The Mobile Pass Psychologists Didn’t Earn

The white noise machine in your hallway goes on at ten to nine and it doesn’t go off again until the last one has gone home.

Fifty minutes, then ten, which is how a psychologist’s whole day gets cut up. In the ten you write the note, refill the jug, put the cushion back where it belongs and try not to look at your phone before the door goes again.

Your website gets about ten minutes of your attention in a whole year, and most of those minutes go on wondering whether the thing looks old.

I have told a lot of people in your line of work that their websites are the most phone-ready of any trade I audit. Nobody has ever been pleased about it.

What comes back instead is one of five sentences, and I’ve started keeping them in order of how often I hear them.

1) “My clients come from referrals anyway”

The one I hear most, and it’s half true.

Your caseload really does come off a doctor, a school, an old client, a colleague who has stopped taking new people. I’m not going to pretend a stranger with a phone is your main source of work.

But the referral checks you. She gets handed two names on a slip of paper, and both of them go into her phone that evening, and something on a screen decides which one she calls in the morning.

78.3% of the practices I sampled have a website at all, 39 of 47, so plenty of your trade has already made its peace with living on referrals and nothing else.

That works right up until the referrals slow down, which they do, usually in the year you have just signed a longer lease.

When did a new person last call you inside an hour of being handed your name? Do you even know how she got there?

Verdict: half true, and the half that isn’t is the half that costs you.

2) “The site works fine on a phone, I checked”

Also true, and it’s the only one of the five I’ll grant you outright.

Whoever built your site picked a template, and that template already knew how to stack itself into a single column on a narrow screen, which is how 85.4% of these sites end up clearing Google’s mobile checks without anybody in your practice ever deciding anything.

The odd part, for a trade that finishes first of 47 on that check, is how little it buys. Restaurants come second on the same one and then make everybody wait for the page to arrive.

That check isn’t a tall hurdle either, since 78% of everything I audit gets over it. Clearing it is the floor, and what a page does after it fits the screen is the part nobody grades.

The check belongs to Google, not to me, and a page fails it the moment a reader has to drag the screen sideways to reach the end of a sentence. She won’t drag it. She’ll go back to the map and open the next name on the list, and you will never hear that it happened.

Your trade doesn’t lose people that way, and that is a genuine advantage, even if it arrived in a template rather than in a conversation with anybody. A whole city got the same free pass in Corpus Christi, where the theme cleared the check on everyone’s behalf. So congratulations, and please stop offering it to me as evidence that the website is finished.

Verdict: true, and beside the point.

3) “I don’t want a bigger practice, I want a full one”

I like this one, because it’s the only honest business plan anybody in any trade has ever said out loud to me.

You’re not building a chain of offices. You want the hours you already work to be booked, with people you can actually help, and then you would like to go home at a reasonable hour.

Except a full practice leaks continuously. Someone finishes, someone moves away, a couple separates and neither of them comes back, and a company changes its benefits in January and takes four people with it.

So you need a trickle, not a flood, and a trickle is harder to arrange than a flood is. A flood you can buy. A trickle has to already be there when the leak happens.

When did you last have a month where nobody new called at all? What did you change that month, other than worrying?

Verdict: holds up completely, and changes nothing about what to fix.

4) “I’ve got nothing to put on a blog”

Your own trade disproves this one, which is why it sits down here rather than higher up.

40.7% of these sites publish something, which puts psychologists in the better half of everybody I audit for having actual words on the page.

You explain the same four things out loud every single week.

What the first appointment is like. Whether she has to talk about her childhood. How long this usually takes. What happens if she cries.

Which of those four do you find yourself repeating most often?

Those are the exact sentences a woman types into a phone at midnight, and she types them long before she’s ready to type anyone’s name.

The practices I keep as examples of what a psychologist site can look like all do the same dull thing. They answer the questions in writing, in the same voice the owner uses in the room.

Verdict: doesn’t hold up. You wrote the material years ago, out loud.

5) “I can’t tell whether any of it works”

The one I hear least, usually near the end of the call, and it’s the one I care about most.

Analytics is a free account and a line of code sitting in your page, and without it a Tuesday when eleven people read your fees and none of them wrote to you looks exactly like a Tuesday when nobody came at all.

48.0% of these sites run it, 42 of 47, so most of your trade is working from a feeling about whether last spring was busier than this one.

A feeling is fine until you decide to spend money. Then it becomes the most expensive object in the building, because you’ll spend on whatever you happen to be annoyed about, which is nearly always the design.

What number would you say out loud for last month’s visitors? Would you bet the price of a rebuild on being within a hundred of it?

I’ve watched owners pay for an entire rebuild on the strength of a hunch that turned out to be about one bad stretch in February.

Verdict: doesn’t hold up, and it’s the cheapest of the five to fix.

What I’d actually say to you

Your trade comes out of my audit an odd shape. First and nearly last in the same row, which is what I ended up telling a psychologist who thought his website was the reason his phone had gone quiet. The parts a template hands you for nothing are excellent, and the parts that need a person to sit down and decide something are thin.

That isn’t laziness and I have never once thought it was. You went to school for a decade to do something else entirely, and nobody in that decade mentioned a word of this to you.

But it does mean the money you’re about to spend is pointed at the wrong half of the problem. Every item on that list of five is a decision rather than a purchase, which is an awkward thing for a man who builds websites for psychologists to sit down and write out.

Which of those five did you say to yourself while you were reading? Be honest. I’ve said three of them about my own business this year.

Do this on Thursday

Email whoever built your site and ask two questions. Is analytics turned on, and can I see last month?

If the answer takes longer than a day to arrive, you’ve learned something worth more than the answer.