The problem
Read ten coaching and therapy websites and you will find the same home page ten times. Helping you live your best life. Unlock your potential. A safe, non-judgemental space. Holistic support for mind, body and spirit. Each is true of the practitioner and false to the reader, because the reader did not arrive looking for potential. They arrived at eleven at night with a specific problem: a job they cannot stay in, a flight they cannot face, a baby who does not sleep, a marriage that has gone quiet. They scanned the page for themselves and were not there.
Vague copy feels safe to write because it excludes nobody. It also convinces nobody. The fix is to be specific, page by page, in the words the client would use.
Why practitioners write it
Three reasons, all understandable. You work with a range of people and do not want to narrow it. You were trained to hold space rather than to diagnose, and a specific page feels like a promise. And the advertising rules for health-adjacent claims make you nervous about naming anything.
All three have answers. You can name several situations without excluding others. A page can describe a situation without promising an outcome. And careful, specific language is easier to keep within the rules than a vague claim about transformation.
The unit is the situation page
The website's structure is a list of situations, each with its own page, linked from the home page under a heading like Who I work with. Each page:
- Heading in the client's words. Not "Career coaching". "You are good at your job and cannot stay in it." Not "Anxiety". "Anxious about a flight, a speech or an exam that is already in the diary."
- Who this is for. Two or three sentences describing the person, the point they are at, and what they have probably already tried.
- What it feels like. Written from the inside, so the reader recognises it. This is the paragraph that gets the booking.
- How you work with it. Your approach for this situation, plainly. How many sessions is typical, what happens in the first one.
- What typically changes. Honest, without guarantees or medical claims. "Most clients tell me they..." rather than "You will...".
- Credentials relevant to this. A line, linking to the About page.
- Price and Book button for the discovery call or first session, with the intake form pre-selecting this situation.
Four to seven hundred words. Three pages to begin with, for the situations you see most, then one a month.
Examples across the practice types
A life coach: career change at forty; life after divorce; the loss of direction that arrives when the children leave. A business coach: first hires; scaling past the founder; a sales problem the owner has been avoiding. A career counsellor: redundancy at fifty; a graduate choosing; a return to work after a long gap. A hypnotherapist: the fear of flying, the exam, the habit, each written within the rules. A sleep consultant: the four-month regression; the toddler who will not go down; the parent back at work on no sleep. A doula: a first birth; a birth after a difficult one; the postnatal weeks with no family nearby.
Each is a search someone is typing tonight. Each is a page the generic site does not have.
Finding the words
The client's words are in your intake forms, your discovery call notes and your inbox. Read the last twenty enquiries and write down how people described their situation before you reframed it. Those phrases are the headings. If you have no intake data yet, ask three recent clients how they would have searched for you.
The home page after the fix
The home page stops trying to describe everyone. One sentence on who you are, one on how you work, then the list of situations with a line each, then prices, credentials and the Book button. The list does the describing. A reader finds their own line and clicks; the vague copy that used to lose them is gone.
Keeping it within the rules
Specific does not mean clinical. Describe the situation the client is in and what you help them work on; do not name a diagnosis you are not qualified to treat, do not promise an outcome, and do not use testimonials for health outcomes where your country or professional body restricts them. A situation page written this way is more defensible than a home page promising transformation, because it claims less and says more.
Where this sits
Situation pages in the client's words are the first of the six must-haves on our coaching practice website page, and the first thing we rebuild on a site that describes nobody. The reader is looking for their own situation; the site's job is to have a page with it on.