Healthcare and medical SEO
Healthcare SEO, where Google checks who is writing before it checks anything else.
Health content sits in the category Google scrutinises hardest, so the usual playbook of more pages and more keywords does not work. What decides it is whether the site makes qualified authorship legible, whether each location deserves its own page, and whether the technical layer is clean enough for any of it to be read.
Straight answer
You cannot mark up authority you do not have.
Schema makes real credentials machine readable. It does not manufacture them. That distinction is the whole of healthcare SEO, and it is where most of the sector's marketing quietly misleads people.
What gets sold
- Volumes of condition pages written by a generalist copywriter
- Location pages differing only by the postcode in the title
- MedicalWebPage schema bolted onto unsigned content
- Blog posts citing other clinics rather than primary sources
- A promise to "fix E-E-A-T" as if it were a technical setting
What actually moves it
- Named clinicians with real credentials, connected in schema
- A medical reviewer and a visible review date on clinical pages
- Locations that genuinely differ, or fewer of them
- Citations to primary sources, because the audience checks
- A technical layer clean enough for the above to be crawled
Said plainly
We take the whole engagement: the technical layer, the site architecture, the on-page work and the local signals. The single thing we hand back is clinical sign-off, because a medical claim should carry a clinician's name rather than an agency's. We build the structure that makes their authority readable to a search engine, and we will tell you when a page needs a name on it that is not ours.
Scope
What healthcare SEO covers here.
The technical and structural work, in the order it tends to matter on a clinic or provider site.
Author and reviewer schema
Clinicians as real Person entities with credentials and registration, connected by @id to the pages they wrote and reviewed, so the relationship resolves as a graph rather than sitting as a byline nothing links to.
Multi-location architecture
Fifteen locations that differ only by postcode read as one page repeated fifteen times. Each needs its own clinicians, services and local signals, or the group needs fewer location pages and more substance in each.
Condition and treatment structure
Deciding which conditions warrant a page, which are variations of one intent, and where two pages are splitting the same search between them. Consolidation usually beats expansion here.
Patient data hygiene
Keeping identifiable information out of URLs, analytics and session recording, and cutting the third party scripts that run on pages where people type symptoms. A privacy problem and a performance problem at once.
Indexation and crawl
Practitioner directories, appointment paths and filtered listings generate URLs nobody should be indexing. Getting that under control is usually the fastest measurable win on a large provider site.
Core Web Vitals
Booking widgets and chat tools are the usual culprits, and they sit on the pages that convert. Measured on real field data rather than a synthetic score, because the score is not what patients experience.
Evidence
Healthcare at scale, not a hypothetical.
We work on a UK medical directory covering both SEO and web design. It operates at exactly the scale this page describes: thousands of specialist profiles, clinic locations and condition pages, all subject to the higher standard Google applies to health content. The client prefers not to be listed publicly, so it is described rather than named.
Medical directory
A specialist and clinic directory
The whole proposition is qualified authorship at volume: named consultants, their credentials, their locations and the conditions they treat. That is the healthcare SEO problem in its hardest form, because every one of those profiles has to be structured, indexed and distinguishable from the next.
- Domain rating
- 74
- Organic keywords
- 16,268
- Ranking in top 3
- 3,475
- Monthly organic traffic
- 53,360
How to read those numbers
They are the site's current UK position, measured on the day this page was last updated, not a before and after we are claiming credit for. A directory of that size is the work of a lot of people over a long time. What it does show is that we work at this scale and in this sector, which is the question you were actually asking.
Cost
What it costs.
Billed at £90 to £110 an hour, or the £95 blended rate where it crosses into development. Most engagements start with an audit and are scoped from what it finds. Minimum engagement is 4 hours.
Technical audit
From £900
Indexation, architecture, schema and speed assessed across the site, with the authorship and location structure reviewed against what the sector is actually judged on.
Schema and authorship build
Scoped
Clinician entities, reviewer relationships and page-level markup built into the templates so it stays correct as content changes rather than decaying.
Multi-location project
Scoped
Location architecture rebuilt so each site earns its page, with the local signals handled as part of local SEO.
Time is logged as it is spent and the ledger is open to you. Full breakdown on the rates page.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
Why is healthcare SEO harder than other sectors?
Because Google classifies health content as "Your Money or Your Life", which means it applies a higher standard of scrutiny to who is publishing it and whether they are qualified to. A page about a medical procedure written by an anonymous copywriter is competing against pages written and signed by clinicians. Everything else being equal, the signed page wins.
That is not a technical problem you can solve with markup alone, and any agency telling you it is has not read the guidelines. What markup does is make the credentials you genuinely have machine readable. It cannot invent them.
What does E-E-A-T actually mean for a clinic site?
In practice it means the site has to answer four questions clearly: who wrote this, what qualifies them, who reviewed it, and when. That translates into named author pages with real credentials and registration numbers, a medical reviewer named on clinical pages, visible review dates, and citations to primary sources rather than to other clinic blogs.
The technical part is connecting those into a schema graph so the relationships resolve rather than sitting as decorative text. The hard part is having the credentials in the first place, which is a content and governance job rather than an SEO one.
What exactly do you take on for a healthcare site?
The full SEO engagement: technical, on-page, content structure, internal linking, local and authority work. The disciplines do not change by sector, and the technical layer in particular is identical whether the pages are about knee surgery or hotel rooms. What changes in healthcare is the standard of proof Google applies to the content on top of it.
The one thing we do not do is write or sign off clinical claims. That needs a clinician, and on a health site the medical review process should sit with someone qualified rather than with an agency. We structure the site so their authority is legible to Google, and we will say plainly when a page needs a clinician's name on it rather than ours.
Do you handle multi-location clinic groups?
Yes, and it is usually where the traffic is being lost. A group with fifteen sites typically has fifteen near-identical location pages differing by a postcode, which Google reads as one page repeated fifteen times. Each location needs a genuine reason to exist: its own clinicians, its own services, its own opening hours and its own local signals.
That overlaps heavily with local SEO, because a clinic group is really a set of local businesses sharing a domain. The location work is priced below.
Is patient privacy a factor in the technical work?
It should be, and it is routinely ignored. Booking forms, symptom checkers and enquiry flows can leak patient data into analytics, session recording tools and third party scripts without anyone intending it. Query strings carrying appointment details into an analytics platform is a genuine risk and a common one.
We audit what third party scripts can see, keep identifiable data out of URLs, and reduce the number of external scripts that run on pages where people type sensitive things. That is a technical fix and it is squarely our part of the job.
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Clinic site not ranking for its own treatments?
Send us the domain and the treatments that matter. We will tell you whether it is an authorship problem, a duplication problem across locations, or something technical stopping the pages being read at all.