Writing Your profile for Psychology Today
It’s important to get this right — but it’s hard.
Have you struggled to figure out exactly what to say about your therapy services, and how to identify which factors distinguish you from the dozens or hundreds of other practitioners in your metro area? Does it seem impossible to fit all this into a few brief paragraphs that match the format requirements of a specific therapist directory?
If so, you’re not alone. Frankly, writing this type of profile is hard work, and most folks don’t have the time or energy to put into it.
Many therapists include a listing on one of the major directory sites (such as TherapyDen, Inclusive Therapists, or Psychology Today) as a key part of their online marketing strategy, because these sites rank highly in search engine results. But the actual writing of the profile, it seems, is a universally dreaded task.
Why is it so tricky to write a therapist profile?
There’s a reason that writing your therapy directory profile feels so complicated. It actually is complicated.
Here are a few of the simultaneous processes that have to occur in order to write an effective profile:
Contemplating the value of the services you offer.
Describing what you do in everyday terms (to be easily understood by people without a psychology background), but with authority as a skilled clinician (to let potential therapy clients know that you are a trustworthy and highly trained provider).
Identifying the concerns of your target audience and expressing them in the kind of language they might use.
Making sure that keywords for your specialty or target demographic appear within the first sentence (to catch your client’s eye in the directory search results), but also making that sentence compelling to the right clients.
Using a tone that’s congruent with your approach to the therapeutic relationship.
Proofreading your own work for typos.
Figuring out how to fit this carefully crafted profile into the (arbitrary) section breaks and word counts mandated by the submission forms of specific directories.
That’s a lot of mental gears turning at once! No wonder most therapists feel their creativity grinding to a halt when faced with this task.
4 elements of an effective profile
In a nutshell, here’s what your therapist profile needs to include:
A first line that will feel compelling, but not pushy, to your ideal client. This is the line that will appear next to your thumbnail photo in the search results.
A brief description of your primary demographic or issue.
A bit more detail about how you work with those people to improve their presenting issue — but in everyday language, not simply a list of modalities you’re trained in.
A direct invitation to reach out via a specified means, whether that’s email or phone.
That’s only 4 things… but it’s complicated. There’s a lot of nuanced decision-making that goes into the tiny details of word choice, sentence length, tone, and all of the other factors that make one profile feel impersonal and stilted while another profile feels warm and direct.
Feeling overwhelmed?
Let me write your therapist profile for you.
As a freelance writer with many years of clinical experience in mental health roles, the complex task of crafting effective therapist profiles is a fun challenge for me. I enjoy pulling all the pieces together to create a profile that sounds and feels like you, speaks directly to your ideal client, and conveys who you are as the highly trained but human person in the therapist chair.
The process of co-creating your therapist profile only takes a few days, and it takes place entirely through email. The profile writing fee of $175 includes one free revision to make sure you’re happy with the final product.
Whenever you’re ready to get started, just drop me a line.