Unfurl EMDR Therapy & Counselling | Brand & Website Case Study
From zero online presence to consistent client demand in eight weeks.
Jakara Anders is a brilliant trauma-informed therapist. When she decided to leave her corporate role and launch her own private practice, she had the vision and the expertise. What she didn’t have was a roadmap. She was stepping out on her own for the first time, starting from absolute zero with no brand, no website, and no idea how to attract the clients she wanted to serve.
- Client:Unfurl EMDR Therapy & Counselling
- Industry:Trauma-informed therapy and counselling
- Service:Website BuildsBrand Transformation
- Website:See it live →
Where Jakara was when I first spoke with her.
Jakara is the kind of therapist you want in your corner. She is a trauma-informed EMDR practitioner who does deep, careful work with adults, young people and parents. The skill was never the question. She had spent years building her clinical expertise working under someone else, and she had reached the point where she was ready to step out and start her own private practice.
The problem was that none of that expertise was findable. There was no brand. There was no website. There were no referral pathways set up yet, and she had zero visibility in Google. If you did not already know Jakara personally, there was no way to discover her, understand what she offered, or know whether she was the right fit. In a field built entirely on trust and safety, that invisibility was costing her before she had even started.
And she was honest about the fear underneath it. In her own words, she was pretty clueless about the marketing and business side of working for herself. She had a clear vision she was struggling to put into place, she was nervous about going out on her own after working for someone else, and she genuinely did not know how clients would ever find her. Investing when you do not yet know what you need is frightening. She did not want a pretty logo. She wanted to know she would not be shouting into the void.
What the Authority by Design process found.
The gap became obvious quickly. Jakara was an experienced, genuinely excellent clinician, but to the outside world she did not exist yet. And in trauma-informed therapy, the people who need to find you are not only clients. They are GPs, paediatricians and other referrers who need to understand your work and trust it within about thirty seconds. Nothing she had was built to earn that trust or make that decision easy. The whole practice was invisible to exactly the people who send the right clients your way.
So the Authority by Design work started with positioning and safety, not with pixels. I built a trauma-informed brand identity designed to feel calm, safe and professional the moment someone lands, because for this audience the feeling of the brand is the first proof of the work. From there I built a conversion-led website with clearly structured services, obvious pathways and real accessibility, so a nervous client or a busy GP could both understand what she does and act on it without friction. I deliberately designed it to make referrers confident, not just clients.
Underneath the design, I set the foundations that make a brand-new practice actually get found. I ran keyword research around EMDR therapy, trauma-informed counselling and local Cairns search terms, implemented SEO foundations across the site, and set up Google Analytics and Search Console so we could see what was working from day one. And because Jakara felt overwhelmed by all of it, I guided her through the messaging, tone, offers and positioning step by step. The strategy and the build were never separate pieces. The website was the strategy, made visible.
What changed.
This is the number that matters most, because Jakara started from absolute zero. No brand, no site, no referrers, no search presence. Within under two months of launch she was averaging two website enquiries a week and roughly one GP referral a week from doctors who found her through Google. The demand was strong enough that she has increased her client days to keep up with it. In her words, it has been fabulous.
The traffic backs up the enquiries. Since launch the site has had 773 total sessions, with 226 of those coming from organic search, so nearly 29 percent of her traffic is people actively searching and finding her. Engagement sits at 59.7 percent, which is well above what a brand-new counselling site would normally see, and visitors are spending an average of 55 seconds per session. Her main service page alone pulled 776 views and 469 active users. On the search side, the site has already earned 1.76 thousand impressions and 152 clicks at an 8.6 percent click-through rate, and she is ranking for the terms that convert, including EMDR therapy Cairns, counselling Cairns and EMDR therapy near me.
But the real result is how Jakara feels now. She is relieved, proud of her brand and website, and confident stepping into business ownership. She is no longer stressed about how to promote herself, because her work is finally easy to find and easy to understand. That is the whole point. She gets to focus on doing the deep clinical work she is brilliant at, and let the website do the finding, the explaining and the referring in the background.
"Hayley walked me through the process step by step and made it really easy and enjoyable. She created something I could not have imagined. I'm really lucky to have clients reach out to me through the website, and referrers like GPs and paediatricians have been able to find me through Google."
