Specialty Pages: How to Write Pages That Convert for Your Practice
Now that your therapy website is live, you’re raring to set the internet world on fire. You’re eager to bring in hordes of eager new clients and add zeroes to your cash flow. But what else can you do dramatically increase your chances of success on the internet?
Specialty pages are key.
What is a specialty page?
Any page that describes concentrations or procedures specific to you and your practice could be considered a specialty page. Do you use a certain type of therapy? Do you focus on specific conditions? Do you have a section where potential clients can learn about their potential therapist – you?
This kind of content all requires a specialty page on your professional website to maximize your impact on interested eyeballs. Let’s look at why specialty pages help you stand out and succeed.
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People want an “expert”
Let’s look at an example from another field. Jenny has sciatica and is fed up with the incessant pain. She heads online to look for relief. Many websites are generic: medical doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists, osteopaths, and pain specialists who don’t even mention sciatica, or do so only in a list. And then Jenny sees it: a page focused solely on the treatment of sciatica. This office clearly understands what they’re doing. The specialty page goes over sciatica’s causes, effective treatment options, and pain-relieving stretches. It uses people-first language to talk about the unique struggles faced by someone suffering from sciatica and how the treatment this office provides can help.
Even if another site has just as much information on their general “Pain Management” page, this sciatica page is much more specific and relatable for Jenny. She feels understood by someone who is knowledgeable. This office ends up looking more expert or specialized than the others she’s researched.
So, who will Jenny choose? The expert, of course.
Specialty pages can brand you as the expert and remove other options from the equation. With the right specialty pages, you effectively become the go-to professional in certain arenas. With this perceived boost in reputation, cost becomes less of a concern for your potential patients. Rather than being just another middle-of-the-road option, you are seen as a unique, better-qualified, and more effective clinician with a head above the crowd because of your private practice focus.
Optimize for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
There are two ways to woo search engine users to your site: paid and unpaid. While paid promotion can form an important part of a good therapy practice marketing strategy, search engine optimization (SEO) is how you give platforms like Google, Bing, and Yahoo the right information so they send people to you for free.
Check out this video explaining more about how this works:
Let’s go back to our sciatica example and think about it with two main concepts in mind: SEO, and how to use words to ethically persuade the audience to buy what you’re selling.
The power of keywords
If you create wonderful unique content that has readers spending good amounts of time on your site, reading from page to page, the search engines want to find you! But you need to provide the search engines with what they need, or else your site could be lost in a dusty corner of the internet forever.
It’s important to include keywords.
A keyword, or keyword phrase, is simply a search term or phrase. When your leg pain gets too much to bear and you search for “sciatica treatment,” you’ve just searched with a keyword phrase.
The search engines will choose what results to display based largely on keyword phrases. By incorporating the keywords people search with on your specialized page, you increase your chance of a boost in rankings, which means you’ll be easier to find.
Picture: An LSIGraph.com search for the keyword phrase: sciatica treatment reveals other potentially useful keywords to incorporate in your writing.
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How to identify potential therapy specialty pages for your website
Before anything, remember that you can add or remove pages from your website at any point. As a therapist, your career will most likely change course a number of times. You may complete additional training that changes your clinical focus. Life might lead you into caring for a new demographic. All of this may affect your choice of specialty pages, so rest assured that your site will be able to reflect these changes as they happen.
There are two types of therapy specialty pages you need to include: pages every site needs (standard but still tailored pages) and those that are more unique and specific to your practice and expertise.
Standard therapy specialty pages include —
Your bio page: Who you are and why potential clients should trust you.
The “who we are” page: This is like an About Me or bio page for your practice. Instead of going into the individual[s] behind the practice here, talk about your private practice in general and what its goals and/or specializations are.
Services page: Think about how what you offer that can benefit a client. CBT for anxiety? Counseling for alcoholism? Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Include a page with a brief summary of all the different kinds of services you provide, and then link the listings to their respective, super-specific specialty pages elsewhere on your site.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page: Many health professionals don’t think to include a FAQ page. What a mistake! As the name infers, this page answers those questions you’re asked often. An FAQ page can ease your team’s workload, offer a seamless experience for current and potential clients, and give you the opportunity to provide important information to the search engines. That’s three birds – one stone.
Testimonials page: Social proof is crucial in our digital world. If people can see other people like them getting results, it may be the final piece to the puzzle of convincing potential clients to reach out to you for a consultation.
Unique therapy specialty pages
While it’s important to have standard specialty pages, they probably don’t cover everything you want your potential clients to know about your practice. The unique therapies or techniques that matter to your practice and your clients, both current and potential, form this part of the specialty pages equation. This is where you can use some creativity: imagine your ideal practice, and specifically target your ideal clients in your specialty pages.
In order to know what kind of unique therapy specialty pages would be the most helpful for your private practice, you’ll need to brainstorm the things about you and your practice that make you stand out compared to some or most other practices.
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Brainstorming Exercise: Specialty Pages
Jot down or type up your answers to these questions. They can help you pinpoint the most noteworthy and distinctive facets of your practice — the ones that deserve a specialty page or a featured position on your site. It’s worth noting, too, that your passion about what you do will help your ideas really shine. If you are really excited about offering brainspotting, for example, that deserves its own page.
- What kinds of conditions do you work with?
- What people or groups do you help?
- What type of therapies do you offer?
- What areas do you have significant experience and expertise in?
- Who do you love working with, and why?
To help you generate unique therapy specialty pages, let’s take a look at some examples:
Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression – See how Rose Park Psychology has targeted this here.
Anxiety treatment for youth – Do you think you’d feel confident taking your anxious child to see these mental health professionals after reading this page? Anxiety in Teens: When Stress Goes Awry. Newport Academy appears professional, educated, and experienced — the obvious go-to — based on that therapy specialty page.
Stepfamily counseling – Notice how this specialty page focuses on a less-common specialty: stepfamilies of all kinds. They’ve gone one step further and offered some helpful suggestions and information to this demographic, increasing their credibility and offering a preview of their empathetic, expert therapeutic care.
How to write better specialty pages
We have a few main tips to keep in mind when it comes to polishing up your specialty pages, so they really start to convert for your practice.
1) Offer meaningful content to readers.
What does someone who lands on your site through search gain from reading your specialty page? Insight? At-home strategies? A path to relief?
People often consume online mental-health-related content without necessarily wanting to visit a therapist. The good news is that, if your content is great, they’ll hang around your website, which the search engine will see as a sign of worthiness and may boost your rankings. In a roundabout way, offering some of your knowledge on your site will help those who do want therapy to find you. No matter who is landing on your site, you need to consider what they want. Once you know what your potential clients are looking to find, weave what they seek into your message. Giving your website visitors what they want can only help your site.
2) Harness the magic of keywords.
Keywords can be a great benefit to specialty pages — actually, to every page — so be sure to include them. Keep a record of the two or three keywords or keyword phrases appropriate for each specialty page and include these as you write.
3) Format your website for success.
Have you ever come across a site that was too visually busy? The text was bundled together so much you could barely read it, and you could immediately tell it was going to be hard work to even get around the site?
Don’t do that to people! You’re encouraging them to click away forever, even if your content is great. (If you change your site later, that’s all well and good, but the people who were already turned off by your poor website aren’t going to come back of their own initiative just to check on you.)
With the importance of website format in mind, here are a few key design tips to keep in mind that will help to ensure your site impresses and converts:
- Incorporate white space
- Include bullet point lists (see what I did there?)
- Write a descriptive headline and make it big
- Use subheadings that pop and matter to your ideal clients
- Use stock photos to connect with their emotions
4) Add a call to action.
You are in private practice, and therefore in business, and your specialty pages serve a specific purpose: to convert, educate, and keep clients.
To encourage your website visitors to buy in, you must ask the reader to take an action in an obvious area on your site.
Do you want a reader to book a consultation, to join a program, to buy your book?? You must ask them to do so in those very words. Yes, there are more sales-y words and creative approaches, but the best option is to keep it simple and direct. Just ask for what you want from them. You may be surprised how well people respond to this approach.
To enhance your conversions, regularly revisit your specialty pages and see how you can improve them with specific “Next Steps” for your potential clients.
5) Write, write, write.
No, I don’t mean that each specialty page should be the size of a thesaurus. But the more frequently you write, the better you’ll become. Practice pays off.
Writing Tip 1: Don’t try to be overly clever with too much fanciful language or complex sentence structure. It will usually end up confusing readers and missing the mark.
Writing Tip 2: Include language that your clients use (Hint: refer back to your keywords as a start). This can boost SEO, but more importantly, it will show your website visitors that you understand what they’re going through.
With your therapy specialty pages completed thoughtfully, the search engines will show you more love, potential clients can find you more easily, and your content will contribute to a thriving practice.
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