Inquiring turtles want to know
Readers: when you are looking for a therapist, counselor, healing practitioner – basically someone you’re going to work on life, emotional, psychological or other such issues with, what are you looking to see on the first page of their website?
That is, what do you want to know about a practitioner that’s going to make you more likely to contact them for a session?
As I’m reworking my website – which will likely be hosted here at WordPress in the future – I want to have a better sense of what catches people’s eye and makes them see that they may have found the practitioner they want. So what piece of information, what bit of language, what type of image or feel, what sense that you get makes you press the “Contact Me” button – or, what turns you off and makes you go look elsewhere?
Your comments wanted!
I have no idea if this will be at all useful to you… I suspect not. But as a data point…
When I was looking for a therapist after my stroke, what caught my eye about the woman I ultimately approached was experience working with people recovering from illness and injury.
If I were doing that again I would be searching for the word “trauma” but it took me some months of work before I could actually articulate that that was what we were talking about.
If I were actually looking for a therapist now, I would probably be looking for some indication that someone was primarily inclined to work on getting rid of unhelpful habits and instilling helpful ones.
Of course, if I were actually looking for a therapist to help me work on that stuff, I probably would not need a therapist to help me work on that stuff.
Anyway, I guess what I’m circling around is the idea that I seem to need some specific thing which is the thing that I am doing therapy for, and I respond well to specific references to that thing.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably not as useful as it could be for me, since it’s very unlikely that the thing I think I’m doing therapy for is actually what I’m doing therapy for.