Your Credentials: How Important are They From Your Potential Client’s Perspective?
In my recent newsletter article, Five Mistakes Therapists Make with Their Websites I wrote the following:
Mistake #3 The content of your site is focused on you, as the counselor or healer.
If a visitor lands at your site and they immediately see information
about you, your credentials and your therapy or healing techniques, you
are off to a bad start. Most clients are pretty self-focused when they
land at a website. They are not that interested in your credentials and
techniques, as disappointing as that might seem.I like to compare it to when you take your car to get repaired. Most of
us don’t care about the credentials of who did the repairs nor the
methods used to repair it. If you focus most of your site on the client
and save the information about yourself for your "About You" page, you
will get a better response.
One of my newsletter subscribers took issue with the point I made above. He wrote to tell me that he felt credentials were very important and that he personally focused on credentials first and foremost when hiring a professional. Below is my response to him.
I didn’t say credentials are not important from a professional point of view.
It’s just not the first thing *most* people are concerned with. If you give them your credentials and not much else to go on, your site is not going to be very compelling to most of them.
Of course there are always exceptions…
And for some people, once they are convinced that you can help them, some of them will look at credentials. But many will never look or ask about this. And that is why you can put most of them on your "About" page.
When was the last time a client asked you when they called, "What are your credentials?" It simply doesn’t happen very often.
Most people assume that practicing professionals are credentialed, whether they are or not. Not a good thing, but that is the way it is.
To add to the above, I think that we as therapists and healing professionals take our training very seriously–and we should. We have invested a lot of time and money into it and have seen the great results our clients have experienced because of it.
However, the bottom line is, it is less important to your potential clients, especially when your credentials sound the same as everyone else’s. Clarify the problems you help solve and the benefits you provide first, and then discuss your credentials in the context of how they may be of benefit to the client.
