Where We Started

Anna is a Registered Clinical Counsellor in Vancouver. A master's in counselling psychology, ten years working with adults and youth, and training in Internal Family Systems that goes well past the introductory level.

She already had a website. Four pages, and it looked good. This part is important because the thing that wasn't working had nothing at all to do with how it looked.

What the website didn't have was enough written on it. Someone who landed there could work out what Anna does and get a feel for whether she might be the right person, because people are good at filling in gaps. Google isn't. Neither is ChatGPT, or any of the other tools people are increasingly asking instead of searching. They can only go on what's actually written down, and there wasn't much written down about what she specializes in, who she works with, or where her counselling practice is located.

What I Found When I Went Looking

I always search for a client before I write anything. Not their industry, just their name, because I want to see what the internet already thinks about them.

When I searched Anna's name and her credential, I got a full page of results back and not one of them was her own website. Directories, a professional association listing, an insurance provider's search page. All of it living on somebody else's site.

And these are exactly the kind of website problems I love helping with. Nothing was broken. There was just a lot of room, and I could already see what to do with it.

All that training and experience, and almost none of it was doing any work for her in search yet. Her areas of focus were sitting there in a short list, waiting to be turned into something that could catch the person who knows how they feel but not what to call it. And Vancouver barely came up, which matters when you've got two offices in it.

Which is how most websites are, by the way. They get built to look good, and nobody really tells you they've also got to be readable by a machine.

What We Built

Depth instead of a pile of thin pages

Four pages with real substance on them, around 4,500 words, written in layers so the person who's never heard of IFS can find their way in alongside the person searching for it by name.

The copy came out of a detailed questionnaire, and the best lines in it are phrases real people actually use. Nobody types "holistic healing journey" into Google at eleven at night. They type what it feels like.

We also said the practical things out loud. Registered Clinical Counsellor, because that's the exact phrase people search while they're working out what their extended health will cover. Both offices and the neighbourhoods she actually practices in. And the same core facts stated the same way on every page, so any search engine or AI tool reading the website comes away with one clear answer rather than four slightly different ones.

Anna did half of it. She photographed her own spaces, built a mood board, sourced the line drawings, rewrote sections of the copy in her own words. The website sounds like her because she was in it the whole way through.

What Happened After Launch

Four days before the new website went live, I searched a number of different search terms for tracking purposes, including "registered clinical counsellor vancouver ifs" and Anna wasn't anywhere on the page. Not in the listings, not on the map, not in the AI summary at the top.

16 days after launch I’m writing this and looking up the same search terms and the same search names her. She's one of four practitioners listed in the AI overview, with her own website cited underneath as the source, and her site is on the first page of results below it.

The bit I love is how that AI overview describes her now. It calls her a Vancouver-based RCC "specializing in IFS layered with mindfulness and somatic awareness," which is a sentence built entirely out of her own website. Three weeks earlier the same tool had nothing of hers to read at all.

"I am so grateful for what you've crafted and all your wisdom in relation to cultivating my online presence. You're a wizard!"

— Anna Williams, MCP, RCC, Essentia Counselling

Why I Work This Way

I'm not a therapist. I wouldn't know the first thing about sitting with someone through the hardest parts of their life. But I know what it looks like when somebody's expertise isn't making it onto the page, and I know how to go and find out what's standing in the way before I write a single word.

And with this kind of work, being findable isn't just good for business. Someone is up late typing something into Google they'd have a hard time saying out loud, and whether they find Anna or they don't comes down to whether a search engine could make sense of her website. She's good at this. People should be able to find her.

Anna didn't just get a website she's proud to send people to. She got one the right people can actually find.