Healthcare
The healthcare marketing guide
Practices operate under rules that most marketing advice ignores entirely. This guide covers what you may and may not do, and what actually brings patients through the door.
How do medical and dental practices market themselves compliantly?
Healthcare marketing works like other local marketing with two constraints layered on top: patient information is protected, so it cannot be used to market a service without valid written authorization in the circumstances HIPAA requires it.
Claims about results are constrained too, because the Federal Trade Commission requires health-related advertising claims to be substantiated by competent and reliable scientific evidence, which means a practice cannot promise an outcome it cannot evidence.
Within those constraints, the work is familiar: an accurate Google Business Profile, a fast and accessible website, genuinely useful content about conditions and procedures, steady first-party reviews, and measurement that tracks new patients rather than website traffic.
Two constraints change everything downstream
Most marketing advice assumes you can use your customer data freely and describe your results enthusiastically. In healthcare, both of those assumptions are wrong, and building a programme on them creates real legal and ethical exposure.
The first constraint is patient information. Protected health information is not ordinary customer data. The fact that someone is your patient is itself protected, which rules out a surprising amount of what other industries do routinely: uploading a patient list to build an advertising audience, sending promotional messages about services to people because of a condition they have, or using a patient's photograph or story without valid written authorization.
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The second constraint is what you may claim. The Federal Trade Commission expects health-related advertising claims to be supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence, and that expectation applies to a practice website as much as to a supplement label. This rules out the ordinary marketing habit of describing a good outcome as a typical one.
Neither of these makes marketing impossible. They change which tactics are available, and in practice they push a practice toward the approaches that work best anyway: being genuinely findable when someone is looking for care, being clearly the right sort of provider, and being trusted enough to call.
There is also a professional dimension that sits above the regulatory one. Patients making healthcare decisions are often anxious and are frequently making the decision for someone they love. Marketing that treats that moment as a conversion opportunity reads badly, and it reads badly to exactly the people you want.
What HIPAA actually constrains in marketing
The pattern worth internalising is that using protected health information to promote a product or service generally requires valid written authorization from the patient first, with narrow exceptions. A practice should have its own counsel or compliance officer check its specific activities against that, because the exceptions are where the arguments happen.
- Do not upload patient lists to advertising platforms to build or match audiences
- Do not target advertising at people based on a condition you know they have from their records
- Do not publish a patient photograph, name or story without valid written authorization
- Do not reply to an online review in a way that confirms the reviewer is a patient
- Do not discuss any clinical detail in a public reply, even to correct an inaccuracy
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- Do check what third-party scripts on your site collect, and where that data goes
- Do keep authorization records for any patient material you publish, and honour withdrawals
- Do treat intake forms, chat transcripts and call recordings as protected, not as marketing data
The review reply rule catches most practices out, because the instinct to defend yourself is strong and the reviewer has already disclosed the relationship publicly. Their disclosure is not your authorization. A reply that says nothing about whether they are a patient, offers an offline route to discuss it, and stays professional is the only safe shape.
Describing what you do without promising an outcome
The distinction that matters is between describing a service and promising a result. You can say what a procedure is, who it is typically appropriate for, what it involves, what the recovery generally looks like and what the risks are. What you cannot do is imply a result any individual patient will get, or present an unusually good outcome as representative.
This has a direct effect on before and after imagery, which is the most common place practices get this wrong. Photographs need valid written authorization from the patient shown. They should be genuinely representative rather than the single best case in the file. And where results vary meaningfully between patients, saying so plainly is not a weakness, it is the requirement.
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It also affects testimonials. A patient testimonial describing an outcome functions as a claim about that outcome, and the FTC's endorsement guidance expects endorsements to reflect honest experience and typical results, with any material connection disclosed. A wall of exceptional testimonials with no context is a claim about what you deliver.
The practical upside is that the compliant version of this content is usually better content anyway. A page that honestly explains who a procedure suits, what it involves and who it does not suit will convert better than a page promising everyone a transformation, because the patients who contact you after reading it are the right patients. Fewer, better-qualified enquiries is a good trade in a practice with finite appointment capacity.
One more point on imagery, and it is a judgement call rather than a rule. Clinical photography that is accurate can still be more graphic than a general audience expects to encounter on a public page. Keeping public-facing imagery discreet and clinical, and reserving the more detailed material for a context where a patient has chosen to see it, respects both the patient and the visitor who arrived unprepared.
How patients actually find a practice
Almost all of it is local search, and almost all of that is decided before anyone reaches your website.
Someone looking for care searches for the specialty and the place, or simply the specialty with location services on. What returns is a map block of three practices, then a longer list, then organic results. The profile decides most of what happens in the first two.
For a practice, the fields that do the most work are the primary category, the services list, the hours, the address and the reviews. A practice listed under a category that does not match the care it mostly provides will lose searches it should win, and that is one of the most common and most fixable problems we see.
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Multi-provider and multi-location practices have a specific complication. Individual practitioners can have their own profiles, and those interact with the practice profile. Getting the relationship right, rather than having several half-maintained records competing, is worth doing deliberately.
The website then has two jobs on that screen: to confirm quickly that you treat the thing the patient searched for, and to make contacting you trivially easy. For practices where booking happens by phone, a tappable number on every page is worth more than any other single change.
What patients look at before they call
BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey asked 1,002 US adults how they use reviews when choosing a local business. It is consumer research across local businesses generally rather than healthcare specifically, and it is self-reported, so read it as a direction rather than a measurement of your patients.
SourceBrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US consumers)
Recency is the finding that changes how a practice works. A practice with a strong historic rating and nothing from this year reads as a practice that used to be good. Asking consistently, rather than in occasional bursts, is the whole technique.
How to run a practice marketing programme
Ordered so that compliance is settled before anything is published, and measurement exists before anything is spent. Both of those are expensive to retrofit.
Settle the compliance position before you publish anything
Agree with whoever owns compliance at the practice what may be used, what authorization looks like, who approves published claims, and how review responses are handled. Write it down. Most compliance failures in practice marketing are not deliberate, they are an unbriefed person replying to a review at eight in the evening.
- A named approver for any clinical claim or patient material
- A standard authorization process for photographs and stories
- A review response template that discloses nothing
Get the Google Business Profile right for the specialty
Set the primary category to the care you most want to attract, list services individually with plain descriptions, and keep hours accurate. Decide deliberately how individual practitioner profiles relate to the practice profile rather than letting them accumulate.
- Primary category matched to the care you want more of
- Every service listed separately, described in patient language
- Practitioner profiles managed alongside the practice, not ignored
Build service pages that answer what patients actually ask
One page per service you would schedule separately, written to answer the questions a patient has before they call: what it is, whether it applies to them, what it involves, what the risks are, and what happens at a first visit in general terms. Have a clinician review the clinical content.
- A page per service, not a combined treatments page
- Plain language, with the clinical term given alongside rather than instead
- Clinician review for anything describing care
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Make contact effortless and make sure it is monitored
Tappable phone number on every page, a short form, and online booking where the practice genuinely supports it. Then confirm that whatever the form sends reaches somebody who acts on it. We will not tell you how fast to respond, because that is your operational decision, but an enquiry route nobody monitors is worse than no route at all.
- Click to call working with one tap on a phone
- A form asking only what is needed to respond
- A confirmed owner for every enquiry channel you offer
Collect reviews as a routine, not a campaign
Build the ask into the end of the visit, make the route a single tap, and ask everyone rather than only patients you expect to be positive. Filtering who you ask, or routing unhappy patients to a private form instead of a public review, is review gating, and the FTC's rule on consumer reviews treats suppressing genuine negative reviews as a violation.
- A consistent ask at the end of the visit, for every patient
- No incentives of any kind offered in exchange
- Responses that stay professional and disclose nothing
Measure new patients, not sessions
Track calls and forms separately, connect them to whether the person became a patient, and look at the mix of care they came in for. Website traffic is an input. The number that matters is new patients by service, because a practice needs a particular mix rather than a total.
- Calls and forms tracked separately and attributed to source
- New patients recorded by the service they arrived for
- Reporting reviewed against appointment capacity, not against traffic
Results vary by specialty, market, competition and the practice's own capacity to convert an enquiry into a booked appointment. We aim for a measurable improvement in qualified new patient enquiries, and we do not promise patient volumes.
Answering the questions patients are already asking
The research a patient does before booking is mostly reassurance-seeking. Content that meets it is the most durable asset a practice can build, and it is the part most practices never get to.
Start from what your front desk gets asked. The questions patients ask on the phone before booking are the highest-value content brief available to any practice, and they are free. They are also, reliably, not the questions a marketing agency would have guessed.
Write for the patient's vocabulary rather than the clinical one. Someone worried about a symptom searches for the symptom in ordinary words, not the diagnosis. Meeting them in their language and then introducing the clinical term is how a page serves both the search and the reader.
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Have a clinician review anything that describes care, and say who reviewed it. Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether content is produced with genuine expertise, and in healthcare that question has an obvious answer available: the clinician who actually does the work.
Keep it current, and say when it was last reviewed. Clinical guidance changes, and a page with a review date is more trustworthy to a patient and more useful to any system trying to decide whether to surface it.
Search, ads and the rest, for a practice
The right mix depends heavily on whether the care is elective or needs-driven, and on whether your constraint is demand or capacity.
| Item | Local search and SEO | Paid search | Social and content |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Steady, compounding new patient flow | Filling capacity now, or a specific service | Trust, recall and elective demand |
| Speed | Weeks to months | Days | Slow, cumulative |
| Cost behaviour | Front-loaded, then compounds | Stops the moment you stop paying | Mostly time rather than media spend |
| Fits needs-driven care | Strongly | Strongly | Weakly |
| Fits elective care | Yes | Yes, at higher cost | Yes, often best |
| Main constraint | Proximity and competition | Cost per click in the specialty | Sustaining it when the practice is busy |
On the paid side, cost varies enormously by specialty. In LocalIQ's 2026 benchmarks, dentists averaged $8.00 per click and $72.97 per lead, while physicians and surgeons averaged $4.76 and $40.04. Note that those are costs per lead, not per new patient, and the two are not interchangeable. Any figure you see quoted as a cost per new patient is almost certainly an agency estimate with no disclosed method behind it.
Go deeper on the specifics
The foundations under this guide, and the specific questions that come up most often in practice marketing.
The local SEO guide
The full version of the local search work a practice depends on.
The local SEO guideHow to get more Google reviews
Asking properly, the rules you must not break, and why steady beats spiky.
How to get more Google reviewsHow do I respond to a negative review
The reply shape that stays professional and discloses nothing.
How do I respond to a negative reviewWhy is my business not showing up on Google
Three different failures that look identical from the outside.
Why is my business not showing up on GoogleHow do I track where my leads come from
Connecting a ringing phone to the search that produced it.
How do I track where my leads come fromHealthcare marketing services
How we work with clinics and practices, and what is in scope.
Healthcare marketing servicesCompeting with a group when you are independent
Independent practices increasingly compete against groups and corporate-backed practices with marketing budgets they cannot match. The instinct is to try to match them on spend, and that is the one approach that reliably fails.
What an independent practice has that a group usually does not is specificity. A named clinician with a real history in the area, a genuine specialism, actual continuity of care, and the ability to answer a question in a human voice. Those are all publishable and none of them require a budget. A group's marketing is necessarily generic, because it has to work across many locations.
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Local search rewards this more than paid search does. Proximity, category accuracy and review signal are not purchasable at scale in the way advertising impressions are, and an independent practice with a well-run profile and a steady flow of genuine reviews frequently outranks a larger competitor in its own immediate area.
The honest limit is that this takes longer and it requires the practice to actually do the things it says. Content written by someone who does not do the work reads like it. A review strategy nobody at the front desk has been briefed on does not produce reviews. The advantage is real and it is not passive.
One thing we will not do, and would encourage you to be wary of anywhere: quoting you a new patient number before anyone has looked at your specialty, your market, your capacity and your current conversion. Patient volumes depend on all four and on factors neither of us controls. What we can commit to is the work, the measurement and the honest reporting of what it produced.
Want a look at how your practice appears to a searching patient?
We will check your profile, your service pages and your enquiry routes, and tell you what we would fix first.
Straight answers.
Can I use patient before and after photos in my marketing?
Only with valid written authorization from the patient shown, and only where the images are genuinely representative rather than the single best result in the file. Keep the authorization on record and honour it if the patient later withdraws it.
Where outcomes vary meaningfully between patients, say so plainly alongside the images. Presenting an exceptional result without that context functions as a claim about what you deliver, which is the thing the FTC's substantiation expectation covers.
Can I reply to a patient's online review?
Yes, but the reply must not confirm that the person is a patient or reference any clinical detail, even if they disclosed both in the review. Their public disclosure is not your authorization to discuss their care.
The safe shape is a professional reply that thanks them for the feedback, states the practice's general commitment, and offers a direct offline contact to discuss it. Nothing specific, nothing defensive, nothing that confirms the relationship.
Can I advertise to people based on a health condition?
Not using information from your own patient records. Using protected health information to market a service generally requires valid written authorization, and targeting people because of a condition you know from their records is squarely within that.
Advertising a service to people searching for information about a condition is a different thing, because the intent comes from the searcher rather than from their record. Ad platforms also apply their own restrictions on health-related targeting, separately from HIPAA, so check both.
What is a good cost per new patient for a practice?
We are not going to publish a number, and we would treat any that you find with suspicion. The figures circulating for cost per new patient in dental and medical marketing trace back to agency blogs with no disclosed methodology, and they vary by an order of magnitude between specialties and markets.
What is publishable is cost per lead from a named source. LocalIQ's 2026 benchmarks put dental at $72.97 per lead and physicians and surgeons at $40.04, across their own customers' campaigns. A lead is not a new patient, and the conversion between the two depends on your intake, so do not let anyone quietly convert one into the other.
Does my practice need a blog?
Not a blog as such. What helps is answering the questions patients actually ask before they book, which often works better as permanent pages attached to the relevant service than as dated posts.
The test is whether you would be glad a patient read it before their appointment. If yes, publish it. If it exists to hit a posting schedule, it will not earn anything and it still has to be reviewed for accuracy, so it is worse than nothing.
How long does it take to see more new patients?
Paid search can produce enquiries within days. Local search and content compound over weeks and months rather than days, and the first visible movement is usually in profile interactions such as calls and direction requests rather than in website traffic.
How quickly enquiries become patients depends on your intake process, which is often where the real constraint sits. Practices frequently find the first measurable improvement comes from fixing what happens to an enquiry, not from generating more of them.
Is this page legal advice?
No. This is a practical summary of how HIPAA and FTC expectations shape marketing decisions, written to help a practice ask better questions. It is not legal advice and it is not a compliance review.
Your practice should have its own counsel or compliance officer review your specific marketing activities, your authorization forms and your review response process. We work within whatever they determine.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- US Department of Health and Human Services: HIPAA marketing guidance (opens in a new tab)
- FTC: Health Products Compliance Guidance (opens in a new tab)What substantiation a health-related advertising claim requires.
- FTC: Endorsement Guides, what people are asking (opens in a new tab)
- Google Business Profile Help: Tips to improve your local ranking on Google (opens in a new tab)Google's own statement of the three local ranking factors: relevance, distance and prominence.
- Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (opens in a new tab)Google's published self-assessment questions for content quality and experience.
- FTC: Final rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (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.