Guidance
Why a good website should put some people off
Being specific costs you enquiries you did not want, and gains you the ones you did. What that looks like in practice.
Most therapists write their website as though every visitor is a potential client. It is an understandable instinct, especially when the diary is not full. It also produces the exact problem people complain about: a steady trickle of enquiries that are not a fit, each of which costs a considerate reply.
The website that produces fewer, better enquiries is the one that is willing to be specific enough to lose people.
What “put off” actually means here
Not rude. Not exclusionary. Not a list of who you will not see.
It means the page says clearly enough what you do that somebody looking for something else can tell, quickly, and go and find it. That is a service to them. Nobody wants to send a careful, difficult first email and receive a polite referral elsewhere.
Where specificity usually goes missing
In who you work with. “I work with adults experiencing a wide range of difficulties” is true of almost every therapist alive. It gives the reader nothing to recognise. Compare: I mostly work with people in their thirties and forties who are functioning well on the outside and finding it increasingly expensive to keep it up. Some readers will recognise themselves in that sentence in a way they never will in the first.
In how you work. Long-term, open-ended, exploratory work is a different offer from eight sessions with a focus. Say which. A person who wants six weeks of practical help and lands with a psychodynamic practitioner has wasted both your times.
In the practicalities. Daytime only. Online only. No, I do not offer same-week appointments. Waiting list of about a month. Each of these loses you somebody, and each of them loses you somebody who was going to be disappointed anyway.
The awkward one: fees
Publishing your fee is the clearest example of a page doing this well.
It removes the enquiries you cannot serve, before they cost either of you anything. It also signals that you are comfortable with what you charge, which is read — accurately — as a sign of an established practice.
If your fee is at the higher end, saying so plainly does more good than concealing it. Somebody who cannot afford it will find that out eventually. Better at the moment of scanning than three emails in.
What it does not mean
It does not mean inventing a niche you do not have. A great many therapists genuinely do work across a broad range, and pretending otherwise produces a website that misrepresents the practice — which is worse than a general one.
If you are genuinely general, be specific about something else: how you work, who you are, what a first session is like, what you are good at. There is always something concrete to say.
The reframe
You are not trying to reach the most people. You are trying to be recognised by the right ones.
A therapist’s diary holds a small number of people. It does not need a large audience. It needs the twenty or thirty people a year for whom you are a good fit to be able to find you and know it.
Specificity is how they know it.