Therapists, Word of Mouth Was My Alibi Too

For about four years I told people my business ran on word of mouth.

It sounded modest. What it meant was that I had no idea where my work came from, and I was selling websites at the time, plenty of them to therapists I was cheerfully telling to keep an eye on their visitors.

Nobody ever called me on it. I’d have gone red if they had.

I think about that every time I go back through the therapy practices I audited, because therapists say the sentence I used to say, and in their case it’s often true. A doctor, a friend, an old client, a directory listing.

So the website is a formality. Right up until the quiet month.

The referral checks you out anyway

I’ve had this argument with a family doctor who was completely certain of himself, and he was wrong in a way that cost the people he was referring.

A recommendation doesn’t walk into your office by itself. He writes your name on a card, and then the woman holding that card sits in her car and types the name into her phone before she does anything else with it.

Whatever loads on that screen decides whether the recommendation survives the drive home.

So the clients you’re sure arrived by word of mouth came through your website on the way, most of them, and you weren’t watching the door when they did.

How many people saw your name last month and never got as far as your voicemail?

The month nobody can explain

You’ve had one. Six weeks where the calendar thins out and then fills back up, and afterwards the reason is the season, or the news, or the school holidays.

Do you know what caused yours, or do you have a story about what caused it?

Those aren’t the same thing, and only one of them is worth anything to you next spring.

47.8% of the therapy websites I audited are running analytics, and it’s the softest showing this trade has anywhere. Psychologists, who do work close enough that clients mix the two up, come out above them on it. Interior designers come out below, and so do accountants, and so do hair salons.

58% of small business sites have it switched on, so the bar being missed here is sitting on the floor.

The objection I got wrong the first time

A counsellor pushed back on me about this years ago and I fumbled the answer, because I thought she was being difficult and she wasn’t.

She thought I was asking her to keep records on the people who read her site. Given what she does for a living, that’s not a silly thing to worry about.

Analytics came down to a single yes or no on every site I opened, and what decides it is small: a page either loads a bit of code that files a note when a stranger arrives, or it carries nothing at all.

The note says a page, a time, and where the person was before they landed. It doesn’t say who.

She’s still a client. She still asks me every couple of years whether it’s collecting more than I said it does, and I like her more for asking.

What would you want to know about the person who reads your fees page twice on a Sunday and never writes to you?

Two quiet months that look identical

Say the calendar goes thin in October. Two completely different things could have happened.

Either fewer people found you, or the same crowd found you and fewer of them wrote to you.

The repair for the first one has nothing in common with the repair for the second. One is about being findable. The other is about what your page does with a person once she’s standing on it.

Guess wrong and you spend the winter fixing the part that was already working. A therapist once asked me to price a rebuild because her site felt wrong on phones, and I wouldn’t take the job, because phones were the one thing her practice already had sorted.

The man who read the whole page

He’s forty-one. He’s been putting this off since a bad Tuesday in August, and tonight he’s on the sofa with the telly on and his phone about six inches from his face.

He finds you, and he reads the page you wrote about anxiety. All of it, which is more than he gave the two tabs before yours.

Then he puts the phone face down and goes to bed. He’ll ring in the morning. He won’t.

You’ll never learn his name and you’re not owed it. What you’re also never told is that a stranger came, stayed four minutes on that one page, and left without saying a word to anyone.

Now count him. If forty of him read that page last month, the page has a problem you could fix on a Sunday. If four of him read it, nobody can find you, which is a different bill entirely.

Same quiet October either way, and from where you’re sitting they look exactly alike.

A therapy client isn’t a haircut, either. Someone who starts with you in September can still be in your calendar the following summer, so one man talking himself out of an email at eleven at night is an expensive evening for a practice, and nowhere in your building does that evening get written down.

Ten of him across a year would change the shape of your whole week. Would you know? You’d have a feeling about the autumn, and the feeling would be wrong in a direction you couldn’t name.

What the counting is actually worth

Not the dashboard. I’ve watched owners fall in love with the dashboard and it does nothing for them.

What it buys you is the ability to have an argument with a person like me and win it.

When the next redesign gets quoted at you in the spring, what will you have to push back with apart from your own taste in photographs?

I turn up with an opinion about your homepage. Without the counting, we’re two people with feelings about a photograph. With it, you can tell me that eleven people read your fees page last week and none of them went any further, and now we’re both looking at the same problem instead of the same paint.

I keep expecting to find out I’ve got this trade wrong, and it hasn’t happened yet. If you’d rather check the numbers than take my word, the explorer at the foot of my report does it: set the industry box to Therapists, leave the city box on all cities, and the trade rolls up into one card with a sample size beside every rate. That card counts 4,012 practices sampled and 3,229 websites checked, which is too big a pile for one bad afternoon in one town to shift.

None of which makes therapists bad at websites. The trade sits at 74 out of 100 on my industry table, comfortably in the better half, which is what makes this one gap so irritating to look at.

Good sites. Nobody home at the back counting.

Veterinary practices have the arrangement upside down. They count beautifully and then nobody ever holds the phone.

What I’d do about it this week

Whoever set your site up can switch it on before lunch. It isn’t a project and it doesn’t photograph well, which is most of the reason it never gets bought.

Switching it on is one job, and having someone in your building who can still open the account a year later is a different one.

Then leave it alone. The first month tells you nothing and will tempt you to draw conclusions from four visits, and the third month is the one that pays for the exercise.

After that, look at it once a month for ten minutes. Not Monday mornings, not a report, not a subscription to anything.

Ten minutes a month is about the size of everything else your website will ask of you too.

Is ten minutes a month worse than another winter of not knowing which half of the year was your fault?

Every therapy website I build has the counting turned on before a single photograph goes near it, and it’s the cheapest line on the whole job.

If you’d sooner I looked first, send me the address and I’ll tell you what’s on your site and what’s missing from it.

Say it again in October

So the next time a colleague asks how people find you, and word of mouth comes out of your mouth the way it used to come out of mine, stop for a second before you say it.

Do you know that? Or is it the only sentence you’ve got?

Mine was true about a third of the time, and I couldn’t have told you which third, and I said it with a straight face at networking events for four years.

Switch the counting on this week. Then say it again in October, and mean it.