Anonymous medical content
Health pages with no named author and no review date are held to a standard they cannot meet. Sign them.
Guide
Local SEO for doctors
Medical search is held to a higher standard than any other local category, because Google treats health as a subject where bad information does harm. That has a practical consequence: who wrote the page, what their qualifications are, and whether the practice is a real, verifiable organisation all count for more here than in any other trade.
By Hamza Rivera
Short answer: Local SEO for doctors rests on a credentialed page for each practitioner, clear statements on new patients, insurance and appointment availability, and a profile category set to the speciality. Health content is held to a higher standard, so clinical pages need a named author and a review date.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
The second thing that defines it is the competition. You are not mainly competing with the practice down the road. You are competing with the health directories, which have enormous authority, an entry for every practitioner in the country, and no interest in whether the patient can actually get an appointment with you.
You can beat them, but not by writing what they write. You beat them on the things they cannot know: which insurers you take, how soon somebody can be seen, which conditions you actually treat, and who the patient will be sitting in front of.
What doctors are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- doctor near me accepting new patients
- [speciality] doctor [city]
- doctor that takes [insurance]
- same day appointment doctor near me
- is [symptom] serious
- [doctor name] md reviews
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
Give every practitioner a properly credentialed page
Full name, qualifications, registration number where it is public, years in practice, conditions treated, languages spoken, and a photograph. This is the page the directories cannot beat because they are guessing at half of it.
- 2
Say whether you are accepting new patients
Prominently, and keep it current. It is one of the most searched qualifiers in medical local search and almost no practice site answers it.
- 3
List the insurers and plans you accept
By name. A patient who cannot tell whether you take their cover will ring the practice that made it obvious instead.
- 4
Set the profile category to the speciality
Not Doctor. Family Practice Physician, Dermatologist, Paediatrician and the rest are separate categories that appear in separate map results.
- 5
Write condition pages, carefully, with an author
What the condition is, when it needs a doctor, what an appointment involves. Signed by the practitioner, reviewed and dated. Unsigned medical content is the fastest way to be ignored in this category.
- 6
Make appointment availability real on the page
How soon somebody can be seen, whether there are same-day slots, how to book out of hours. The directories cannot say any of this and it is what the patient is actually deciding on.
- 7
Handle reviews without breaching confidentiality
Thank the reviewer, do not confirm they are a patient, do not mention anything clinical. A single careless reply in this category is a serious problem.
- 8
Keep the practice details identical everywhere
Name, address, phone, across the profile, the site and every health directory. Medical listings are duplicated more than any other category and the inconsistencies suppress you.
What usually goes wrong
Nothing about insurance or availability
The two questions every patient has, answered by neither the site nor the directories, and the easiest ground to win.
The generic Doctor category
Puts you in the widest possible pool rather than the speciality pool where the patient is looking.
Clinical detail in a review reply
A confidentiality breach in public, and one that cannot be taken back.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Calls and appointment link clicks from the profile
- Whether your own practitioners now outrank the directories on their own names
- Search Console impressions on insurance and availability queries
- New patient registrations, which is the only outcome that counts
Protecting what you build
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether doctors still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
For a medical practice the specific risk is the content itself. Health pages are held to a higher standard than any other category, so unsigned, undated or outdated clinical content does not merely underperform, it can pull the whole site down with it. Every clinical page needs a named clinician and a review date that is kept current.
What actually breaks a business in search
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
A redesign or a platform move
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
A plugin or a setting nobody audited
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
Losing control of an account
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
A suspended Google Business Profile
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Letting the work stop
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
What to refuse, however it is sold to you
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
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Bought links, in any packaging
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
-
Reviews you did not earn
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
-
Keywords stuffed into the business name
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
-
Pages written to have pages
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
-
Anybody who guarantees a position
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
The monthly discipline
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
- Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
- Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
- Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
- Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
- Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
- Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
- Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.
Own your own accounts
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for doctors
Why is medical SEO treated differently?
Google applies a higher bar to subjects where poor information can cause harm. In practice that means named, qualified authors, verifiable organisation details and dated reviews of clinical content matter far more here than elsewhere.
Can a small practice outrank the health directories?
On the directories’ own ground, rarely. On yours, routinely: which insurers you take, how soon a patient can be seen, who they will see, and what you actually treat. The directories cannot answer any of those.
Should doctors write their own content?
They should review and be named on anything clinical. Drafting can be done for them, but an unsigned medical page starts at a disadvantage it rarely recovers from.
How do we reply to a negative review?
Without confirming the person is a patient and without any clinical detail. Acknowledge, give a route to discuss it privately, and stop there.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.