From zero online presence to a full practice site. Brand, voice, colour and keyword strategy for a trauma therapist working at a very specific edge of the field.
Web: farahsultan.com
Farah Sultan is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She works with trauma using somatic and body-based approaches, sees clients in person and online across New Mexico, and also offers supervision and trainings to other therapists.
She came to me with no online presence at all. No site, no brand, no positioning. The job was to build the whole presence from the ground up: identity, voice, colour, keyword strategy, and the website that would hold all of it.
Therapy websites tend to land in one of three places, and all three feel wrong for trauma work.
Clinical and credential-first reads cold. Pastel-and-lotus-flower spiritual reads vague. Marketing-first with countdown timers and free-consultation buttons reads insulting to anyone who has been through something.
Farah’s practice sits at a specific edge of the field (complex trauma, spiritual trauma, recovery from high-control groups, sexual assault recovery) and she needed a voice that matched the actual register she uses with clients. Warm but not vague. Direct but not clinical. Embodied without becoming “wellness”.
The voice came before everything else. Colours and layout followed once we knew how the site was going to speak.
Voice first, design second. Before opening Figma I worked with Farah on how she actually talks to clients. The lines you read on the homepage (“On the outside, you seem fine, but I understand that on the inside it can feel very different”) come from that work, not from a template. Once the voice was locked, the visual choices became obvious.
The reader before the practitioner. Most therapist sites open with credentials. This one opens with the reader’s experience. The bio shows up later, as a meeting that happens after the visitor has already been seen.
Specificity as positioning. “Trauma therapy” alone says nothing because thousands of therapists offer it. Naming the specific intersections (spiritual trauma, high-control groups, attachment wounds, low self-worth) does two things at once: it tells the right reader they are in the right place, and it does the SEO work without resorting to keyword stuffing.
Slow design for slow work. Warm earth tones, generous whitespace, longer line lengths. The site reads at the pace of the therapy it describes, not at the pace of a sales funnel.
The SEO study did not start from search volume. It started from a question: where does Farah want to be found, and by whom?
From there we built a keyword map that respects both the local layer (Santa Fe, in-person therapy, New Mexico online sessions) and the specialisation layer (somatic experiencing, complex trauma, spiritual trauma, high-control group recovery). The result is a site architecture where each service page is a real entry point for a real search, written in the same voice as everything else.
Farah’s practice now has an online presence that sounds like her. The site is live, the keyword structure is set up to grow over time, and the brand has the consistency it needs to extend into trainings, group programmes and supervision without rewriting itself each time.