Where it works
Your town plus your specialism. Google Business Profile and the map results. The pages that answer one question properly: fees, first session, whether you work online.
Websites & SEO for therapists · UK-wide
Website design and SEO for therapists
A practice website and a local visibility system for counsellors and psychotherapists in private practice, so people already searching for help in your town find you, not only the directory you rent a listing on.
£1,050 for the 90-day visibility sprint. £2,190 for the sprint with a new practice site built alongside it. No setup fee, no lock-in, everything in your name.
Fifteen minutes, no obligation, no slide deck. I take on a maximum of 2 new practices each month, so there is time to do this properly.
What the work is for
Be foundAppear when someone in your town searches for help, not three pages later.
Be trustedCredentials, fees, privacy and safety visible before anyone has to ask.
Get contactedOne clear, low-friction way to make the first approach.
No cookies, and nothing stored on your device — just an anonymous page count. The practice sites we build carry none of it.
✱Eleven at night
Someone in your town cannot sleep
They have been putting it off for months. Tonight they finally pick up the phone and type "counsellor near me". It is the first time they have looked for help.
What they find is a directory, or a practice a few towns away whose website explains things a little more clearly than yours does. Not because that therapist is better. Google could read their pages and could not read yours.
Google cannot recommend what it does not clearly understand.
The work is unglamorous: saying plainly who you help, where you practise, what you charge and what happens on the first call, in a form a search engine can follow and a frightened person can read at midnight.
✱The honest answer
Does SEO work for therapists?
Locally, yes. Nationally, no, and anyone selling you national rankings for "therapy" is selling you a number, not a client.
Therapy search is a local behaviour. People type a town, a problem, or both: "counselling Exeter", "anxiety therapist near me", "counsellor for grief Devon". Those searches are small in volume and high in intent. The person is not browsing, they are deciding.
That cuts both ways. A handful of the right searches a month can fill a caseload, and a market can be too thin to justify the work. I check your town's demand before you pay me anything, and if it is not there I will tell you at the review.
Where it does not
Broad national terms, where directories and the NHS hold the results and always will. Blogging weekly about mental health in general. Chasing volume instead of the fifteen people near you who are actually looking.
How long it takes
Profile and listing work moves in weeks. Organic search takes months: movement around month two, a change in enquiries you can feel around month four to six. That is why the sprint is ninety days.
✱Therapist website design
What makes a good therapist website?
Seven things, in this order. Most practice sites get the photograph and the palette right and miss all seven. None of them are about how it looks.
It loads before they change their mind
Under a second on a phone on a poor connection. Hand-coded, no page builder, no plugin stack. The first approach is often made at night, in bed, on 4G.
It says who you help, in their words
"I cannot stop worrying" before "integrative CBT-informed practice". Modality matters to your supervisor. The person searching describes a feeling.
Registration and fees are visible
BACP, UKCP or NCPS on the page, not in a footer image. Your fee stated. A hidden price reads as an awkward conversation waiting to happen.
Privacy is designed in, not disclosed
No advertising pixels, no session recording, no form that quietly hands an enquiry to an ad network. A privacy notice a client can read and an ICO position that holds up.
Quick exit and crisis links
A control on every page that leaves immediately, and helpline numbers where they are needed. For someone researching abuse this is the difference between reading on and closing the tab. Try it, bottom right corner of this page. Every therapist site I build includes this.
It is readable by everyone
WCAG AA contrast, real text at a real size, keyboard navigation, works with a screen reader. A distressed reader and a dyslexic reader want the same thing: less work.
You own all of it
Domain, hosting, files, content, analytics: in your name from week one. No licence to keep paying, no platform that owns the pages, nothing held back to make leaving harder.
✱Rent or own
Counselling Directory or your own website?
Both. Keep the listing. It ranks and it carries trust. The question is whether it is your only route in, because a listing is rent and a site is an asset.
| A directory listing | Your own website | |
|---|---|---|
| What you pay | Around £245 a year for a standard Counselling Directory listing, at the time of writing. Psychology Today is billed monthly. Two listings is roughly £500 a year, every year. | £1,490 for a practice site, or £2,190 with the 90-day sprint. Then hosting, which is pennies. |
| What you get for it | A profile on a page alongside every other therapist in your postcode, ranked by rules you do not control. | A page where you are the only practitioner, saying what you choose, in the order you choose. |
| Who the search engine credits | The directory. Its authority grows with your content. | You. Every page adds to your own standing. |
| If you stop paying | You disappear from it the same week. | Nothing changes. The site is yours. |
| Enquiry data | Theirs. You see what they choose to show you. | Yours. You can count enquiries and see where they came from. |
| Quiet months | Therapists on UK practitioner forums regularly report long stretches with no contact from a paid listing. You pay the same either way. | Also possible, but the cause is measurable, and fixable. |
keep the listing, stop depending on it
The aim is not to leave the directories. It is that in a year a growing share of enquiries arrives through something you own, so a price rise or a ranking change on someone else's platform is an inconvenience rather than a bad month.
✱The system
How do I get more counselling clients?
Three phases, in this order, because trust is worth nothing if nobody finds you and being found is wasted if nobody feels safe enough to write. This is the whole of the 90-day sprint.
Be found
- Google Business Profile claimed, filled in properly and kept current
- Local listings and professional directories consistent with each other
- Pages that answer what people actually type, in their words rather than clinical ones
Be trusted
- Privacy by design: no advertising pixels, no session recording, forms that do not leak
- A quick-exit control on every page, and crisis helpline links where they are needed
- BACP, UKCP or NCPS registration, your fees and your ICO position visible rather than buried
Get contacted
- One enquiry form, short enough to finish at eleven at night
- Plain wording about what happens to what they write, and who reads it
- Crisis resources alongside the form, so nobody in danger is left waiting for a reply
Referrals, supervision networks and directories sit on top of this. None of it involves advertising to people who are not already looking for help.
✱Straight answer
Do therapists need a website?
If your caseload is full from referrals and you intend to keep it that way, then no. A directory profile is enough, and I will say so on the call.
If you want to choose who you work with, raise your fee, take fewer low-fee referrals, or stop feeling the drop when one referral source goes quiet, then you need somewhere that is yours. Almost everyone who contacts you will look you up before they write, including the people your colleagues send.
You probably do if
- You have empty hours in the week you would like filled
- Your enquiries come from one or two sources you do not control
- You are moving into a specialism and want to be known for it
- You are raising your fee and need the practice to look like the fee
- Your current site was built on a platform you cannot get out of
✱Cost
How much does a therapist website cost?
£1,490 for a practice site, £2,190 for a site plus the 90-day visibility sprint, £1,050 for the sprint alone. Fixed prices, not ranges. No setup fee and no contract longer than a month.
Months 1–3 The sprint
£1,050 · £350 × 3 Your current site is kept · no setup fee
- All three phases built and live, not a plan handed over for you to action
- A plain-English report by the 5th, and me on the other end of the email
- Everything in your accounts, in your name, from the first week
Sprint + new practice site Bundle
£2,190 · £730 × 3 Separately £2,540 · bundled saves one month's rate
A new or rebuilt practice site alongside the full sprint, across the same three months. For practices whose current site cannot carry the work: slow, unfixable, or on a platform you do not own.
Redesign credit: start with the sprint alone and change your mind later, and £300 of what you have paid counts towards the rebuild.
Book my free review Month 4 onwards £350 /month
Optional · locked for as long as you stay
If the day-90 data says it is working, ongoing work continues at the same rate. Months four to twelve are where the compounding happens, so there is no cut-down tier: continuity is rewarded by locking your rate, never by giving you less attention.
Month to month, 30 days' notice, and you can pause up to two months a year without losing your rate. A site on its own needs no retainer at all. A Care Plan is £59 a month if you want one.
Day-90 checkpoint
At the end of the sprint we look at the enquiry data together.
Not impressions, not a visibility score. How many people found you and got in touch. If the data says this is not working for your market, I will say so before you do, and we stop. You keep the site and everything built around it.
Why not £400
The cheaper end of this market
Therapist website packages start around £400 as a one-off, or £25 a month on a subscription. That buys a template, your text dropped into it, and a site that is live. If your need is "I have nothing online", it is a reasonable buy and I will tell you so.
What it does not buy is the thing that produces enquiries: someone doing the local search work, week after week, and measuring what came back.
What £2,190 buys instead
- A hand-coded site, not a template: no page builder, no plugins, sub-second on mobile
- Ninety days of actual local SEO: profile, listings, pages, measurement
- Privacy by design and WCAG AA built in, quick exit and crisis links on every page
- The founder doing the work: no account manager, no junior, no outsourcing
- A day-90 checkpoint against measured enquiries, including the honest "stop" answer
You own everything either way. That is the floor, not the offer. The offer is a system that is measured.
✱Ethics
Is it ethical for therapists to advertise?
Your professional body permits accurate, non-exploitative promotion of your practice. Check your own framework for the wording. Being findable is not the ethical question. How you are found is.
No pressure tactics
No pop-ups, no countdown timers, no adverts following someone around the internet after they read a counselling page. For this audience that is not persuasive, it is frightening.
No invasive tracking
No advertising pixels, no session recording, no third-party script watching a vulnerable person read your trauma page. Measurement is privacy-respecting, or it is not done.
No claims you cannot stand behind
Outcomes are not promised, testimonials are not solicited from current clients, and nothing on the page implies a result you cannot evidence. Your registration keeps you to that. So do I.
I will not work for your competitor
I won't run SEO for two practices competing for the same clients in the same local market. It applies to the SEO work, for as long as we work together, and you are told plainly if a neighbouring enquiry arrives.
Your records are none of my business
I never need access to client records and will never ask. Every access I hold is listed in writing and removed on request. This is guidance on the technical side, not legal advice about your practice.
You work with me, not a team
No account manager, no outsourcing, no one else reading the emails you send about your practice. I know what BACP, UKCP and NCPS registration means and how each expects you to advertise.
✱Proof
A Devon counselling practice, built this way
Tash Thomas-Still Counselling: built from scratch, privacy-first, and still run by me. It is the reference site for everything described above.
Tash Thomas-Still Counselling
Built: a hand-coded practice site with a quick-exit control, crisis links, no third-party tracking, a privacy notice written in plain English and an enquiry form configured so nothing is shared with advertising networks.
tashcounselling.co.uk · Core Web Vitals 95+
Third-party trackers
0
No advertising pixels, no session recording Core Web Vitals
95+
Measured on mobile, where the enquiry starts "People mention they found me on Google now, rather than being passed my name."
✱Guarantees
What I guarantee on a sprint
01Deliverables scheduled in writing
Before month one starts you have a dated list of what is built in each of the three months, so you can see whether I am keeping to it. Your report arrives by the 5th and I answer email within 24 hours on working days.
02Pause when your practice needs it
Illness, a full caseload, a quiet season: pause up to two months a year without losing your rate or your place.
03Clean exit, full handover
Accounts, content, files and a written handover document. My access is removed on request, and nothing is held back to make leaving harder.
04Diagnostic honesty, twice
Once at the free review, if I do not think I can move the needle for your market, before you have paid anything. Again at day 90, against measured enquiries.
Never
A ranking promise, or your visitors in an advertising pixel
Nobody controls Google, so no position and no page one is ever promised here. And no tracking follows someone after they leave your site. No marketing gain is worth a client feeling watched.
✱Questions
Questions therapists ask me
The ones that come up on almost every first call. If yours is not here, ask me and I will answer it in writing.
Do therapists have websites?
Most established private practices do, and a good number of them are a directory profile plus a one-page template that has not been touched in three years. Having a website and being findable through it are two different things. If yours does not appear when someone in your town searches, it is closer to a business card than a source of enquiries.
Is Counselling Directory any good?
It is worth having and it is not enough on its own. It ranks well, it carries trust with the public, and for some practitioners it produces steady enquiries. Others report long stretches with nothing. The risk is not the listing, it is depending on it, because you cannot change how you are ranked on it and you do not keep anything if you stop paying.
How much does it cost to be on the Counselling Directory?
A standard listing is around £245 a year at the time of writing, and rates change, so check the current price before you budget. Psychology Today is billed monthly at a similar annual order of magnitude. Both are rent: useful rent, but rent.
Which website builder is best for therapists?
If you are building it yourself, Squarespace is the least painful and produces a respectable practice site. Wix gives you more control and more ways to slow the page down. Both are fine choices. What they cannot easily give you is a page that loads in under a second on a poor mobile connection, a site with no third-party tracking on it, and a quick-exit control that works on every page. That is where a hand-coded site earns its cost.
How to attract clients as a counsellor?
In order of what actually moves enquiries for a small practice: be present and correct on Google for your town, have a site that answers what people type in their own words, make your registration and fees visible, and give people one short way to make contact. Referrals and directories sit on top of that. None of it involves advertising to people who are not already looking for help.
Is there a shortage of counsellors in the UK?
NHS talking therapies waiting lists are long while many private practitioners have room in their week, so the problem is usually distribution rather than supply. I have no defensible national figure for private-practice demand and will not invent one. What can be measured is your own market: how many people search for help in your area each month, and who they currently find.
Book my free 15-minute practice review
Fifteen minutes on the phone. I will look at how your practice appears today, tell you what your local demand looks like, and say honestly whether this is worth doing. If it is not, that is what you will hear.
Cisco Ramos
The person who answers your email
Book my free review 2 new practices a month · UK-wide