Healthcare sector hub
Healthcare marketing, built around how patients actually search.
Sixteen specialties sit under this hub, and the differences between them are not cosmetic. A patient choosing an orthodontist behaves nothing like a patient looking for urgent care at nine on a Sunday night. What they share is a regulatory floor that most marketing advice ignores.
How do medical practices get more patients from search?
Most new patients arrive through a small set of predictable moments: a local search on a phone, a maps result, a review check, and increasingly an AI assistant summarising options before anyone clicks anything. A practice wins those moments by being complete and accurate where they happen, not by publishing more content in general.
The mechanics are a correct and active Google Business Profile, pages that answer the specific clinical questions patients ask before booking, a steady flow of recent first party reviews, and booking that works on a phone in under a minute.
The constraint that makes healthcare different is regulatory. HIPAA limits what patient information can be used in marketing, Google and Meta gate several healthcare categories behind certification and restrict how audiences can be built, the FTC requires real evidence behind health claims, and state licensing boards govern what a clinician may publish about outcomes and testimonials.
Healthcare marketing is patient acquisition with a compliance floor under it.
Strip out the jargon and the work is simple to describe: be findable at the moment a patient decides, be credible when they check you, and make booking effortless. The complication is that every one of those three steps is regulated.
A general marketing agency will happily put a patient testimonial on your homepage, build a remarketing audience from people who visited your oncology page, and drop a chat widget that stores conversations with an unknown vendor. Each of those is a decision with legal consequences, and none of them are obvious from the outside.
That is the real argument for a healthcare specific approach. Not that clinics need special words, but that they need someone who knows which ordinary marketing moves are not available to them and what to do instead.
The search has moved, and part of it no longer produces a click.
For a decade, healthcare SEO meant ranking a page. That is now one of four surfaces, and it is not the one most patients touch first.
An AI summary at the top of the page answers the informational half of the query before the patient scrolls. A map pack answers the logistical half: who is near me, are they open, what do people say. Ads sit above both. The organic result that used to carry the whole strategy now catches whatever is left.
This is why a practice can rank well and still feel invisible. The ranking is real; the click is not arriving, because the question was answered above it. The response is not to abandon organic search, it is to make sure the profile, the structured answers and the review signal all carry your name in the places that now resolve the query.
Local, on a phone, and checking you before they call.
BrightLocal's 2026 consumer research measures the behaviour that sits underneath every specialty on this hub.
SourceBrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior study, 2026
These are consumer figures across all local categories, not healthcare specific, and they are vendor research rather than independent study. They are useful for direction, not for forecasting your practice.
Five moments decide whether a patient becomes yours.
Marketing budgets usually go into the first moment. Most of the loss happens in the last three.
The trigger search
A symptom, a referral name to check, a benefits change, or a broken tooth on a Friday. Urgency varies enormously by specialty and decides everything downstream.
- Urgent care and emergency dental: minutes, decided on open now and distance
- Dermatology and optometry: days to weeks, decided on availability and insurance
- Orthodontics, plastic surgery and fertility: weeks to months, decided on trust
The shortlist
Three map results, maybe an AI summary naming a few practices. Your primary category, your proximity and your review signal do most of the work here, and only one of those three can be changed quickly.
The credibility check
They read recent reviews, look for a named clinician, and scan for whether you take their insurance. This is where practices lose patients they already paid to attract, usually through a thin about page and a missing insurance list.
See the remaining steps: Five moments decide whether a patient becomes yours.Hide the remaining steps: Five moments decide whether a patient becomes yours.
The booking attempt
A phone call during clinic hours that nobody answers, or a form that asks for a date of birth and an insurance member number before it will accept anything. Friction here is expensive and completely invisible in a rankings report.
The confirmation
Reminders, directions, and what to bring. New patient no shows are a marketing problem with a clinical cost, and they are almost always a communication gap rather than a patient failing.
We measure all five. A practice that fixes moments three and four often gets more from its existing traffic than from any amount of new traffic.
The same channels, weighted completely differently.
This is the honest version of specialty differences: not that the tools change, but that their usefulness does.
| Type of practice | Dominant channel | Decision window | The usual failure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Urgent and emergency care | Map pack and open now signals | Minutes | Wrong or stale hours |
| General dental and optometry | Local search plus recall | Days | No recall system, so growth leaks out the back |
| Elective aesthetics | Search plus social proof | Weeks | Discounting instead of positioning |
| Surgical and high acuity | Reputation and referral | Months | Anonymous site with no named surgeon |
| Behavioural and addiction | Organic and certified paid | Days to weeks | Ads blocked for want of certification |
| Veterinary | Map pack and reviews | Hours to days | Treating it like retail and ignoring clinical trust |
Every specialty page under this hub starts from its own row, not from a template with the name swapped in.
What HIPAA actually constrains in marketing.
HIPAA is misunderstood in both directions. Some practices believe it prevents almost all marketing, and do nothing. Others believe a vendor's compliance badge makes the problem go away, and do far too much.
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.
Read the full breakdown: What HIPAA actually constrains in marketing.Hide the full breakdown: What HIPAA actually constrains in marketing.
Using patient information to market a service generally needs a written HIPAA authorisation from that patient first. Treating an appointment list as a marketing list is the single most common way a practice creates a problem for itself.
If a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits protected health information on your behalf, HIPAA treats that vendor as a business associate and a written business associate agreement is required. VIS Mountain signs a BAA where an engagement genuinely involves protected health information.
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.
In practice this means a short list of decisions get made deliberately rather than by default: what the contact form collects and where it lands, whether calls are recorded and who holds the recording, which vendor runs the chat widget and under what agreement, and what the advertising pixels are allowed to see.
What the ad platforms will and will not let a clinic do.
These are current policy requirements, not opinions. Each one is linked in the sources at the foot of this page.
- Google's healthcare and medicines policy gates several categories behind certification before an ad can run at all, including prescription drug services, online pharmacies, telemedicine and, in the United States, health and medical insurance coverage.
- 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.
- Meta does not allow an ad to assert or imply that it knows a personal attribute of the person seeing it, including a medical or health condition, financial status or criminal history. "Depression counselling" is allowed. "Depression getting you down?" is not.
- 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 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.
If an agency has told you none of this applies to your ads, they have either not read the policies or they are running an account that is one review away from a problem.
Pick the practice you actually run.
Each page below covers how patients search that specialty, what a lead is worth, which channels earn their place, the rules that apply, and what honest measurement looks like.
Dental Marketing
General practice, hygiene recall and the new patient flow that funds everything else.
Dental MarketingCosmetic Dentistry Marketing
Elective, high value cases where the decision takes weeks and comparison is the norm.
Cosmetic Dentistry MarketingOrthodontics Marketing
A parent-and-teen decision, plus an adult clear aligner market that behaves like retail.
Orthodontics MarketingMed Spa Marketing
Aesthetics, where compliance is most of the content and the discount spiral is the real risk.
Med Spa MarketingDermatology Marketing
Medical and cosmetic demand in one practice, with very different economics.
Dermatology MarketingPlastic Surgery Marketing
Long consideration, high ticket, heavy scrutiny of credentials and imagery.
Plastic Surgery MarketingUrgent Care Marketing
Decided in minutes on hours, wait time and whether you are open now.
Urgent Care MarketingChiropractic Marketing
Recurring care with a low barrier to the first visit and a retention problem after it.
Chiropractic MarketingPhysical Therapy Marketing
Referral driven, but direct access has quietly made search matter.
Physical Therapy MarketingMental Health Marketing
Private, stigmatised searching where targeting rules bite hardest.
Mental Health MarketingAddiction & Rehab Marketing
Certification gated advertising and the most scrutinised category on the platforms.
Addiction & Rehab MarketingOptometry Marketing
Exams, eyewear and contact lens revenue, with a federal prescription release rule attached.
Optometry MarketingOB-GYN Marketing
Continuity of care decisions made early and kept for years.
OB-GYN MarketingVeterinary Marketing
Consumer behaviour of retail, clinical duty of care of medicine.
Veterinary MarketingPharmacy & Labs Marketing
Certification gated on the ad platforms and reliant on B2B and referral channels.
Pharmacy & Labs MarketingBenchmarks, so a quote can be sanity checked.
LocalIQ publishes annual benchmarks aggregated from its own customers' Google and Microsoft Ads accounts. That makes them a useful reference point and a bad target, because your market, your radius and your conversion definition all move them.
SourceLocalIQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks, 2026
Note these are cost per lead, not cost per patient. Converting one into the other requires your own booking and show rates, which is exactly the number most published healthcare marketing figures quietly skip. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
A booking is the only metric that survives a bad month.
Healthcare measurement has a specific trap: the things easiest to count are the things least connected to revenue.
Impressions, keyword counts and traffic totals all move without any patient being treated. The metrics worth a monthly conversation are new patient enquiries by source, the answer rate on the phone during clinic hours, booked appointments, and the show rate on those appointments.
The vanity metric to ignore in this sector is total website traffic. A dermatology practice publishing general skin health content can double its traffic with readers who live three states away and will never book. Traffic that cannot travel to you is not an asset.
Doing this properly means tracking that respects the compliance floor. Aggregate counts and source attribution do not require patient detail to flow into an ad platform, and building it that way from the start is far easier than unpicking it later.
What the first ninety days look like.
No promised timeline to a ranking. This is the sequence of work, which is the part that is actually within our control.
Weeks one and two: audit and access
Profile and listings audit, technical and content review, a look at how enquiries are currently captured, and the compliance conversation about forms, calls, chat and pixels. You own every account and every asset throughout.
Weeks three to six: foundations
Profile corrections, structured data, the pages that answer the clinical questions patients actually ask, speed and accessibility fixes, and conversion tracking that works before any budget goes into ads.
Weeks six to twelve: demand
Paid search where the intent already exists and the category is eligible, review collection running steadily, and content published against real questions rather than keyword volume.
Ongoing: compounding and reporting
Monthly reporting against enquiries and bookings, not rankings. Local visibility tends to move first, competitive organic terms take longer, and we say so in advance rather than after.
Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
What we actually do for a practice.
Each of these is a separate scope of work and can be bought on its own.
SEO and GEO
Local rankings, organic visibility and being a source AI assistants cite for your category.
Google Ads Management
Search campaigns aimed at qualified enquiries, built inside the healthcare policy constraints.
Web Design and Development
Fast, accessible sites where booking works on a phone and the forms collect only what they need.
Reputation and CRM
First party review collection, listings accuracy and the follow up that stops enquiries going cold.
Google Business Profile Management
The profile that decides whether you appear on Maps at all, kept accurate and active.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Calls, forms and chat wired to the campaign that produced them, without patient detail leaking into ad platforms.
What good looks like for a clinic website.
This is the bar we hold the work to. Every line is something you can check on your own site this afternoon, which is the point: a standard you cannot verify is a slogan.
- A named clinician appears on the page a patient actually lands on, with real credentials and a photograph of that person rather than a stock portrait.
- The primary Google Business Profile category matches what the practice does, not the broadest category that could be argued for.
- Every service page names conditions in the words a patient would use as well as the clinical terms, because both get searched and only one gets typed.
- Booking works one handed on a phone, on a poor connection, without pinching to zoom or opening a second app.
- Hours, address and phone number match character for character across the site, the profile and the listings.
See the full checklist: What good looks like for a clinic website.Hide the full checklist: What good looks like for a clinic website.
- Insurance, plan acceptance or payment information is on the site and findable without ringing to ask.
- Forms collect the minimum needed to make contact, and no clinical detail travels through an advertising pixel.
- The site is usable with a keyboard alone and with a screen reader, and somebody has tested that rather than assumed it.
- Reviews shown on the site are pulled live from the platform they were left on, never typed in by hand.
Most of the work on a clinic website is closing the distance between that list and what is there today. The line we find missing most often: plan and payment information, which practices leave off because the list changes, and which is the single most common reason a paid click ends in a two minute phone call and nothing else.
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. Whichever of these a practice runs, the pattern is the same: the record system is rarely the problem, and the three taps between a search result and a booking screen usually are.
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 healthcare marketing audit.
We look at your profile, your local visibility, your site and how enquiries are captured, then tell you what we would fix first and why.
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.
Is a website ever HIPAA compliant?
No. Compliance is a property of an organisation's practices, not of a piece of software, and HHS does not certify anyone or anything as HIPAA compliant.
What a website can be is built so that it does not create avoidable risk: forms that collect the minimum and deliver it somewhere appropriate, no clinical detail sitting in an analytics platform, and written agreements with any vendor that genuinely handles protected health information.
Will you sign a business associate agreement?
Where an engagement genuinely involves protected health information, yes. A BAA is required when a vendor creates, receives, maintains or transmits PHI on a covered entity's behalf.
Plenty of marketing work does not touch PHI at all, and in those cases the honest answer is that a BAA is not the relevant control. We will tell you which situation you are in rather than signing something for reassurance.
Can we use patient before and after photos?
Sometimes, and it depends on three separate things: HIPAA authorisation from the patient, your state licensing board's rules on portraying treatment and results, and the FTC's requirement that the impression the images create is substantiated.
A photo set that is representative, unretouched, consistently lit and accompanied by honest framing is defensible. A curated set of best cases presented as typical is the problem, and a results not typical line does not fix it.
Why were our Google Ads disapproved?
The most common reasons in healthcare are a category that requires certification before it can run at all, a claim in the ad that reads as a medical promise, or an audience built in a way the personalised advertising policy does not permit for a sensitive category.
Certification is not a formality. For addiction services in the United States it runs through a third party and takes real documentation. We check eligibility before recommending any spend.
Do patient testimonials help or are they a risk?
Both, which is why the answer depends on your state and your profession. Some boards permit testimonials with written authorisation and disclaimers, others restrict them heavily, and rules differ between medicine, dentistry and behavioural health inside the same state.
Google reviews are a separate and generally safer route, because the patient publishes them on their own account rather than the practice publishing a claim about care.
How long before we see anything?
Profile and listings work usually shows in local visibility first because it changes signals Google reads quickly. Competitive organic terms compound over months. Paid search produces data immediately and useful cost per enquiry figures within a few weeks of honest testing.
We will not give you a date for a ranking. Anyone who does is describing something they cannot control.
We already rank well but the phone is quiet. What is wrong?
Usually one of three things. The queries you rank for are informational rather than local and intent driven. The result is being answered above you by an AI summary or the map pack. Or the traffic arrives and the booking path loses it.
That last one is the most common and the easiest to fix. It is worth checking the answer rate on your main line during clinic hours before spending anything on new traffic.
Do you work with multi location groups?
Yes. The specific problems at scale are locations competing with each other for the same terms, profiles drifting out of sync, and reviews pooling at one site while another has none.
That is a structural job: clean location pages, distinct profiles, consistent records everywhere they are quoted, and reporting that can separate one site's performance from another's.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- HHS: be aware of misleading HIPAA marketing claims (opens in a new tab)HHS does not certify any person or product as HIPAA compliant.
- HHS: HIPAA privacy rule and marketing (opens in a new tab)
- HHS: HIPAA business associates (opens in a new tab)
- Google Ads Help: healthcare and medicines policy (opens in a new tab)Which healthcare categories need certification before an ad can run.
- Google Ads Help: personalised advertising policy (opens in a new tab)Health is a sensitive interest category, which limits audience targeting.
- Meta Transparency Center: privacy violations and personal attributes in ads (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.
- 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.
- American Hospital Association: court ruling vacating the HHS online tracking bulletin (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.