Healthcare / Dermatology
Dermatology marketing when medical and cosmetic pull in opposite directions.
Most dermatology practices are two businesses sharing a waiting room. One is insurance fed, referral heavy and frequently booked out for months. The other is cash pay, high margin and genuinely responsive to marketing. Treating them as one is how budgets get wasted.
How should a dermatology practice market itself?
A dermatology practice should market its medical and cosmetic sides separately, because they have different economics and often opposite problems. Medical dermatology is frequently capacity constrained, so generating more eczema and acne enquiries adds waiting time rather than revenue. Cosmetic dermatology has open capacity and responds directly to marketing.
The work that helps both is the same foundation: an accurate Google Business Profile, condition and treatment pages that answer what patients actually ask, and a booking path that does not lose people at insurance verification.
The trap specific to dermatology is content. General skin health articles attract national readers who can never book an appointment, which inflates traffic reporting while producing nothing.
Medical dermatology and cosmetic dermatology are opposite problems.
Before anything else, work out which half of the practice actually needs demand. In a surprising number of cases it is not the one being advertised.
| Item | Medical dermatology | Cosmetic dermatology |
|---|---|---|
| Who pays | Insurance, with a copay | The patient, in full |
| How patients arrive | Referral, insurance directory, condition search | Search, social, word of mouth |
| Usual constraint | Capacity. The diary is full | Demand. The diary has gaps |
| Margin per appointment | Lower, volume driven | Higher, procedure driven |
| Does more traffic help? | Often not. It lengthens the wait | Yes, directly |
| What marketing should do | Reduce no shows, improve payer mix, protect reputation | Fill capacity and raise average value |
This is the conversation we have first, because a practice with a fourteen week medical wait and an empty laser room does not have a traffic problem at all.
Sometimes the right recommendation is to stop advertising.
An agency has an obvious incentive to tell every practice it needs more leads. In dermatology that is often untrue, and the honest recommendation looks nothing like a proposal.
If the medical side is booked out for months, additional medical enquiries produce three things: a longer wait, a frustrated front desk and worse reviews from people who never got seen. The money spent generating them is not neutral, it is actively harmful.
Read the full breakdown: Sometimes the right recommendation is to stop advertising.Hide the full breakdown: Sometimes the right recommendation is to stop advertising.
What helps instead is unglamorous. Cutting no shows through better reminders and easier rescheduling recovers capacity you already have. Improving the payer mix changes what an hour of clinic time is worth without changing the hour. Getting the profile, hours and directions right stops people arriving at the wrong site. Protecting the review profile matters more when demand exceeds supply, because that is exactly when service complaints cluster.
Meanwhile the cosmetic side, where there is usually real capacity, is often marketed as an afterthought on a single page. Reversing that emphasis is frequently the highest return change available to a dermatology practice, and it costs nothing extra in media.
How dermatology content goes wrong, in four predictable stages.
This pattern repeats so consistently that it is worth naming, because it produces a report that looks like success.
Somebody suggests a blog
The reasoning is sound: patients search skin questions constantly, and a dermatologist has genuine expertise to share. So far so good.
The topics drift national
What causes eczema. Best moisturiser for dry skin. Is this mole dangerous. These have enormous search volume and no geography attached, so they attract readers from everywhere.
Traffic rises and bookings do not
Sessions double. The monthly report looks excellent. Nobody notices that the readers are three states away and were never going to book, because the report does not segment by location.
The budget gets cut
Eventually somebody asks what the content produced and there is no answer. The conclusion drawn is that content does not work in dermatology, which is the wrong lesson.
The fix is not to abandon content. It is to write condition pages that a local patient would read while deciding whether to book here, with the practical detail, and to judge them on appointments rather than sessions. Total traffic is the vanity metric in this category and it should be removed from the front of the report.
Local search behaviour, measured.
BrightLocal's 2026 consumer research covers all local categories rather than dermatology specifically, so read it as direction.
SourceBrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior study, 2026
For a practice with several locations, this is also the argument for keeping every profile distinct and accurate rather than pointing everything at one head office record.
Condition clusters, not a list of services.
Dermatology has an unusually good fit with topical structure, because patients search a diagnosis rather than a profession.
Nobody searches for a dermatologist when they have a suspicious mole. They search for the mole. Then they search for what the check involves, whether it is covered, and whether it hurts. Only after that do they search for somebody to do it.
That sequence is a site structure. A hub page for the condition or treatment area, with pages beneath it answering the specific questions, all linking to a booking path that works. It is better for patients and it is the structure search engines and answer engines read most reliably.
The discipline is to keep every page anchored to something a local patient can act on. A page about what psoriasis is belongs to the internet. A page about how this practice manages psoriasis, what the first appointment involves and what it costs belongs to you.
What applies to a dermatology practice specifically.
Dermatology sits on the boundary between medical and cosmetic, which means both sets of rules apply at once.
- Google treats health as a sensitive interest category, and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences. Google names those as customer match, your data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments, and your data segments is the ordinary site visitor list that retargeting runs on. What the ads and the landing pages promote is what triggers the restriction, not how the list was assembled. Google's predefined audiences stay available, including in market and affinity segments, life events, demographics and location targeting, because Google configures those with the sensitive signals excluded.
- There is no such thing as a HIPAA certification, and no website is HIPAA compliant on its own. HHS states plainly that it does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant, and the Security Rule contains no requirement to certify at all. Anyone selling you a certificate is selling you a document, not a defence.
- The part of the HHS online tracking bulletin that treated an IP address plus a visit to a condition page as protected health information was vacated by the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas in June 2024, and HHS withdrew its appeal that August. The business associate rules did not change, so the safe position is still to keep identifiable patient detail out of pixels, chat transcripts and call recordings.
- The FTC requires competent and reliable scientific evidence behind a health claim before the ad runs, and says plainly that a "results not typical" line does not cure a deceptive impression. A testimonial is not substantiation for the claim underneath it.
- State licensing boards, not just HIPAA, govern what a clinician may publish. New York's Board of Regents rules allow a patient testimonial only where the patient has expressly authorised it in writing, the portrayal is disclosed, reasonable disclaimers accompany any claim about results, and fictional patient testimonials are prohibited outright. Rules differ by state and by profession, so the answer for one practice is not the answer for another.
- Meta requires ads promoting cosmetic products, procedures or surgery to be targeted to people aged 18 and over, and restricts creative that idealises a result or draws negative attention to a body part. Read the standard before building a campaign around transformation imagery.
The sensitive audiences rule deserves particular attention here, and it is wider than it first looks. Condition pages are exactly what an agency would try to build a remarketing audience from, but the policy does not stop at condition pages: an advertiser promoting products or services inside a sensitive category cannot use advertiser curated audiences at all, and your data segments, the plain site visitor list, is one of them. Rebuilding the same audience from every visitor is not a way round it.
Skin cancer screening behaves differently from everything else.
Screening searches carry a different emotional weight and a different urgency from either acne or fillers. Somebody looking for a skin check has usually noticed something, told nobody, and is deciding whether to be worried. They are not comparing prices.
What they need is practical: what the appointment involves, how long it takes, whether they need a referral, what happens if something is found, and how quickly they can be seen. A page that answers those five questions plainly outperforms anything written to a keyword target, because it resolves the actual hesitation.
Read the full breakdown: Skin cancer screening behaves differently from everything else.Hide the full breakdown: Skin cancer screening behaves differently from everything else.
This is also a category where tone matters more than usual. Urgency framing that reads as fear marketing is both distasteful and a substantiation problem, since claims about detection and outcomes need real evidence behind them. Describe the process accurately and let the reader decide.
There is genuine seasonality worth planning around, with interest rising through spring and into summer in most markets. As with any seasonal category, the foundations need to be in place before the window rather than during it.
Insurance verification is where a dermatology enquiry usually dies.
A patient who has decided to book still has to establish whether you take their plan. In most practices that discovery happens on a phone call, which means the click was paid for, a team member spent several minutes, and the outcome was nothing.
Publishing plan information feels risky because networks change and nobody wants to be held to a stale list. The cost of publishing nothing is a slower funnel full of people who were never eligible, and a front desk doing qualification work that a web page could have done.
Read the full breakdown: Insurance verification is where a dermatology enquiry usually dies.Hide the full breakdown: Insurance verification is where a dermatology enquiry usually dies.
A page that names the plans you are in network with, explains how out of network benefits generally work for dermatology, and states plainly what the cosmetic side costs since it is not billed to insurance, removes most of that friction. Date it and review it on a schedule so it stays honest.
The same page is unusually good at earning visibility on its own, because it is specific, local and genuinely useful, which is precisely what general skin health content is not.
What a dermatology enquiry is worth, and where agencies get it wrong.
LocalIQ's 2026 benchmarks put physicians and surgeons at a $40.04 average cost per lead, the lowest of the clinical categories they report. That figure is misleading in dermatology unless it is split, because a medical appointment and a cosmetic procedure are worth entirely different amounts and frequently have opposite capacity positions.
Define qualified separately for each half. On the medical side it is somebody with a condition you treat, with a payer you accept, who can attend. On the cosmetic side it is somebody within the travel radius with a realistic budget for the procedure they are asking about. Averaging the two produces a number that describes nothing.
Read the full breakdown: What a dermatology enquiry is worth, and where agencies get it wrong.Hide the full breakdown: What a dermatology enquiry is worth, and where agencies get it wrong.
The HIPAA surface here is unusually exposed because of condition pages. A contact form that asks what somebody is concerned about collects clinical information. A call recording of a booking conversation contains it. A chat transcript held by a vendor contains it. Most significantly, an advertising pixel on a page about a specific skin condition can pass an identifier alongside a clear inference about the visitor.
That last one is the pattern to design out. Aggregate conversion counting does not require patient detail to reach an ad platform, and building it that way from the start is far easier than unpicking it after somebody asks the question.
How you tell it is being done badly: a single blended cost per lead across medical and cosmetic, a traffic chart that is not segmented by location, remarketing audiences built from condition page visitors, and nobody asking whether the medical side has capacity before proposing to grow it.
What we would do first.
SEO Content Strategy
Condition clusters that a local patient can act on, judged on appointments rather than sessions.
Multi-Location SEO
Every site ranking in its own area without competing against the others.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Enquiries resolved to source without clinical detail reaching an ad platform.
Google Ads Management
Cosmetic capacity filled with paid search, medical demand left alone where the diary is full.
Marketing Automation
Reminders and rescheduling that recover capacity you are already paying for.
Your website works alongside the record system you already run.
We do not replace your record system, we do not migrate it, and we do not ask you to change it. The site links to it from the places a patient is ready to act, and embeds the vendor's own widget where the vendor publishes one. Being plain about the mechanism: that is all it is. Nothing is synced, nothing we build reads or writes your records, and the names below are systems our clients run, not partners of ours. Medical and cosmetic sides of a dermatology practice frequently book through two different systems. Sending every visitor to one of them is the most common fault we find on a derm site.
Electronic health records
Whatever the practice runs, it stays. We do not migrate records, we do not ask you to change vendor, and nothing on the site reads a chart. The only thing the website needs from your record system is a patient facing address it can point at.
- Epic
- athenahealth, including athenaOne
- eClinicalWorks
- NextGen Enterprise and NextGen Office
- Tebra, formerly Kareo and PatientPop
- Practice Fusion
- AdvancedMD
- Greenway Health, including Intergy and Novare
- Veradigm, formerly Allscripts
- Oracle Health, formerly Cerner
- DrChrono
- Elation Health
Patient portals
A portal is tied to the record system behind it, which means we link to it and nothing more. The useful work is making sure an existing patient can find the portal in one tap and a new patient is never sent to it by mistake, because those two people want opposite things.
- MyChart
- FollowMyHealth
- healow
Scheduling, intake and check in
These are the ones that usually do publish something embeddable, and they are also the ones most often buried. Where a widget exists it belongs on the page that persuaded somebody, not on a separate contact page they have to go looking for.
- NexHealth
- Luma Health
- Phreesia
- Klara
- Zocdoc
- Solv
What we actually change
Not the system: the path to it. Where the button sits on the page, whether it says what happens when you press it, how many taps it takes from a phone, whether it appears again at the point a patient has finished reading and decided, and whether somebody who is not ready yet has a second way to reach you. That path is ours, it is measurable, and in most practice audits it is the part doing the damage.
Where the handoff is only a link
Some vendors publish an embeddable widget and some publish nothing at all. Where there is nothing to embed and no deep link worth pointing at, the site sends the visitor to your booking page or your login and stops there. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather say so than describe a seam we cannot remove. What we can do is make the destination unsurprising, so nobody arrives wondering whether they are still dealing with you.
Get a dermatology practice audit.
We look at where demand is genuinely short, what your content is actually attracting, and whether your tracking is built in a way you would be comfortable defending.
One caveat on all of that. These are descriptions of rules as they are published today, not legal advice about your situation. They differ by state and they change, sometimes quietly, so check the current wording with your own counsel or compliance officer before you rely on any of it. Where a rule touches your marketing we write to the stricter reading and send it to you for sign off before anything publishes.
Straight answers.
Should we market medical and cosmetic dermatology together?
No. They have different payers, different patients and usually opposite constraints. A combined campaign optimises toward whichever produces cheaper enquiries, which is almost always the half that did not need them.
Separate pages, separate campaigns and separate reporting. It also makes the capacity conversation much easier to have honestly.
Our traffic has doubled but appointments have not. Why?
Almost always because the traffic is not local. General skin health content attracts readers nationally, and a report that does not segment by location will show growth that cannot convert.
Segment sessions by the area you actually serve before drawing any conclusion. The honest number is usually much smaller and much more useful.
Can we retarget people who read our condition pages?
No, not on your own visitor lists. Google treats health as a sensitive interest category and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences, which Google lists as customer match, your data segments, audience expansion and lookalike segments. Your data segments is the plain site visitor list, so the condition pages are not the problem on their own: what the ads and the landing pages promote is.
Campaigns are built around intent and location instead. That is a real constraint and it is better to design around it than to discover it when an account is suspended.
What should a dermatology website include?
Named dermatologists with real credentials, clear separation of medical and cosmetic services, insurance information that is actually useful, and condition pages that explain what an appointment involves.
It also has to be fast and accessible on a phone, since that is where most of this searching happens and accessibility failures remain the most common defect on the web.
How do we reduce no shows?
Reminders on the channel the patient chose, easy rescheduling that does not require a phone call, and clear pre-appointment information so nobody arrives unprepared or at the wrong location.
It is unglamorous work and in a capacity constrained practice it recovers more revenue than any advertising campaign would. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
Do patient testimonials help a dermatology practice?
Google reviews do, and they carry less risk because the patient publishes them on their own account rather than the practice publishing a claim about care.
Practice published testimonials are governed by your state licensing board as well as by HIPAA, and the rules differ by state and profession. Where they are permitted they typically need written authorisation, disclosure and disclaimers.
How do I know if my dermatology marketing is working?
Split every number between medical and cosmetic before reading it. A blended figure will rise when the half that did not need demand grows, which is the most common way a dermatology report misleads.
Then segment traffic by location. General skin health content attracts national readers, and a report that celebrates unsegmented sessions is celebrating people who cannot book an appointment.
What should we do about our contact form and chat widget?
Collect the minimum, and decide deliberately where the data lands, who can read it and how long it is kept. A form asking what condition somebody is concerned about has collected clinical information.
A chat widget stores conversations with a third party vendor, so whether that vendor is genuinely handling protected health information on your behalf is a question to settle before it is installed rather than afterwards.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- LocalIQ: search advertising benchmarks (opens in a new tab)
- Google Ads Help: personalised advertising policy (opens in a new tab)Health is a sensitive interest category, which limits audience targeting.
- HHS: be aware of misleading HIPAA marketing claims (opens in a new tab)HHS does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant.
- American Hospital Association: court ruling vacating the HHS online tracking bulletin (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: health products compliance guidance (opens in a new tab)What counts as competent and reliable scientific evidence for a health claim.
- New York State Board of Regents Rules, Part 29: unprofessional conduct and advertising (opens in a new tab)Testimonials need written authorisation, disclosure and disclaimers.
- Meta Transparency Center: health and wellness advertising standard (opens in a new tab)
- Google Business Profile Help: tips to improve your local ranking on Google (opens in a new tab)Relevance, distance and prominence, in Google's own words.
- BrightLocal: local consumer review survey (opens in a new tab)
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.