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Creating online therapy profiles
Therapy seekers form their first impressions of a prospective therapist while reading their online profiles. How can you, as a therapist, use your profile text to distinguish yourself while remaining accessible? At a recent webinar for therapists hosted by Headway, Ryan Schwartz, Founder & CEO of Mental Health Match, shared six of his recommendations for therapist profiles—based on his years of direct experience as a communications consultant. In fact, his advice comes backed up by the view-to-contact data of profiles on Mental Health Match—and yet they’re incredibly easy for therapists to implement on Mental Health Match and other platforms.
Ultimately, these tips boil down to one important principle: the task of writing a profile doesn’t require being an accomplished content creator—but it does require thinking about how you want to invite an initial feeling of connection.
6 Tips for a Profile that Resonates
Tip #1: Use words of connection like “we” and “together”. By using a collective first person point-of-view, your profile can show the relationship you might have with a client in action. Think about the feelings that therapy seekers have at around the time when they look at a profile in the first place—often they are anxious, overwhelmed, or tender. Now think about how you speak to people with those feelings. Not by elaborating on all of the potential challenges they might be facing, but by pointing out what can and should be done. It can be useful to imagine that you’re writing the profile for a single, specific person.
Tip #2: Photos matter. Create a sense of respect and eye contact! Choose a photograph where you are posed in an open and approachable way—and where your whole face, especially your eyes, are visible. Mental Health Match has compiled this useful guide for therapist headshots for a visual guide to photos that do and don’t accomplish this.
Tip #3: Use the word “you” to connect and validate. Cast the reader as a protagonist and suggest the actions they can take. Use descriptors that suggest a desire for positive change rather than assume and dwell on the difficult circumstances. Ultimately the profile is a call to action.
Tip #4: Use words of hope. Point readers towards what they can do. Verbs like “improve, ease, achieve, love, connect…” go a long way. Half of all web traffic occurs on smartphones, so assume that your profile text is probably being skimmed. Choose words that will jump out at readers, and will make them feel hope, connection, and reflected
Tip #5: Use everyday language and words you can sense. Avoid jargon, words that prevent connection, and acronyms. Don’t be afraid to be at least a little specific and subjective! Consider running your profile through a grade-level language check, and aim for 8th-grade reading level—unless, perhaps, your client base is licensed therapists.
Tip #6: Define a niche in your marketing. If you try to speak to everyone, you wind up speaking to nobody. Mental Health Match has compiled this useful guide for articulating your niche in a way that won’t feel constraining. A great way to get started is to fill in these blanks:
- I specialize in working with people who are _____
- Together, we can ____
Notice that that first prompt forces you to be specific about who you work with—and there are a lot of different ways to be specific! The second prompt forces you to think collectively alongside your reader.
Understanding these principles in theory is a little different than appreciating how they work in an actual profile, so check out this recording of the webinar to listen along as Ryan points out where they do occur in Mental Health Match’s highest-performing profiles and where the opportunities are missed in others. (Psst: He looks at specific profiles at approximately the 1, 5, 30, and 42-minute marks in the video.)
