FINDING CLIENTS IN A SATURATED MARKET | EP 176

Are you looking to build your private practice website hassle-free? WordPress has you covered. For just $33 CAD per month (plus tax), get everything you need: a free domain for a year, premium themes, unlimited pages, plugins, website security, real-time backups and  performance boosters for your website. All built on an open sourced content management system. 

And if you need a hand crafting your site, WordPress’ website design services start at $675 CAD (plus tax). Simply choose a plan, template, and submit your content—or let the WordPress AI do the work. In just four business days, Happiness Engineers will deliver a 5-page website tailored to your private practice and services.

To learn more you can go to fearlesspractice.ca/website

In This Episode

• The situation in Canada right now 
• It’s often said but still true: niche 
• Splitting the niches with staff 
• Maintaining Psychology Today profiles 
• Keep up to date with AI practices 

The situation in Canada right now 

If you have been listening to my recent interview episodes with guests, you will have heard a lot of Canadian therapists pointing out one thing: the market is saturated. 

‘Over the past couple of years, our profession has tripled! Which is so great for people who are trying to find a therapist, but it can lead to some challenges when it comes to marketing your private practice.’ – Jules Smith

So, today, I wanted to share a few tips with you that I’m using myself to stand out from the crowd!

It’s often said but still true: niche 

‘Niching is so important and I feel sometimes like a broken record to always bring it up in the podcast, but it is so important!’ – Jules Smith 

Three important things happen when you niche down in your Canadian private practice:

• Clients instantly know that you’re the right fit
• Other professionals can refer to you more easily because you’re a specialist rather than a generalist 
• You can use it to tailor your marketing message 

If you want to learn more about nichings, feel free to listen to this episode of the Fearless Practice Podcast, which dives in deep!

Splitting the niches with staff 

‘Instead of standing out with all of the things that we could help with, we ended up blending in with other private practices. Now, because Halifax is a larger city, we’ve decided to have a couple of niches … not a long list anymore.’ – Jules Smith 

Instead of giving long lists about all the ways in which we can help our clients, we decided to reorganize our approach in this way: we each have three specialties, and we share two specialties. 

Now, when someone goes to our practice website’s menu, they can see exactly which therapist can help them with what, making it easy to find and decide who to reach out to. 

Maintaining Psychology Today profiles 

The next thing is to monitor and make sure your social media profiles, and especially therapy directory pages like Psychology Today, are consistently updated

Also, Psychology Today recently added HST for Canadian therapists using the platform, meaning that it costs more money to have a profile on their directory. So make sure that your Psychology Today profile is worth it to have!

‘All you need to do is log into your profile, go to the top menu bar where it says, “home, profile, clients, sessions”, and then you select clients, and you can see how many people have contacted you through Psychology Today, and then you can cross-reference that with how many of those people became clients.’ – Jules Smith 

If you want to get involved and elevate your Psychology Today profile, making it look sharp and effective, you can check out this podcast episode for the full scope of advice.

Keep up to date with AI practices

Disclaimer: I use WordPress because I love that I own my website (unlike website builders)s. If you want to learn more about this, you can listen to this episode about my journey with WordPress. 

Now, one of the things that you can do on your WordPress website is to add an LLMS.txt file. It has been designed to help AI assistants know what your website is all about. 

‘This file is designed to help AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini better understand your website, especially when they are answering questions about it.’ – Jules Smith