Does your website brand you or attract clients?
For providers of intangible services -- such as psychotherapy, counseling, intuitive readings, and coaching -- and especially for those on a shoe string budget, a website must serve two primary functions. It must connect with potential clients in an emotionally compelling way, and it must establish our own authority as trustworthy professionals.
Put another way: websites are useless if they don't help you get clients and /or create your professional brand.
What I see, however, is that most of the time solopreneur professionals sacrifice one for the other. Either your content is nearly all about persuading readers that they need your services, or your content is primarily about your depth of experience and training.
My biased experience is that what works best for most clinical and advising professionals are websites that comfortably do both, usually in an 80 /20 split, client attracting to branding.
But once in a while a therapist or psychic comes to me to have a website built who has that ratio the other way around -- they primarily want to brand themselves and aren't as interested in the kind of SEO or marketing message content that will help convent visitors into clients. This list below can help you formulate the content for a professional branding website.
Recommended for a professional brand websites:
1. Have a logo professionally created for you.
2. Use that logo on every piece of marketing you produce - including your website, your social media pages, and your email signature.
3. Use your homepage to tell a compelling story about you as a professional. Write it in a storyteller style, create some emotional empathy and connection with anticipated readers.
4. Use your about page to enumerate your credentials, giving short, relevant, personal, and meaningful anecdotes about each degree and work place cited.
5. Provide other pages to focus on an special experience that helps build your brand identity. For example if your career centers around couples counseling or communication with the deceased, provide a page with facts and figures about that field of professional work to help deepen your own expertise.
6. If you have published peer reviewed articles or books / ebooks, have a page for those with titles, abstracts, and links to where they can be found online.
7. Set up a media page with a general type of press release to encourage getting interviewed on topics you specify. If you do public speaking, provide an event calendar on this page or as a subpage.