The Hypno Coach

It’s time for another Weekend Challenge. 🌊

Find one thing your Google profile and your website disagree about. There’s always at least one.

All week we’ve been on your Google Business Profile — what Google quietly changes without telling you, why yours might not be showing up, and the twenty-minute routine that keeps it honest. Yesterday made the point that matters most: people find you on the phone and decide on your website.
Which only works if the two are saying the same thing.
You’re not fixing anything this weekend. You’re just looking.

How to:
1. Open your Google Business Profile on one screen and your website on the other.
2. Start with the boring four — name, address, phone number, hours. Check each one against the website.
3. Then read the services on your profile against the services on your site. Find something that’s on one and missing from the other.
4. Pick the biggest mismatch you found.
5. Share it in the comments.

P.S. No wrong answers and nothing to be embarrassed about. Nobody has a matching set. I found three of my own the last time I looked properly, and I do this for a living.

Choose one:
The boring four — Name, address, phone, hours. Thirty seconds, and the failure is real: someone rings a number you stopped answering in 2023 and gives up.
The missing service — On your profile but never mentioned on your website, or a service with its own page that never made it onto the profile.
The service you stopped offering — Still sitting there, quietly advertising work you don’t want.
The phone test — Read your profile description aloud, then say what you actually tell someone who rings. If those are two different practices, that’s your mismatch.
One to watch: if your profile says “Wellness Centre — Your Name Hypnotherapy” and your website just says your name, don’t fix that by changing the website. Google’s rules say a practitioner at a shared address should have only their own name on the profile. It’s the profile that’s wrong.

Template:
My profile says ____________, but my website says ____________.

Examples:
My profile says I close at 5pm, but my website says evening appointments available.
My profile lists gambling cessation, but my website hasn’t mentioned it since I rebuilt it.
My profile has the landline, my website has the mobile — and I only answer the mobile.
My profile says “hypnotherapy,” my website leads with anxiety and sleep. Same work, completely different words.

Have fun!
Ernest

Yesterday I gave you a twenty-minute monthly routine for your Google Business Profile. Some of you put it in the diary. And some of you read it, agreed with every word, and knew honestly that you weren’t going to do it.

That’s not laziness. Twenty minutes isn’t the problem — it’s that it’s one more thing on a list that already has the tax return, the CPD hours and the website you’ve been meaning to fix since March. That’s a sole trader doing the arithmetic correctly.

So here’s the other option.

Search “hypnotherapist near me” on your phone and you get a map with two or three listings taking up most of the screen before anything else appears. Those get clicked far more than anything below, and Google actively wants real local practitioners in them.

But here’s the bit the usual advice gets wrong. Mobile is not where someone books a hypnotherapist. Nobody taps a call button about a twenty-year phobia on first sight. The phone is where they find you. Your website is where they decide, days later, often on a different device. Which means the two have to say the same thing.

Closing that gap is most of the job. About a day and a half. $750 USD. I have room for four.

Full details here: https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/for-the-people-who-wont-do-it?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

For the People Who Won’t Do It Twenty minutes a month is a small ask. It’s still one more thing on a list that’s already too long. So here’s the other option, and what it costs.

Somebody wanted to ask you a question last November. Do you work with gambling as well? Is it one session or several? How much?

There used to be a box for that on your Google profile. A questions section, where anyone could ask and you could answer in your own words, and the answer stayed there for everyone who came after.

Google discontinued it on 3 November 2025. It’s on their own developer changelog. The public section has been vanishing from profiles ever since, and new profiles never had it.

In its place, an AI writes the answer — built from your profile fields, your reviews, your photos, your website. You can’t write the answer any more. You can only supply the material it’s made from.

Which happens to be a job you already understand. Five steps, twenty minutes, once a month.

Read it here: https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/google-deleted-the-answer-box?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

You’ve typed your town and “hypnotherapist” into Google. You’ve scrolled the little map. Three businesses came up and none of them was you.

And somewhere underneath that, a thought arrived that had nothing to do with Google. Maybe I’m just not established enough yet.

It’s almost never that.

Google sorts every business into a handful of shapes — a shop people walk into, a van that drives to people, a department inside a bigger building. Those shapes were built for plumbers and dentists. A hypnotherapist fits none of them cleanly, so at some point you picked the one that felt safest.

Three specific things go wrong from there, all documented in Google’s own guidelines, all fixable. Including this one: if you rent a room in someone else’s clinic, you ARE allowed your own profile at that address. Most people have been told otherwise.

Read it here: https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/why-your-google-business-profile?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Why Your Google Business Profile Isn’t Showing Up Three reasons that apply specifically to hypnotherapists. None of them is that you’re new, small, or bad at this.

There’s a voicemail greeting somewhere with your voice on it. Recorded years ago. Still gives the old number. Still says you’re back on Tuesday. Everyone who rings hears it — and you never do, because you’re not the one ringing yourself.

That’s most Google Business Profiles.

Here’s the part almost nobody knows. Google says, in its own help documentation, that it collects information about your business from other sources and may change your profile for you if those sources say your details are out of date. And there’s a screen that shows you which bits it changed — the altered text appears in blue.

Two minutes to look. Most hypnotherapists have never opened it.

Read it here: https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/your-google-profile-is-being-edited?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Your Google Profile Is Being Edited Without You There’s a screen that shows exactly which parts Google changed. It takes two minutes to look, and most hypnotherapists have never opened it.

It's time for another Weekend Challenge. 🌊

The Last Ten Count
Find out where your clients actually come from — in about ten minutes.

All week we've been pulling apart the idea that good work brings clients. Word of mouth is thinner in this profession than anyone admits, and professional referrals take a year to build.
But that's the profession in general. This is about you.
Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for. Just your client records and a piece of paper.

How to:
1 Open your client records and go back through the last ten people who actually booked and paid — not enquiries, not people who asked and drifted off.
2 Write the ten in a column. Beside each one, write where they came from. If you don't know, write don't know. That's a real answer.
3 Count the columns. Which source produced the most?
4 Now write down the one channel that took most of your effort over the last month or two. The thing you kept posting on, or kept meaning to.
5 Compare the two. Share what you found in the comments — just the shape, no client details.

P.S. There are no wrong answers here, and there's no score. A page full of don't know is one of the most useful results you can get, because it tells you exactly what to start recording from Monday. Nobody is doing this well. Most of us have never done it at all.

Choose one:
The straightforward version — you have ten clients and decent records. Do the ten, count them up, post the tally.
Fewer than ten — use however many you've had. Six is fine. Three is fine. The pattern shows up quickly.
Records are patchy — count the ones you do know and count the don't knows separately. The size of that second number is the finding.
Been going a while — do your last ten, then do ten from two years ago and put them side by side. What's changed is more interesting than either list alone.

Template:
Of my last ten clients: ____ came from ______, ____ from ______, and ____ I don't know. Meanwhile most of my effort went into ______.

Examples:
Of my last ten clients: 4 came from Google, 3 from past client referrals, 1 from a physio, and 2 I don't know. Meanwhile most of my effort went into Instagram.
Of my last six clients: 3 came from one GP who keeps sending people, 2 from my website, 1 don't know. Meanwhile most of my effort went into a networking group I've been to eleven times.
Of my last ten clients: 7 I genuinely don't know. Starting an enquiry log on Monday.
Of my last ten: 5 from Google Business Profile, 4 word of mouth, 1 from a directory. Most of my effort went into the directory.

Have fun!
Ernest

The Hypnotherapy Business Survey is open until Sunday 4 October. Question 9 asks this exact thing across the whole profession. [https://forms.gle/xnNFZGy9Fm9Yvf8T7]

Three days this week arguing about where clients come from. Here's how to find out what's actually true in your practice.

Open your client records. Go back through the last ten people who booked and paid — not the last ten enquiries. Write down where each one came from.

Not where you think. What you know. "Don't know" is a real answer and it's usually the most useful one on the page.

Then count.

Of everything on that list, there's exactly one channel you can actually inspect. You can't audit word of mouth. But you can look at what a stranger sees when they search for what you do, in the place you do it.

I'll do that for you if you'd like — full written report, no charge, nothing to buy at the end.

https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/where-did-your-last-ten-clients-actually?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Where Did Your Last Ten Clients Actually Come From? Three days of theory. Here’s how to find out what’s true for you.

Yesterday's post was a bit of a downer, so here's the other half.

There's a kind of referral that asks nothing at all of your clients. No disclosure. No awkward dinner-table conversation. It comes from other professionals — and the whole problem we talked about yesterday simply disappears.

There's a second difference too. A happy client refers once, if you're lucky. A physio sees new patients every week. One relationship, built once, can send people for years.

But most of us go about it backwards. When you write asking for referrals, you're asking someone to solve your problem. They've got their own — and their problem is the patient sitting in front of them they can't quite help.

Today's piece is about the difference, and it ends with one small decision.

https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/the-referrals-that-actually-compound?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

The Referrals That Actually Compound The kind that don’t ask your client to say anything at all

"Do good work and the clients will come."

We've all heard it. But look at what actually has to happen for a referral to exist. Someone has to say out loud: I had this problem, and I went to someone about it.

People do talk about being in therapy now. That's changed. But talking about being in therapy and talking about what you went for are two very different things.

And there's a pattern in which problems people will name. A study this year rated thirty-six conditions for stigma. The worst weren't the most serious ones — they were the ones people believed were within their own control.

Weight came out top of all thirty-six.

Now look at the list of what comes through a hypnotherapist's door.

Part two of this week's series

https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/one-happy-client-rarely-brings-you?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Your last really good client walked out the door and never came back.

That's the job working properly. It's also the hardest business problem in hypnotherapy, and hardly anyone says it out loud.

Counsellors have a diary that carries itself forward. Ours resets. Every person we help is a person who stops needing us — and the better we are, the faster it happens.

New article. It starts with a piece of arithmetic most of us have never actually done.

https://hypnotherapistsbusinesspulse.substack.com/p/you-fixed-it-now-theyre-gone?r=1eufvm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

You Fixed It. Now They’re Gone. The business problem hiding inside hypnotherapy’s greatest strength