this, as I think maybe you are, too. I I want every single button on that homepage to say, like you said, say the same thing, look the same. I just want it consistent, consistent because people searching for any solution, well, let's talk about therapy, specifically. I think a lot of people are still ambivalent about it. So yes, they're on their website, but they're not excited. Like I was the other night when I was at a food truck for hot mini donuts. I was like, dancing, right? I was like, call to action, get hot mini donuts. It is exciting. Let's go. But When it's therapy, it's mixed feelings, probably, right? So you want to give them every opportunity to take that action. I think almost without exception, the next action that people want potential clients to take is to contact them, whatever that method of contact is. That's the most important thing. Once you have clear messaging and a clear call to action, then you want to give them clear next steps. Our recommendation is that you send them directly to your contact page or some page that helps them schedule a call, book an appointment, do something that is engaging with your services.

Uriah Guilford
Do you think sending them to the contact page is the best way? I think it is, but I think, yeah, I do think so, because like you said, that is almost always, I can't actually think of a situation when it wouldn't be, the next step that you want them to take is to make contact with you.

Luci Carrillo
I really like the way that you have had this set up for your practice, Yuraya. Obviously, we know that between three and five steps is the ideal. You don't want fewer than three, you don't want more than five. Can you share what the three steps are that you use with your practice? I feel like there's a happy dance involved in it as well.

Uriah Guilford
Yeah, I was pretty happy with this. When I was building this website a couple of years ago, actually, I had this website built for me. It was the first time I didn't do it myself. But I wanted to use something that I learned from building a story brand from Donald Miller, and that is not exclusive to him, of course, but to give people a three-step process of do number one, do number two, do number three, to make it seem like this is actually going to be simple and easy. On our website, if you go to intunefamily. Com, you'll see it says in big bold letters, Next steps. Step one, schedule a call. Step two, get matched with the therapist. And then step three, do a happy dance. I think that's pretty good, right?

Luci Carrillo
I think it's great. And I still remember the happy dance.

Uriah Guilford
And it says underneath that, it says, Fill out a few quick forms on our client portal, show up to your first session, and start feeling better.

Luci Carrillo
I love that. It's great.

Uriah Guilford
You've mentioned this to me quite a few times in the past about putting words on a page or communicating something to someone that feels like work. And I've always taken that feedback from you as very, very helpful. You want to present things to people like, you don't want to say, This is a seven-step process that's going to take you three hours. No, you want to make it sound easy.

Luci Carrillo
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding around that with just business owners in general. They're excited about their product or their service, and they want to make it sound as impressive as possible, which is great, except that may not be what the potential client wants from when they go to your website. Obviously, they're there for a reason. They have a problem, and they're looking for a solution to it. They don't need to know every feature that your product or service has. They just need to know, Is this going to solve my problem? And if so, how complicated is it going to be for me to get that solution? So that's where your header and your call to action, and then your clear next steps work together to communicate that, take them through that journey, and hopefully end up in them clicking the button and taking the action you want them to take.

Uriah Guilford
Have you ever heard the saying, Good technology is indistinguishable from magic? Have you heard that?

Luci Carrillo
I have.

Uriah Guilford
Yeah, I don't know the source of that.

Luci Carrillo
I don't either. It's been a long time since I heard that as well, but it's true.

Uriah Guilford
I was thinking about that in the context of our conversations on the intake process and the client journey. I don't know if this fits, but it seems like it might. A beautifully designed intake process and client onboarding journey should be indistinguishable from Magic or maybe a Disneyland ride.

Luci Carrillo
You shouldn't be thinking about the process. You should just be whiskt along. You should be whiskt. Yeah, that's a great way to put it. It's a journey to a solution. You're not thinking about the steps.

Uriah Guilford
I just wanted to highlight this, and in a future episode, we will be talking about the most ideal pros and cons of different first contact Methods. I think we're going to do an episode on that, and that will be, at least to me, very interesting. But I think my best recommendation for that next step is to fill out a very short form and then be instantly redirected to a page where you can schedule a call to book your first appointment. That's my favorite flow, and that's what we have on our website right now. I've definitely seen a lot of people create a contact page where they want to gather a lot of information, but it's 17 different things, and you have to scroll, scroll, scroll, and do a lot of work to fill out this form. We just do first name, last name, email, phone, what service are you interested in, how did you hear about us, and then a field where they can enter information that might be important, and then click Send Message, right?

Luci Carrillo
Yeah, I really like that flow as well because you could absolutely just direct them to the page where they can schedule a call with the intake coordinator or give them your phone number. But it is very, very helpful to have some information ahead of that call to know If this person is even going to be a good fit for your practice. If they're not, the intake coordinator can be ready for that. So rather than going through the entire call script, wasting their time and the potential client's time, they can refer them out to someone that you would trust to handle them.

Uriah Guilford
We'll talk to you more about this in a future episode, but we're huge fans of online scheduling and giving the opportunity for a potential client to quickly and easily schedule a call with a human to help them, guide them through that process. We're huge believers in having an amazing mental health-specific, trained intake coordinator. Okay, so I think we could go on and on again, but we're going to stop there. Just give you just enough. But our recommendations from today's episode are take a look at the headline on your homepage. Think about if you can make that a bit better, and then take a look at your buttons. Are they consistent? Are they direct? And inviting people to take a next action? And then when they get to that page, probably your contact page. Take a look at it as if you'd never looked at your contact page before. How many options do you give folks? And is it easy to figure out what to do next? Pretty sure you'll find at least one thing to tweak in in that process, and that will help your clients.

Luci Carrillo
Sounds great. I love that.

Uriah Guilford
Here's some good news for you, listener. We have something to expand upon this wonderful topic that we've discussed today, and I'm going to give the microphone over to Lucy to tell us more Can you hear more about it.

Luci Carrillo
This is when I do the thing, isn't it?

Uriah Guilford
Yes. Please use your best British accent.

Luci Carrillo
I will whip out my best British accent. Okay, here we go. Are you getting enough calls but not enough new clients? Intake accelerating Intake Accelerator will help you sign up more ideal dream clients with a beautifully streamlined intake process. This short course covers the seven ingredients you need in place to have a conversion boosting, time saving, and money-generating intake process. For more information and to get your access, visit intakeaccelerator. Com. And PS, it's only 27 bucks, so it's really a no-brainer. How was that?

Uriah Guilford
Fantastic. I like the PS.

Luci Carrillo
I love a good PS.

Uriah Guilford
Yes. We really are proud of this course, and it walks you through everything you need to know to, like Lucy just said, build a high converting intake process. You can actually get through the course in less than 60 minutes, and we think you'll really find it valuable. So go check that out. And thanks for listening, and thanks for joining me, Lucy.

Luci Carrillo
Thanks, you're right. That's it for today. Thanks so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and hit the subscribe button to make sure you never miss an episode. If you're looking for more personalized help, you can reach us through productivethherapist. Com. Thanks so much for listening. We are Productive Therapists, and this is the podcast that helps therapists get more done and have more fun.