Don’t Fall for the New Craze in Counselling Websites

By Philip Armstrong

I have noticed an increase in websites now offering “Counsellors” in private practice web pages that they claim will increase business to your service for a price. These commercial operations are simply about making money off your back, as they do not increase your profile over and above consumers going to their sites looking for counsellors.

So, in essence, they are already competing with your business website, if you have one, for a priority listing, so why would you want to add to the coffers of your competitors? They do not actively advertise “your” service; they advertise “their” website.  The problem with this strategy is that they work from the theory of “casting the net as wide as possible”. In other words, anyone who pays and is a member of an association can receive a web page from them, whether they be a psychologist, social worker etc. “Fair enough”, you say. “At least they have standards”.

Well, it’s not that simple once you get past the marketing rhetoric. If you want to get the best bang for your buck, you need to be more vigilant in how you spend it. Is simply getting what seems to be a good web page on a site that seems to look good a win-win situation? Well, if it were a level playing field, then possibly yes, but let’s look at how the casting-a-wide-net philosophy actually works against you and creates an uneven playing field.

A counselling site that claims to help you to get more business makes this claim to all its members and these members, because they cast a wide net, come from many disciplines. How does that impact on you as a service provider? Well, let’s look at what happens when a consumer conducts a search for a Counsellor in Brisbane. For argument’s sake, two services show up, one a “Psychologist” (even though the site calls itself a counselling site) and the second a Counsellor. The psychologist in Brisbane has a big spiel about how cost-effective their service is because they have access to rebates. This acts as leverage to draw consumers to their service. On the same search, you, a “Counsellor”, come up. You (not the website owner, whom you are paying) now have to find a way of levelling the playing field in your spiel, a very difficult task if you have little or no training in marketing, a subject not covered in most counsellor training courses. 

The kicker is you are paying for the privilege of needing to try and find ways to counter other service providers’ natural advantages, service providers who are paying the same amount of money as you to appear on the same site as you and who come up on the same search result as you. If the site only advertised “Counsellors” then it would be a level playing field, however, from a commercial perspective, casting the net as wide as possible makes for more money but could be counterproductive to you as a counsellor and private service provider. Paying to put yourself in this situation may not be smart and certainly would not be considered getting the best bang for your buck.

The only advantage you may get from these essentially fancy-looking search engines is that, through numbers, they can afford to pay for a higher priority than you can for your site on other search engines such as Google. And this is not necessarily an advantage when you are thrown in the same pot as everyone else. Although an efficient use of services such as Google’s Ad Words can overcome this disadvantage at little cost in any case.

Having said all that, ACA members do not need to concern themselves with this issue, since all ACA members receive a free web page as a member benefit in any case. And to boot, the ACA website already has top billing in Google and Bing, type in ‘counselling’ to see if I am right.  And don’t forget that all ACA members’ web pages automatically feature on the “search for a counsellor” facility on our new public portal, “Mind Your Head”, which goes live in 2012, so you get twice the profile just for being a member. You get heaps more bang for your membership dollar with no added costs for further benefits. So I suppose that, in a nutshell, what I am saying is save your money for OPD or Supervision if you are an ACA member, because we will put you on an already established top-priority search engine and all for no extra charge.