Patients reach a practice through different kinds of searches. Someone typing "Dr. [last name]" already has a provider in mind. Someone typing "physical therapy near me" is looking for care and may not know your practice. Your site has to answer both.
Our healthcare marketing is for practices where the patient picks the provider and makes the first call themselves. So the plan has to cover each provider and where they see patients. It also has to tie every treatment you want to grow to a way to request an appointment.
Keyword research for healthcare practices starts with what patients type
Patients describe care in their own words, and the research begins with those words. From there, you decide which of those searches matter to your practice. Sorting the searches into four kinds helps you decide which pages need attention.
| Kind of search | What a patient might type | Who is searching | What to have in place |
|---|---|---|---|
| The practice's name | Your practice's name | Someone who already has your practice's name | A clear page about the practice and accurate details for each office, with an easy way to request an appointment |
| A provider's name | "Dr. [last name]" | Someone looking for one provider, including after a referral | A page for that provider that shows where they see patients and links to their treatments |
| A treatment | "chiropractor near me", "orthodontics cost" | Someone looking for care who may not know your practice | A page about the treatment as your practice offers it, linked to the providers and offices that offer it |
| A symptom or question | "how much does an optometrist visit cost" | Someone researching a question in their own words | Relevant content tied to care your practice offers, with the provider named |
The first two kinds come from people who already have a name. A patient who was referred to you may still look you up, and what they find should make them comfortable contacting you.
In any report of search terms, keep the name searches on their own line. Then you can see how well patients find you when they search for the care itself.
What thirteen months of search terms showed at a California wellness practice
We ran the SEO for a California wellness practice, and its search query reports cover thirteen consecutive months. The practice came up on page one for 214 search terms in the opening month and 352 in the closing month. Those figures count search terms. They don't count patients, inquiries, appointments or revenue, and the record doesn't show who booked.
The record sorts those terms into two groups. There were 5 terms naming the practice in the opening month and 5 in the closing month, and the count stayed between five and seven in every month. Terms from people looking up a treatment or a symptom went from 209 to 347.
All of the increase was in the treatment and symptom terms. That is what happened at one practice, and it doesn't tell you what yours should expect. The full study is on our healthcare page.
Patients and providers describe the same care in different words
Google's SEO Starter Guide says, "Think about the words that a user might search for to find a piece of your content. Users who know a lot about the topic might use different keywords in their search queries than someone who is new to the topic."
Your site might say optometry on every page while a patient types "eye doctor near me". The research connects the patient's wording to the page that answers it.
The people who book your appointments can help here. They know the words callers use for a treatment, and your page headings should use the same ones. A heading only your staff would understand is worth changing.
Our monthly SEO plan includes research into the words and phrases the people you want to reach actually search for, and the audit at the start shows which searches matter in your market. For any treatment page someone proposes, you should be able to see which searches it's meant to answer.
Which treatments to build first, and how many
Which treatments come first is your decision. It belongs with the people who provide the care and run the practice. The research shows how patients look for a treatment, and your team knows which appointments it has room for.
One problem we see is a website that says very little about the services the practice most wants to grow. A treatment like that is a good place to begin. Its page should describe what your practice offers and say who provides it, and for a group, which offices offer it.
How many to start with depends on how much you can explain properly. Three treatments built with depth beat nine built thinly. Keep your other treatments easy to find on the site while the pages for the ones you chose are being built.
If a provider is missing from one of those first pages, or its appointment link goes to the wrong office, fix it before you start another treatment.
Articles come in when a patient's question needs more room than the treatment page has. The article should connect to care you offer and link to that treatment's page. A broad question with no tie to your practice can wait.
Urgent care and planned care need different pages
How much a page has to say depends on how the patient is deciding. For planned care, patients read your site and your reviews before they book. That page needs room to say who provides the treatment and where.
For care your practice offers urgently, reaching you and getting an answer matter more. The phone number and the appointment request belong at the top of those pages.
What the website needs for medical SEO
We usually find sites organized by department, the way the practice is run. Someone who searched for a treatment should recognize it on the page they land on, and the menu should name it in words they'd use.
Then the pages need to connect. A treatment page links to the providers who offer it, and each provider's page shows the offices where they see patients. A location page says what is available at that office.
If only some offices offer a treatment, its page should link to those offices. A patient should know which address applies before they open the appointment form.
The appointment request should reach the right office
After the page, there is still an appointment to book. For each treatment, the form should name the intended office, and your team should test where requests arrive. Whoever receives a request should know which office the patient wants.
The phone link and the form need the same test on a phone. If one booking team handles several offices, the form still has to say which office the patient is asking for.
After the first pages, the work is monthly
Medical SEO is monthly work, and the mix changes. Our monthly work includes site speed, ongoing content, and local SEO that grows with the number of locations. The early months usually go to fixes, such as completing the profile for every location and provider. Later months go to content and to pages for more of your treatments and locations.
Make each provider findable by name
The practice's name and a provider's name are separate searches, and you want to come up for both. Each provider is searched for by name. Check whether patients can find your newest provider that way.
A page for each provider gives that search somewhere to land on your site. Put the provider's full name in the page title and the heading, so the page is easy to recognize. If a provider works at several offices and offers different treatments at each, the page should pair each treatment with the office where they offer it.
From there, a patient should be able to get to the treatment itself without going back to the home page. A link from the provider's page to each treatment page does that. The patient can then request an appointment from the page about the care they wanted.
When a provider joins or moves offices, go back over their page and the treatment pages that link to it. Each treatment page should name the providers who offer that care now, at the location shown.
Local SEO for doctors, one location at a time
Google's guidance on local ranking says, "Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity." Each location in your practice needs its own Google Business Profile and its own coverage on the site. A profile that isn't complete for every location and provider is one of the first things to fix.
Read each profile for what a patient could learn about that office. The treatments listed should be offered there, the hours should be right, and the phone number should reach the team that books for it.
The practice's name and each office's address should match across your site and the online listings that mention you. Check that for each office, since one office's listings can match while another's don't.
Check the date of the newest review at each location
Google also says, "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." A practice can have good reviews and still have no new one lately. So look at the date of the newest review for each office along with its rating.
The area you serve depends on the treatment
How far someone will travel depends on what they're coming for. So choose the search area for each treatment around the offices that offer it.
Your position on the map changes across the area you serve, and our report shows where the practice stands across that area. A search from your front desk shows one point in it. Reading the map by treatment and by location tells you which office needs attention next.
Why trust matters for a medical practice's content
Google's guidance on helpful content says its systems try to determine which content demonstrates "aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T. Of these aspects, trust is most important." It also says, "our systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society." Google names health in that sentence.
For a treatment page, we'd make sure it says who the provider is and describes what your practice actually offers. Someone reading it should be able to connect what they're reading with a provider they can name.
Check whether AI answers name your practice
You can check whether AI answers name your practice for the treatments you want to grow. Our AI search report shows the question we asked and the answer as it was recorded, with the date and the platform. Read each entry as what that platform said about one treatment on that date.
That answer shows whether the platform named your practice for the treatment you asked about. It isn't a booking, and no one can guarantee your practice appears.
Read what the answer says about the practice, and which provider or office it names. How AI answers choose who to cite covers the subject in more detail.
How SEO and paid search work together for medical practices
A patient who needs care today rarely compares three practices, so we'd consider paid search early for that care, as long as your booking team answers the calls it brings. For planned care, patients read your site and your reviews before they book, so the treatment pages and reviews matter early. SEO and paid search work together for the treatments you chose, and SEO isn't a way to phase paid search out.
How to tell whether SEO for doctors is bringing in appointments
The way to tell is to match each month's inquiries from search against your own appointment record. We send one plain report every month, and each call and form on it carries the channel that brought it in. So you can see which inquiries came from search and which came from somewhere else.
Whether an inquiry became an appointment is in your own appointment record. Have your team note which treatment each inquiry was about and whether it was booked. A search term report can't tell you that, because it shows where the practice came up and nothing about who booked.
Then count the appointments for the treatments you chose. A bigger total can come from calls about a different treatment, which is why you count by treatment. If the right inquiries come in and appointments don't follow, bring in the team that handles those requests.
Get this in place while the first treatment pages are being built. We usually find that nothing connects an inquiry to a booked appointment, and it's one of the first things we fix. Before you add another treatment, you should be able to say what happened to the requests you already get.
What decides the cost and timing of SEO for medical practices
The cost and the timing both depend on how many locations and providers you have and how much local competition your specialty has. The cost also depends on how many treatments you build out properly, the state of your site and whether paid search runs alongside. The timing also depends on what your current site can carry and how much of your patient flow already comes from referrals. Our healthcare page goes through each one, and our article on what drives the cost of SEO covers the planning in general.
See where your practice comes up for each treatment
Our free visibility report checks where you come up for your treatments, location by location, and whether each of your providers is findable by name. It also checks whether your profile makes booking the obvious next step and whether AI answers name your practice for those treatments.
Where you rank on Google for the searches that matter
We audit your site and your search results first. The work and the price come to you in writing.
Built in-house by our U.S. team, doing this since 2011.