When Your Website Doesn't Sound Like You
Your website says things you'd never say out loud, and clients notice before you do.
Your website says things you'd never say out loud, and clients notice before you do.
Your homepage is misfiring - and the clients who would book fastest are scrolling straight past it, because nothing they read sounds like the person they need.
Your homepage says you're passionate about client wellbeing. Read it aloud now, to the kettle, to the dog, to whoever's nearest.
Notice how it lands. It lands like a phrase off a jar of hand cream.
You have never said this sentence to a client's face. You've said other things, truer things, usually while writing up notes at half nine at night.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
If you wouldn't say it in the room, it has no business on the homepage.
Word of mouth built your client list, brick by brick, over years you can practically date by haircut. You know exactly which regular sent you the last three new faces, and could probably guess the fourth.
Your website has never been introduced to any of them. It's like the in-law who turns up at Christmas having heard nothing about anyone.
Your real referral pattern already tells you who you're writing for. Most sites are written for a stranger who was never coming anyway.
UK physiotherapy practice owners take home around £52,596 a year, running practices that turn over anywhere from £35,000 to £300,000 or more. Somewhere inside that spread sits a website still using the phrase 'personalised treatment protocols', written by nobody at all.
Meanwhile you're eating lunch standing at the sink, because sitting down felt like an admin task you hadn't scheduled.
Your turnover doesn't care how the copy sounds. Your next client, reading it at ten at night, absolutely does.
Here's a test for this week, and it costs nothing. Read your About page aloud to the person who cuts your hair.
If they ask who wrote it, that's your answer.
You want them to say, without thinking, 'yes, that's you, stop wriggling.'
A website that sounds like you survives being read aloud to a client who already knows your voice better than your web developer ever will.
Most web copy fails this test before the kettle's even boiled.
Keeping a website sounding like you takes proper ongoing attention. It's rather like a fish tank. One good clean at Christmas won't see it through to Easter.
Handing the job to someone else is a real option, and often the sensible one.
But they have to meet you properly, sat across a table, hearing how you talk about your work. Words written without meeting you first read like they were written without meeting you first, no matter how tidy the logo looks underneath them.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
A fish tank cleaned once a year isn't a fish tank. It's a display case.
Clients ring up repeating phrases straight off your services page, word for word, like they've learned a poem for assembly.
You take this as proof the website's working. It's proof of something, but not that.
It's proof they're being polite, the way you'd compliment a casserole you had no intention of finishing. Clients quoting your copy back at you isn't the same as clients recognising themselves in it, and the second one is the only one worth having.
You wrote your 'meet the team' page in 2019, in a rare burst of confidence, probably after a good cup of coffee. Nobody's touched it since.
Check the staff photo against who's in the building this week.
Two of them have left. One of them got married and changed her name. Your website is still introducing clients to people who no longer work there, which is an odd way to build trust before anyone's even walked in.
The clinic down the road has a website that reads like a hostage note translated from Swedish, all noun and no warmth.
Yours doesn't need to sound like a brochure to sound professional.
It needs to sound like the person clients already trust once they're sitting in the room with you. That's the whole job. Sounding professional and sounding like yourself were never in competition, whatever the brochure people told you.
Professional was never the opposite of yourself. Someone just told you it was.
Get a website that sounds like the person clients already trust in the room. Make your website sound like you
≡