Writing a directory profile that is remembered

For most therapists, a directory is where private practice actually begins, and for a good while it is where most enquiries come from. It is worth taking seriously on its own terms rather than treating it as the thing you do until you have a website.

The problem is not quality

Spend half an hour reading profiles in your own area and something odd happens: they stop being distinguishable. Not because the therapists are inexperienced, and not because the writing is poor. Most of it is warm, careful and professionally done.

The difficulty is that a great many of them begin in the same place.

I provide a safe, confidential and non-judgemental space.

I am an integrative therapist working with anxiety, depression, relationships and self-esteem.

Nothing there is wrong. Every word of it may be true. It simply could belong to almost anybody, which means it does not help the person reading to work out whether it belongs to you.

The structure is fixed, so the sentences are all you have

This is the part worth sitting with. On a directory, everyone gets the same headings, the same layout, the same fields and roughly the same amount of space. There is no design decision available to you. There is no photograph placement to get right, no typography, no sequence.

What is left is the sentences. On a website you can be distinctive in a dozen ways; on a directory you can be distinctive in one.

The first two lines do most of the work

Somebody comparing therapists is usually reading six profiles in an evening, on a phone, deciding in a few seconds each whether to keep reading. The opening is not a warm-up. It is the whole shortlisting decision.

So put the specific thing first. Not what you provide — who you tend to work with and what tends to be going on for them.

Most of the people I see are in their thirties and forties, functioning perfectly well from the outside, and finding it increasingly expensive to keep it up.

That sentence loses you some readers. That is the point of it: the ones it loses were going to be a poor fit, and the ones it keeps have just recognised themselves.

The directory has already done the categorising

You do not need to repeat the filters. The person reading has already ticked the boxes for location, fee band and presenting issue — that is how they arrived. Restating the list of everything you work with spends your only distinguishing resource on information the platform has already supplied.

Say the thing the filters cannot: what it is like, how you tend to work, what you notice.

Practical certainty, stated plainly

The same things that matter on a homepage matter more here, because there is less room to recover from a gap. Fee. Session length. In person or online, and where. Whether they can email rather than ring. How long you take to reply. Whether you currently have space.

A person deciding between six people will quietly deselect the ones who make them ask.

The photograph

The same photograph advice applies as anywhere else, and it matters more here because it is the one element of the page you control that is not text. One recent, plainly lit photograph of you, looking at the camera. There is a longer note on photographs if it is a decision you have been avoiding.

Where a profile stops

A directory is built to help people discover therapists, and it is good at that. What it cannot do is let somebody understand a practice, because the structure that makes profiles comparable is the same structure that makes them uniform. Everyone is described in the same shape.

That is the honest case for having somewhere of your own, and it is a narrower case than it is usually made to sound. You do not need a website to get enquiries; plenty of full practices run on a directory profile alone. You need one when the thing you want to say does not fit in a form that was designed for everybody.

If your profile is doing its job and your diary is full, that is a real answer, and it is worth knowing before you spend anything.

One test

Take your opening two sentences, remove your name, and put them beside the opening two sentences of three other profiles in your area.

If somebody who knows you could not pick yours out, that is the thing to work on — and it is a writing problem rather than a marketing one.