For practices whose site is written for a colleague rather than a client
Nobody asks a friend for this, so the website is doing the work a referral does everywhere else.
A report on your own site, showing how it lands on somebody who is anxious and deciding.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
4 minutes
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Choosing a psychologist is one of the most privately researched decisions anybody makes. It happens late at night, alone, often over weeks, and almost entirely on websites.
That makes the website unusually decisive in this profession, and it makes almost everything that works in ordinary marketing actively counterproductive.
For most services people ask around. Here they usually do not, because the thing they need help with is the thing they are least willing to mention. The website is doing the work a recommendation does everywhere else.
That means the site is read far more carefully than a normal service site, by somebody who is anxious, and who is looking for reasons to feel safe rather than reasons to be impressed.
What reassures is specificity and calm. What it is like to come in, how long a session runs, what happens in the first one, whether they have to talk about everything immediately, and what the room is actually like.
What repels is marketing language. Superlatives, stock photography of somebody staring out of a window, and anything that sounds like a business trying to convert them. This audience is unusually sensitive to being sold to.
The searches are anxiety, panic attacks, burnout, grief, trauma, ADHD assessment, couples counselling, teenagers. Very few people search for a psychologist without a word in front of it, and even fewer search for a modality.
This is the largest and most consistent gap in the profession's websites. Practices list their approaches, which are meaningless to somebody outside the field, and say very little about the experiences people arrive with.
A page written about what burnout actually looks like, or what an ADHD assessment involves, reaches somebody weeks before they are ready to book. That is exactly the moment worth reaching, because they will book with whoever was useful then.
Modality still matters, but as reassurance rather than as a search. Name it, explain in a sentence what it means for the person in the chair, and let the presenting-issue pages do the finding.
What it costs, what the rebate is, whether a referral is needed, whether there is a waitlist, whether sessions are online, and whether the psychologist is taking new clients at all.
Every one of those is a reason somebody quietly gives up, and most practice sites answer none of them. A person who has spent three weeks working up to this will not ring to ask what it costs.
The waitlist question is worth being honest about rather than silent. Saying that the wait is six weeks, and what somebody should do in the meantime, keeps a person engaged and reads as care rather than as a closed door.
The rebate explanation is the highest-value dull page in the profession. Almost nobody understands mental health care plans, everybody wants to, and the practice that explains it clearly gets remembered and linked to.
A page for each presenting issue you work with, a plain answer on cost, rebates and availability, a first-session page written for somebody nervous, and a real photograph of a real room.
The presenting-issue pages are the engine and they compound. They reach people early, they keep earning for years, and they are the pages that let a solo practitioner outrank a large practice that wrote nothing.
Reviews work differently here than anywhere else, because clients will not publicly review a psychologist and should not be asked to. The reassurance has to come from the writing, the credentials, the room and the clarity, which raises the value of everything on the site.
Then the ordinary things that matter more than they look: a booking path that does not require a phone call, a real photograph rather than a stock office, and the psychologist's own words rather than a practice voice.
This is the one profession where the website genuinely is the referral, because the person reading it has told nobody they are looking. Almost every practice site is written for a colleague rather than for them.
Related reading from us: seo for roofers and seo for locksmiths.
Three to six months for the presenting-issue pages to do their work, and they keep earning long after. There is no fast version, because the pages that matter are the ones read slowly.
Problems. Modality means nothing to somebody outside the profession, and everything they type describes what they are experiencing.
It shifts the weight onto the writing, the credentials and the clarity. It is a real constraint and it makes the presenting-issue pages more valuable, not less.
Yes, with the length and what somebody should do in the meantime. Silence reads as a closed door; honesty reads as care and keeps them coming back when a place opens.