You may be wondering how to improve your therapist profile to get the most referrals. Well, after matching over 500,000 therapy seekers, Mental Health Match has learned a lot about what makes for a successful profile. This short guide provides our best advice for improving your profile.
To best use this guide, start with the most recent data about your profile, which you can find in the monthly data email we send you, or on your dashboard when you log into Mental Health Match.
The data we share provides a lot of context about how therapy seekers are engaging with your profile. You’ll want to look at:
- Number of times you’ve been shown as a match
- Number of times your full profile has been viewed
- Number of times you’ve been contacted by a prospective client
How many times have you been shown as a match?
If you are shown as a match to a potential client less than once every other day, then there are not enough clients looking for your specific services. There are two ways to fix this:
- Mental Health Match can do more to advertise to the population you seek. We have an entire team that monitors the client traffic we receive and looks for areas we can do a better job with, including locations, presenting issues, and price points.
- You can experiment with changing some of the settings for your profile to reach a broader audience, such as lowering your fees, offering teletherapy, or broadening your niche. Also make sure you provide demographic details such as your race and religion to make sure you show up for searches with those criteria.
How many people who see you as a match click on your full profile?
When clients see you as a match, they see a summary of your practice, your specialties, and presenting issues. (See an example here).
If fewer than 25% of the clients who see you as a match for their needs click to view your full profile, it means the basics of your profile are not speaking to their needs.
Overwhelmingly, this can be fixed in two ways:
- Changing your photo. Your photo should be warm and inviting with clear eye contact. It should not be blurry, have distractions in the background, or be too zoomed in or out. See our guide to the best photos for examples and instructions on how to take a photo that will connect with clients.
- Focusing your list of specialties. Clients want to feel reflected in your profile and having dozens of specialties can make you seem too unfocused for their needs. We recommend 6-10 specialties maximum. If you’d like further guidance on how to clarify your specialties, see our guide to defining a niche.
How many people who click on your profile contact you?
If fewer than 25% of the people who click on your full profile contact you, it means that the content of your profile does not resonate with their needs. Our guide to writing profile prompts has plenty of examples and suggestions for writing a successful profile. Our biggest tips are:
- Answer all of the prompts. Give therapy seekers more information about you and more ways to connect with who you are as a therapist.
- Speak in everyday language. Avoid clinical jargon such as modalities that most people do not recognize or understand.
- Focus on solutions. People seeking a therapist want hope and optimism that things can change. So instead of focusing your profile on problems, try to speak to what you can make possible for the client.
- Display your fees, especially if you are private pay. Many seekers will skip over profiles if they don’t have a clear idea of the costs involved to see you.
Give your changes a month to take effect and then check your next data email to see what has improved and what other opportunities exist to hone your profile.
