Most professional websites can show their work. A landscaper photographs the finished garden. An architect posts the building. A software company records the product doing the thing it promises to do.
Therapy has no equivalent. The work happens in a room with one other person in it, it is confidential by definition, and in most Canadian jurisdictions the therapist is not permitted to publish what clients say about it afterward. Ontario's College of Registered Psychotherapists treats using a client testimonial in advertising as professional misconduct, and that includes star ratings and community voting awards, not just written quotes (CRPO Standard 6.2).
So a therapist's website is left in an unusual position. It has to help someone make a genuinely consequential decision, without being able to show the work or quote anyone who has experienced it.
What it has instead is the therapist.
The question a prospective client is actually asking
Someone comparing accountants can compare fees and credentials and be reasonably confident they are comparing the right things. Someone looking for a therapist is trying to answer something less tractable: whether they can imagine sitting across from this particular person and saying things they may not have said to anyone.
Credentials do not answer that. Neither does a list of modalities. A photograph gets closer, because faces carry information, but a photograph is a single frozen moment that has usually been chosen precisely because it is flattering.
Video is the only element on a therapist website that shows the therapist behaving like a person: how quickly they speak, whether they fill silences or sit in them, whether "warm" means chatty or means calm, how they explain an idea when they are not writing it down first.
None of that predicts therapeutic outcome. It is not meant to. It gives someone enough of a sense of you to decide whether to take one more step, which is the only decision your website is actually asking them to make.
A real example
Alex Gosselin is a Toronto-based Registered Social Worker and psychotherapist. Her About page gives real space to her perspective and background rather than compressing it into a credentials block, and it carries an in-person profile video.
I produced that video.
I am pointing at it because it is a concrete example of the format rather than because I can tell you what it did to her inquiry volume. I have not measured that, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed a clean number for it. What I can describe is the shape of the thing: it was filmed in person, in a real space, with Alex talking rather than presenting.
That distinction is most of the craft. A prospective client reading her page can move from her written description of how she works to hearing her actually work through an idea out loud. The written and spoken versions of a good therapist tend to be recognisably the same person, and seeing that consistency is reassuring in a way that is hard to manufacture.
Where most therapist videos go wrong
The camera is rarely the problem. The script is.
When someone memorises a paragraph and delivers it to a lens, they stop sounding like themselves at exactly the moment the video exists to show what they sound like. You can hear the recitation. Most people can, even when they could not tell you why the video felt off.
The other common failures are more specific:
- Opening with a credential list. Nobody chooses a therapist from an audio CV, and it is the least distinctive thirty seconds you could possibly lead with.
- Language nobody uses out loud. "I provide a safe, non-judgmental space for clients to explore their authentic selves" is a sentence written to be read, not said.
- Running five or six minutes. A profile video that leaves someone wanting slightly more is doing its job.
- Music doing emotional work the therapist should be doing.
- Anything that edges toward promising a result, which is both bad video and, in Ontario, a regulatory problem.
The alternative is not a better script. It is fewer scripts. Decide on three or four things you want to get across, then talk about them. Retakes are cheap. Sounding like a person is not something you can edit in afterwards.
What to actually talk about
Four things, in roughly this order, will carry a 60 to 120 second video.
Who tends to end up in your practice. Not everyone you are qualified to see. The people who actually find their way to you. "Adults who look like they are managing well from the outside and feel overwhelmed underneath it" tells a listener more than fourteen listed specialties, because it lets the right person recognise themselves.
What is usually going on for them. In ordinary language. You are helping someone work out whether they are in approximately the right place.
What working with you is like. Therapists tend to retreat into acronyms here. CBT, EFT, ACT, EMDR and somatic work are all meaningful to colleagues and close to meaningless to someone who has never had a session. Describe what happens, how you tend to work, what a first meeting feels like.
What to do next. One clear thing. A consultation, an email, a form. It should sound like an invitation rather than a close.
Sixty to 120 seconds is a working recommendation, not a rule anyone at Google or elsewhere has published. Educational videos can obviously run longer. A profile video is not the place to explain your entire orientation.
When a phone is enough, and when it is not
A recent phone, a window, a quiet room and clean audio will produce a genuinely usable profile video. Sound matters considerably more than resolution here. Viewers forgive a soft image and will not forgive audio they have to strain through.
Professional production buys lighting, sound, composition, editing and location. In my experience the most underrated thing it buys is direction, meaning someone whose job is to ask you questions and keep you talking until you forget the camera is running. "Stand there and say this" produces stiff video regardless of what it was shot on. A good interviewer produces usable material from people who were certain they would be terrible on camera.
The teleprompter in that photo deserves a caveat, since I have just spent several paragraphs arguing against scripts. Prompters are useful for a specific kind of person: someone who is articulate in conversation and goes completely blank the moment a lens is pointed at them. For everyone else they tend to make things worse, because reading and talking use visibly different parts of the face. The eyes track. The rhythm flattens into sentences rather than thoughts.
If you use one, put bullet points on it rather than full sentences. It should function as a reminder of what comes next, not as a script to be performed. The moment someone starts reading, you can see it, and so can the person deciding whether to book with you.
The case for hiring someone gets stronger when the rest of the site is already deliberate about how it looks, because a visibly rougher video becomes the thing people notice.
Where to put it
The About page is the obvious home, since anyone who has navigated there is already trying to work out who you are. That is also where it does the most good, because it converts a page people skim into a page people spend time on.
A homepage placement works when you are the practice and the page is not already busy. Service pages can carry a shorter video when you genuinely have something to add beyond what the copy says, which is less often than people assume. A short video on a consultation or contact page can take some of the edge off the moment where someone has to decide to actually reach out.
Worth knowing: several therapy directories, Psychology Today among them, support video on profiles. A video produced for your own site frequently has a second life there, which improves the economics of producing one properly.
On SEO, briefly
Video is not a ranking shortcut. Google's current guidance on optimising for its generative AI features points at the same fundamentals it always has, accessible pages and useful original content, with no special mechanism for video (Google Search Central). If you publish substantial standalone video content there is ordinary video SEO to be done, but that is a different project from a profile video.
The honest argument for video is that it makes the page better for the person on it. That is a sufficient argument, and it does not require anyone to pretend there is a hidden ranking benefit.
Staying inside the rules
Treat a profile video as professional public communication, because that is what it is. In Ontario the advertising standard applies to it the same way it applies to everything else: accurate, verifiable, no testimonials, no promised outcomes, no superlatives.
One nuance worth knowing, because therapists are often told a flatly incorrect version of it. CRPO's position is that registrants must not solicit testimonials or use them in advertising. It does not prevent clients or others from independently reviewing you on third-party sites, provided you did not ask for the review and do not influence which ones appear (CRPO on testimonials and endorsements). The prohibition is on soliciting and publishing, not on the existence of reviews in the world.
Rules differ by profession and province. Confirm what applies to your own designation rather than assuming Ontario's psychotherapy rules generalise.
There is also a quieter boundary question underneath all of this, and it deserves saying plainly: showing more of your professional personality does not require making your private life into content. You do not need to film your family, disclose things you would rather not, or perform vulnerability because someone told you authenticity converts. A profile video can be entirely professional and still feel like a person.
Do you need one?
No. Plenty of good therapist websites do not have video, and a video will not rescue a site that has not made clear who the therapist helps.
But there are not many fields where the personality and interpersonal style of the practitioner matter this much to whether the service works at all. A photograph shows someone what you look like. Your writing tells them what you think. Video is the only part of the site that shows them what happens when the person behind the writing starts talking, which is the thing they were actually trying to find out.
Regulatory information reviewed August 2026. Advertising standards differ by profession and province, and change without notice. Confirm the rules that apply to your own designation.