Psychologists Come First and Nearly Last at the Same Time
Psychologists come first of 47 trades on Google’s mobile checks and 46th on reviews, where only 70.4% hold even one. A psychologist asked me whether his website was why the phone went quiet, and it wasn’t.
“Before I spend money replacing the site, is the site the problem? One line is fine.”
That arrived on a Sunday night, from a psychologist who shares an office with two colleagues and pays more for his parking space than he does for his website.
One line is what he got back, because I had a call at two and I answer these badly whenever I’m in a hurry.
No. Go and get reviews.
He wrote again on the Friday and asked me to explain myself properly, which was fair of him, because a four word answer to a money question is a bit rude.
So this is the version I never have room for on a call.
First and 46th, same trade
I run the same ten checks on all 47 trades, and psychologists hand me the strangest answer of the lot. 3,539 of their practices went into it, across 24 cities, and I opened every website that existed.
Take those ten checks in order and psychologists do something no other trade manages. They start at the very top and they finish down near the floor.
85.4% of these sites clear Google’s mobile checks, first of all 47 trades I audit.
Not first among the quiet professions. First. Ahead of the shops, ahead of the restaurants, ahead of every business that sells things off a screen for a living.
Now move along to the reviews, and the trade drops to 46 of 47, because only 70.4% hold at least one Google review.
Same practices, same audit, same two weeks of my life, and two results that read as though they came out of different industries altogether.
Trades that look nothing like yours pull the same trick. Orthodontists write more than nearly anybody and then hand you a page that fights your thumb.
My ten checks average out at 70 out of 100 for the trade, 38 of 47, which is the sort of middling result that tells an owner nothing whatsoever. An average sits on top of both ends and politely hides them.
Your next client isn’t on your website yet
Think about the order she does things in, because it isn’t the order you would have designed for her.
She doesn’t open your website first. Nobody opens your website first.
She types something into her phone at eleven at night, or she takes a name off a friend and goes away to check it, and what comes back is a map with three practices on it and a row of stars underneath each one.
She picks two of the three from that screen. Then, and only then, does anybody open a website.
Which two do you suppose she picked, sitting there at eleven at night with work in the morning?
So your phone-ready page, the best of any trade I audit at the job it was built for, is the fourth thing that happens to her, and the stars are the first.
Everything I know about how a page should treat a first time visitor still holds. It just gets its turn later than you would like.
A lovely dining room on a street nobody walks down is still a lovely dining room. It’s just empty on a Friday night.
Why I don’t roll my eyes at this one
Every other trade I audit is allowed to ask. The plumber leaves a card by the kettle, the dentist keeps a tablet at reception, and the roofer texts a link from the driveway before he’s even off your street.
You can’t do any of that. Or you could, and it would cost you something you aren’t willing to spend, which amounts to the same thing.
Nobody wants to write about their own therapy under their own name, with a photograph of their face beside it, somewhere a colleague might read it.
And you’re not going to hand a request to a woman in the middle of the worst month she has ever had. I wouldn’t either, and I’d think less of you if you did.
How would that land on you, if you were the one sitting in the chair?
So I understand how that cell got so low, and I’ve had the conversation often enough now to stop being surprised by it. One client of mine refused to ask a single person she treats, so we went hunting for the people she could ask instead.
But my check isn’t whether you are well reviewed. It asks whether one single person has ever written one line about you anywhere, and 88% of the businesses I audit clear it.
Being the exception is comfortable right up until the woman with three tabs open has to choose between you and two practices who aren’t.
Zero and one are further apart than they look
Nobody needs a wall of praise underneath their name. A wall of it would put me off, if I’m honest.
The first review does almost all of the available work, because it moves you out of the group that looks closed.
An empty listing reads three ways to a stranger, and not one of them is true of you. New. Closed. Or busy in a way that would make her a nuisance for asking.
The second review is considerably easier than the first, and the third tends to arrive on its own, months later, from someone you had stopped thinking about entirely.
How many do you suppose the practice down the corridor from you has? Have you ever gone and looked?
The page nobody you hire will touch
Give this four minutes tonight, before you spend a dollar on anything else.
The page carrying those stars isn’t part of your website at all, and whoever built your website has most likely never opened it. It belongs to Google, it costs nothing to keep, and claiming yours is one evening’s work for whichever of you has the most patience with forms.
Type your own practice name into Google and look at what comes back beside the map. Is there a panel with your opening hours in it, or is there nothing there whatsoever?
If there’s nothing, then no client of yours can leave you a review even if she wants to, because there’s no wall for her to write on.
I’ve sat with three psychologists this year who were certain a tired website had dried up their new inquiries. Two of them had no listing to be reviewed in the first place.
Would you know, without checking, which of those two rooms you’re standing in?
One thing, and only this one
Claim the page. If it’s already claimed, finish filling it in and get one review onto it before Christmas.
That’s the instruction.
Now ignore the rest of what you have just read.
Ignore the mobile result, because your trade already owns it and there’s nothing there for you to buy. Nobody in your line of work built that on purpose anyway. Ignore the fact that 23.5% of these homepages carry a contact form, even though on any other day I would be at you about that one for an hour.
Ignore me on blogging, ignore me on your social links, and ignore the fellow who tells you in October that your fonts are looking dated.
I hand owners lists of four improvements all the time, and what happens is that they nod along at all four of them and then do none. One thing done badly beats four things admired.
Most of the psychologist websites I build get bought by someone who had already decided the site was the reason their phone went quiet. It usually isn’t, and I would rather say so before the invoice than afterwards.
Is the site still nagging at you the way it was on that Sunday night? Point me at it and I’ll tell you what a stranger meets on her way to your phone number, though my honest guess is that she never got that far.
