Start with what a directory does well
Counselling Directory, Psychology Today and the BACP register put you in front of people who are looking for a therapist today. That is genuinely valuable, and it is hard to replicate. Someone who has finally decided to find help types “counsellor near me” into Google, lands on a directory, and starts reading.
If your listing is the reason your practice is running, keep it. Nothing below is an argument for cancelling it.
Now what it can’t do
On a directory you appear beside dozens of other counsellors in the same template. Same photograph size. Same field headings. Roughly the same word count.
Which means the reader has very little to choose on. Location, price, the photograph, and whichever few sentences they get through before their attention goes. Your training, your approach, the particular thing you’re good at, and the reason you do this work at all — all of it compresses into the same small box as everyone else’s.
A directory is very good at making you findable. It is not built to make you choosable.
What tends to happen next
Something I hear often from counsellors, and see in my own behaviour when I’m choosing anyone I’m going to trust: people search the name before they make contact.
They’ve narrowed it down to two or three profiles, and now they want to know whether you’re real. So they type your name into Google. If something considered comes up, that settles it. If nothing comes up, some of them move on to the next name on the list.
I want to be careful here, because I’ve seen this claim attached to invented statistics. I don’t have a number for you. What I can say is that it’s a pattern counsellors describe to me repeatedly, and it’s worth taking seriously on those grounds alone.
You’re renting, not owning
This is the part that matters most over years rather than months. A directory listing is rented visibility. Stop paying and your presence disappears the same week, along with whatever standing you’d built up in their search results.
A website is an asset you own. It accumulates. The words you wrote three years ago are still working. If you move towns, change modality, add a specialism or put your fees up, it comes with you.
The honest conclusion
Keep the directory. Add the website. They do different jobs and they work best together:
- The directory is how people find you. It’s a shop window on a busy street.
- The website is how people choose you. It’s the conversation that happens before the first conversation.
If your directory profile is bringing you enquiries and your diary is full, you may not need anything else, and I’d say so on a call. If it’s bringing you enquiries that go quiet, or your diary swings between full and frightening, the gap is usually somewhere in that second job.