Why Is Your About Page One of Your Most Important SEO Assets as a Therapist?
In every other trade the about page is a formality nobody reads. Here it is the product. A client is deciding whether they could sit in a room with this particular person and talk. That decision gets made on the about page rather than anywhere else on the site.
They Are Choosing A Person
The approach matters far less to most clients than whether they think they could talk to this person. Everything else on a therapy website supports that judgement. The about page is where it is made.
Why the method comes second. They cannot assess it.
Somebody with no training has no way of choosing between two approaches on their merits. What they can assess, instantly and confidently, is whether a person seems like somebody they could say difficult things to.
What the searches show about this. People look for a kind of person.
Our own keyword research in August 2026 found 105 terms describing a practitioner's faith, community, language or sex, carrying 5,530 searches a month. Not the method. The person.
How specific those searches get. Very.
The same research found faith based practitioner terms at 320 searches a month each at competitive difficulty scores of roughly 25 and 13. One named community ran at 140. A practitioner's sex ran at 140 at a difficulty score of roughly 8. Small individually. Unambiguous about what is being chosen.
What that means for the page. The person is the subject.
Not the qualifications, which come later. Not the theory either. The page has to let somebody form an impression of a human being, which is a different writing job from any other page on the site.
And It Is Usually Written As A CV
Training first, then accreditations, then previous roles, then theoretical orientation. That is the order on most therapy about pages and it is the order a colleague would want.
Why practitioners write it that way. It is the only model they have seen.
It is how the profession describes itself, how supervision applications are written and how every other practitioner's page reads. Nobody chose this format. It was inherited.
What it does to an anxious reader. Nothing they need.
They arrive wanting to know whether this person will make them feel stupid. They get a placement history. The page is not badly written. It is written for the wrong reader.
Why the order matters more than the content. Most people stop early.
The material a client actually wants is frequently on the page already, sitting in the fourth paragraph underneath three that read like an application form. Moving it is often the whole rewrite.
What the credentials are still for. Confirming a decision, not making one.
They matter enormously once somebody has decided they like the sound of a practitioner. The accreditation material covers how to write them. They just do not belong at the top of this particular page.
What A Client Actually Wants To Know
Whether they will be judged. Whether this person has worked with people like them. What the room and the conversation are actually like. And whether they have to explain everything at once.
Which of those appears on most about pages. None of them.
They are not difficult questions and they are not intrusive ones. They are simply never asked, because a page written as a professional summary has no natural place to put them.
What the data says about the demand for them. There is none.
Our own keyword research in August 2026 returned nothing at all for what happens in a first session and nothing for having to talk about everything. Not a thin seam. No terms.
Why the absence is the finding rather than a disappointment. It changes how the page is judged.
Content with no search volume behind it cannot be justified by traffic and has to be justified by what it does to somebody already reading. That is a conversion argument. On this page it is the correct one.
Why nobody searches for it. They do not know it is answerable.
People search for things they expect to find. Nobody types a question they assume no website would answer. That is exactly why answering it is worth so much. Block nine explains how the page still earns its rankings.
Describing How You Actually Work
Translating a way of working into language a client understands, without giving up any accuracy, is the single most useful piece of writing a practitioner can do. It is also the one most often skipped.
What gets published instead. The name of the approach.
A modality named and left to speak for itself, sometimes with a definition borrowed from a training body. It tells a colleague a great deal. It tells somebody choosing a therapist almost nothing.
What the translation looks like. The session, not the theory.
How long it lasts, who talks and when, whether there is anything to do between sessions, whether the practitioner asks questions or waits and how the work tends to start. All ordinary and all reassuring.
Why accuracy survives the translation. It is description, not simplification.
Describing what happens in a room is not a watered down version of the approach. It is the approach, seen from the chair the client will be sitting in.
Where the line falls. No claim about what it achieves.
Describing the work is safe ground and stating what it will do for a reader is not, which the compliance material sets out in full. The page says what happens, never what results.
What this earns beyond the about page. Everything else.
Once a practitioner has written this properly, the same translation carries into every issue page and every modality page on the site. It is written once and reused for years.
The Photograph Matters More Than Anywhere
A reader is forming an impression of approachability from a picture before they have read a word. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the part of the page practitioners most often leave until later and then never do.
What this page is not saying. Anything about how anybody looks.
No advice here concerns appearance, age or presentation and none is coming. The only thing that matters is whether the picture is of the actual practitioner.
Why no photograph is the worst option. It reads as reluctance.
A reader deciding whether they could talk to somebody, faced with a page that will not show them who that somebody is, draws a conclusion. It is rarely the intended one.
Why a stock image is worse still. It is a stranger.
Somebody who arrives at a first appointment and finds a different person than the one on the website has been told something about the practice before a word is spoken.
What an ordinary photograph achieves. Enough.
A clear, current picture of the practitioner does the whole job. It does not need to be a studio portrait and it does not need to be recent enough to be flattering. It needs to be them.
How Much To Disclose
Some practitioners say why they came to this work. Some deliberately do not. Both positions are held thoughtfully by people who have considered them carefully. We take no view on which is right.
What disclosure can do. Shorten the distance.
A reader who learns something about why somebody does this work has a person in front of them rather than a professional. For some clients that is the moment they decide to make contact.
What it can also do. Shape the work before it starts.
Practitioners who withhold it generally do so for reasons about the therapy rather than about the website. Those reasons do not stop applying because a marketing argument exists.
Why we will not push either way. It is not a marketing decision.
This is a clinical and personal judgement and it belongs to the practitioner and their supervisor. Nothing we recommend on any page in this cluster asks anybody to disclose anything about themselves.
What works without any disclosure at all. Warmth in the ordinary material.
A practitioner who says nothing personal can still be recognisably human in how they describe the room, the first session and what they are like to talk to. That is available to everybody and it is usually enough.
Who You Work With And Who You Do Not
Saying who a practitioner works with is ordinary. Saying what they do not take is unusual. It is both better practice and better marketing at the same time.
Why the second half is left off. It feels like turning down work.
A practitioner building a caseload is reluctant to publish a limit. The instinct is understandable and it produces a page that attracts enquiries the practice was always going to decline.
What those enquiries actually cost. Unpaid hours.
Every one has to be read, considered and answered with care, because the person writing it is in difficulty. A page that generates ten of those a month has created a job nobody is paying for.
What stating the limit does for the reader. It reads as competence.
Somebody who names what they are not equipped for is telling a client they will be told the truth about the work. In this sector that is reassuring rather than off putting.
How to write it without sounding closed. Point onwards.
What the practitioner does not take and where somebody might reasonably look instead, said in one sentence without naming anybody. The issue pages in this cluster carry the same rule.
The First Contact Is The Barrier
Making contact is the hardest single step for this client. Somebody can read an entire website, decide they like a practitioner and then not send the message. Most practices never learn that it happened.
Why a telephone number alone loses people. It demands a conversation.
Ringing means explaining something painful, out loud, to a stranger, without preparation. For a great many people that is the point at which the whole thing stops.
What reduces the difficulty. Writing instead of speaking.
A short written route, with the practitioner saying plainly that a brief message is enough and that nobody needs to explain everything to get started, removes the largest single obstacle on the site.
The detail almost nobody publishes. How long the wait will be.
Somebody who has just sent a message about the hardest thing in their life then sits with the silence. Stating that replies come within a working day counts as a genuine kindness. Use whatever the practice can actually hold to.
What happens next, said in advance. The whole sequence.
Whether the reply is an email or a call, whether there is a conversation before booking anything and what that conversation covers. Uncertainty is what stops people, so removing it is the work.
It Is Also A Ranking Asset
Block three said the most useful content on this page has no search demand behind it. That is true and it is not the whole picture, because the page ranks for something else entirely.
What it actually ranks for. The practitioner's own name.
Anybody who hears a recommendation, sees a directory listing or is given a name by a doctor searches that name next. The about page is what they find. If it is thin the enquiry weakens.
What else it carries. The attribute connections.
Faith, language, community, sex and location all sit naturally on this page. Per block one, our own keyword research in August 2026 found 105 terms of that kind carrying 5,530 searches a month, several at low competitive difficulty.
How the two jobs divide. One brings people, one keeps them.
The name and the attributes bring somebody to the page. The reassurance, which nobody searches for, is what stops them leaving again. Judging the page on either measure alone will get it rewritten wrongly.
Why this matters for reporting. Traffic understates it.
An about page with modest visits can be the most valuable page on the site, because almost everybody who reaches it is already close to deciding. Volume was never the point here.
What The Page Has To Contain
Seven things, in roughly this order. Who they are, how they work described plainly, who they work with, training and registration, the fee or a link to it, what a first session involves and how to make contact.
Why the order is nearly the whole job. The reader is deciding as they go.
Each item answers the question the previous one raised. Reversing it puts the credentials in front of somebody who has not yet decided they want to know.
The item most often missing. The fee.
Our own keyword research in August 2026 found 24 terms asking what therapy costs, carrying 5,140 searches a month, with the head term at a competitive difficulty score of roughly 14. Somebody working out whether they can afford help will not enquire to find out.
What omitting it actually does. Moves the question, not away.
It arrives as an email the practitioner answers for nothing, from somebody who then discovers the answer was never going to work for them. Publishing it filters properly and costs nobody anything.
What must not appear. Any claim about results.
No statement about what therapy will achieve, no number of sessions and nothing about outcomes. That rule holds on this page as on every other in the cluster. None of the seven items above requires breaking it.
How We Target It
Three things. The third is the one most agencies leave out because it does not appear in a rankings report.
The name, treated as a search term. Because it is one.
The practitioner's name, consistently written, on the page, in the page title and matching whatever appears on any register or listing. Somebody checking a name should find the practice first.
The attribute and specialism connections. Where they are genuine.
Language, community, faith and location, stated only where they are true of the practitioner, connected to the pages for the presentations they work with. Never claimed to widen a net.
First contacts, not page views. The only measure that means anything.
Messages, calls and booked first sessions, counted and reported. A page that lost visits and gained enquiries improved. A report showing only traffic would record the opposite.
Where the rest is explained. The connected pages.
The credentials this page refers to are covered in BACP and UKCP accreditation and SEO, the reason this page carries so much weight instead of client accounts is in client testimonials and therapy SEO and the highest volume presentation in the cluster is anxiety therapist SEO. Our approach is on the SEO for therapists page and the series in our SEO guides for therapists.
A person.
Not a CV.
The page reordered so the reader meets somebody before they meet a qualification, the approach translated into what happens in a session, the fee published, the contact route made easy to use, with first contacts reported rather than page views.
What is included every month:
One monthly rate covering everything listed above. No setup fee. Nothing billed separately.
Every guide.
One profession.
The compliance position, accreditation and registration, testimonials handled properly, the issue and modality pages, online delivery, corporate work, private client strategy and the comparison with health services, directories and platforms.
