How To Attract Group Therapy Clients On Your Website

Guest Post by: Kat Love
Kat is a very talented therapist website expert! Click here to learn more about them & their work
Reach out here: kat@katlove.com 🙂

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How To Attract Group Therapy Clients On Your Website

Knowing what to put on your website isn’t easy.

If you’re offering therapy groups, it can be even more confusing. How do you attract multiple people to a single offering? How can you make the benefits of groups clear? And get them to reach out?

So whether you are running your first group or your 40th, this post will outline the absolute best practices for attracting group therapy clients on your website.

How to help visitors find groups, understand the benefits of joining a group, and encouraging visitors to reach out and take the next step in joining.

Avoid These Common Group Therapy Website Mistakes

First let’s look at a few things that are very common that you shouldn’t do. The following things are commonly done on therapist websites but should be avoided:

Don’t create and use a flyer only. While it’s ok to create an image that contains all of the information about your groups, perhaps for sharing on social media, an image is an unhelpful format for most website visitors (and for search engines too). Text that is within an image cannot be copied and pasted and cannot be read at all by search engines. So stick to typing your group’s information directly on the page.

Don’t only link to a PDF form with the information. PDFs will open in a new tab or download directly onto a website visitors computer (depending on how they’ve set up their internet browser). Don’t interrupt the flow of browsing your website by forcing visitors to open a PDF to view the basics about the group. PDFs with group info could be an optional way to get information vs. the only way.

Don’t create one mega page with a ton of groups listed. Instead, create a page for each one. That way, visitors easily see what you offer and match themselves up to what they are struggling with. Scrolling through a page that is 5 miles long and has information about many groups that aren’t speaking to them can be overwhelming. Instead think of it as creating a different room for the different types of clients. Visitors see the sign on the door and choose to enter the space that they feel resonates with them.

Don’t create a blank page that says “more info coming soon.” If you haven’t had the time to write a page for the group, simply leave it off of the website for now. “Coming soon” pages lower your credibility. If you’d like to mention upcoming groups, consider adding an announcement bar to the top of your website or create a landing page with a subscribe form so that interested visitors can sign up to get notified when a particular group is launched.

Avoiding these mistakes will already get you on the right track towards a group-client-attractive website.

First Tip: Each Group Needs Its Own Page

If you’re running 3 different types of groups, each group needs its own page on your website.

I know, I know, creating one page per group means that you have to write more, design more, and maintain more. But believe me when I say that this is by far the most effective way to approach showcasing groups on your website.

Why?

Because each visitor is trying to find the information that could solve their unique suffering and a single bullet point or paragraph on a huge page listing everything together doesn’t make it easy for visitors to find what is a fit for them.

Creating a page for every group is also beneficial for SEO, aka: search engine optimization. It turns out that just like human visitors, search engines, like google, love having a dedicated page that is specific to a topic. That way, the search engine knows to match that page with what searchers are specifically looking for.

People aren’t searching for “therapy group austin” but perhaps “dbt skills group for teens in austin,” right?

Try matching searches like the latter, not the first, by creating a page that is just for the single group someone is seeking.

Each Page Should Be Named Descriptively

On that note about search… the title of each page should include:

• The concern or skill (ex: “depression” or “DBT skills”)
• The age group (ex: “teens”)
• That it’s group therapy (ex: “group”)
• And on the page itself, add the city or indicate if it’s online

So, for example, title a page with “Teen DBT Skills Group in Austin, TX” on the page itself and in the menu, you can shorten it to “Teen DBT Skills Group”

Yes, the page title is longer this way but both humans and search engines will appreciate knowing what to expect on a page. So it’s longer, but being descriptive is also worth it.

Ensure Your Primary Website Navigation Includes Groups

Website visitors visit websites in unpredictable ways. They may arrive through a blog post that was shared on social media or they might land directly to your “about” page through a link given to them by a referral source.

So although you may have a page for each group, you’ll still want to ensure your website visitors are able to find the pages from anywhere they might land on your site.

Simple and easy-to-use navigation is the best way to let visitors know the most important information that is available on your site. To your navigation, I suggest adding a top level item called “How I Help” or “Who I Help” and within that, adding your service pages.

So say you are a therapy service specialized in anxiety for all ages. Perhaps you run three groups by age group:

1. Home
2. About
3. How I Help
   1. Child Anxiety Group
   2. Teen Anxiety Group
   3. Adult Anxiety Group
4. FAQ
5. Blog
6. Contact

Or, perhaps you are a therapist offering women’s groups. Perhaps you could organize your navigation as follows:

1. Home
2. About
3. One-To-One Therapy
   1. Depression Therapy
   2. Grief and Loss Therapy
   3. Trauma Recovery Therapy
4. Group Therapy
   1. Yoga and Mindfulness Group
   2. Assault Recovery Group
   3. Nature Walk And Talk Group
5. Blog
6. Contact

These are just a couple of examples of how to incorporate your group pages directly into your website’s navigation menu.

It’s worthwhile to put some thought into how to incorporate your group pages into your navigation as visitors may rely on it for discovering the groups you offer.

Describe Each Group and Link To Its Page On The Home Page

In addition to adding group pages to the navigation menu, each group should also be featured on your website’s home page.

Keep it simple: write a little bit about the group, let’s say 3-5 concise sentences, and then link to the group page from there.

That way, visitors who do visit the homepage will easily see what groups you offer, quickly understand how they could help them, and are able to click through to read more.

Write About The Struggles And Outcomes

Ok, so let’s jump also into what to put on the pages themselves.

Before you dive into writing about the nitty gritty of the when, where, and how, you should also speak to the struggles and outcomes of your group participants.

With your best-fit group participant in mind, grab a journal or open up a fresh document and start writing about who they are.

What are they struggling with? What keeps them up at night? What is happening in their life that makes them a good-fit for the therapy group?

And also explore what outcomes they desire. For example if you are running a group on grief, if they are struggling with a recent loss, where would they like to be? What benefit will they get from joining a therapy group? During the group? After it ends?

Your answers to these questions like these can form the start of your group therapy page. Speaking to where your best-fit client is and where they could be with the help of a group will help website visitors who fit the profile feel seen, heard, and hopeful that healing is possible for them too.

Each Group Page Should Have The Basic Group Information

Each page needs what is probably pretty obvious: the basic information about the group. When you write the page, make sure you are answering questions like the following:

1. When and where will the group meet?
2. How many sessions will they be and how long will they last?
3. How many other members will be in the group?
4. What does the group cost?
5. Will I get the chance to speak at every session?
6. What should I expect at the first session?
7. How do I sign up for the group? And what happens when I take that step?

You may also think of further questions that need to be answered in the case of your unique therapy group. If there is anything specific to the modality that you’ll be using (ex: DBT skills groups) or a special skill that will be learned (Ex: mindfulness) then make sure to discuss how groups will be run to help participants get the results they desire.

Get Clear On Your Best Fit Client’s Awareness About Therapy Groups And Address Gaps

When most people think of therapy, they think of individual therapy. But if you are a therapist offering therapy groups, you may need to open a website visitor’s mind to the possibility of therapy being done in a group context or in fact, that it might be a better way for them to get help than doing one-on-one.

Thinking of your best fit group client: how aware are they? What do they think about group therapy? Do they know what the benefits of groups are?

Knowing where your website visitor is in their awareness will help you highlight the benefits that they need to know about in order to consider a therapy group at all.

1. Perhaps you are running DBT skills groups and incoming clients are typically referred by doctors for the specific group
2. Perhaps you are running a support group for those who have experienced a loss in their families. Maybe they’ve never done therapy before in their life and don’t realize how healing it can be to have relationships with others going through the same thing
3. Perhaps you are forming groups for kids and the parents need to be assured that the groups are safe for their kid who has experienced bullying in other social situations

Identify who you are speaking to. Discover their main concerns. Speak to them specifically. Each best fit client persona may have a different concern and uncovering what those concerns are, and in what stage of awareness they are, can help you craft the right-fit copy to speak to them.

Call Visitors To Action: Invite Them To Get Started

Perhaps one of the most important pieces of content to create on a therapist website is a call to action: words that describe how a website visitor can get started.

In the case of therapy groups, you might want visitors to fill out a form to express their interest or call you directly for a free consultation to explore if the group could be a good fit for them.

Whatever that next step is, it ought to be clearly stated throughout your group therapy page. Don’t make your website visitor have to think of what to do, guide them.

Use Visual Communication To Tie Everything Together

Website navigation and words will only get you so far.

Assuming that your website is already visually designed to communicate your unique way of helping through things like colors and fonts, the task when adding your therapy group information is to keep things consistent.

Images that are used on group therapy pages should reflect the desired outcome of the participants and also, importantly, reflect the identities of your best fit clients.

So perhaps you’ll want to find a photo of a group of diverse teens for your teen DBT skills group. Or maybe for your women’s after divorce group, you’ll need a group of middle-aged women.

Finding right-fit images including people in them can be challenging though! If that’s the case for you, consider getting symbolic. Some symbols that work well for communicating about the benefits of groups include things like: a group of chairs in a circle, many hands meeting together, a table with multiple notebooks on it, or perhaps a couple couches ready for people to sit in them.

With some thought, you can ensure the visuals help communicate about the beneficial energy of joining a group and the positive outcomes.

Email Lists: Important to Start For Groups

Having an email list, or perhaps several, can be extremely important if you run therapy groups. Unlike individual therapy:

• Groups can get full so some visitors might be interested and want to know about future groups
• A group could be running at a time that a visitor isn’t available so they may want to know about another option in the future
• Some visitors may be unsure about joining immediately but interested enough to get the heads up in the future as they keep it in mind

Having a way for visitors to sign up for an email list is a way for you to continue to have a relationship with them even beyond the time that they spend on the website.

When adding a subscription form to your website, make sure you are crystal clear on what subscribers can expect when they sign up. Is it simply a list to know when groups are running or can they expect to hear from you with content on a regular basis?

You can also generously offer a free gift like a downloadable ebook or free meditation. Doing son can make it more appealing for subscribers to get started.

Attracting Group Therapy Clients Is So Important

There’s an actual limit to how many clients a therapist can help one-on-one every day.

I love group therapy because it helps more than one person at a time and in a communal format. There are some types of healing that happen best in community and offering therapy groups is such an important way to provide that form of healing.

It’s your responsibility to get the word out about the power of therapy groups. Helping people clearly understand the benefits is a gift to them.

Ensuring each type of group has its own page helps visitors identify with the one that fits them. If they can easily find it through the navigation or from the home page, it won’t matter where they start their visit on your website, they’ll always be able to find information about the groups no matter what.

Once they are on a page, they’ll have all the basic questions answered and more. Seeing their struggles and also their desired results on the page helps them know that you “get them” – perhaps in a way that no one else can.

If they aren’t aware of all of the great things that groups can do, helping raise their awareness about the many benefits can help consider joining a group. And tying it all together with some visual levels of communication can help too.

Hopefully the tips in this article help you put together an awesome way for group therapy clients to land on your site, discover your groups, and get started.