Healthcare / OB-GYN
OB-GYN marketing for a decision made once and kept for years.
Few healthcare choices are kept as long as this one. A patient who picks a practice for a first pregnancy may stay for twenty years, which makes the acquisition worth far more than a single visit suggests and the switching moments worth understanding.
How do OB-GYN practices attract new patients?
New OB-GYN patients usually arrive at one of a small number of switching moments: a positive pregnancy test, a move to a new area, an insurance change, a referral, or dissatisfaction with a previous practice. Most of the year, most people are not looking.
Because the decision is made under time pressure, the practical questions decide it: which insurance you accept, which hospital you deliver at, how soon a first appointment is available, and whether the practice can be reached without a long hold.
Content works unusually well here because pregnancy and gynaecological health generate enormous research volume, but it only produces patients when it is written for somebody who could actually attend the practice rather than for the internet at large.
Five switching moments, and what each one needs.
Marketing in this category is not about persuading people to change. It is about being the obvious answer at the moment they have to.
A positive pregnancy test
Urgent, emotional and highly practical. The questions are how soon can I be seen, which hospital do you deliver at, and do you take my insurance. Availability beats almost everything else at this moment.
A move to a new area
Methodical. They will search, read reviews carefully, check insurance directories and compare two or three practices. Reviews and the about page carry this decision.
An insurance change
Forced, usually in a defined enrolment window, and almost entirely decided by network participation. A clear, current insurance page is worth more here than any other asset.
See the remaining steps: Five switching moments, and what each one needs.Hide the remaining steps: Five switching moments, and what each one needs.
A referral
From a primary care physician, a fertility practice or a friend. The practice name is searched directly, so the profile and recent reviews either confirm the recommendation or quietly undermine it.
Dissatisfaction
The hardest to reach and the most loyal once won. These patients are usually searching for something specific they did not get, often around being listened to or being able to reach somebody.
Note how little of this responds to brand advertising and how much of it responds to practical information being easy to find.
Insurance, hospital affiliation and availability decide more than anything you write.
Three facts settle most OB-GYN decisions, and in a surprising number of practices all three are hard to find or out of date on the website.
Insurance participation comes first, because it is binary. A patient who cannot establish whether you are in network will ring, and if the phone is not answered promptly they will move on to a practice whose page told them. Publish the plans, date the page, and review it on a schedule.
Read the full breakdown: Insurance, hospital affiliation and availability decide more than anything you write.Hide the full breakdown: Insurance, hospital affiliation and availability decide more than anything you write.
Hospital affiliation decides obstetric patients. Where you deliver determines the entire birth experience, and many patients have a strong preference formed before they choose a physician. Stating it plainly, with the hospital named, is more useful than any description of philosophy of care.
Availability is the third. A patient with a positive test wants an appointment within weeks, not months. A practice that can offer a first appointment quickly should say so. A practice that cannot should be honest rather than allowing the discovery to happen after a long hold, because that is the sequence that produces a bad review.
None of these are marketing claims in the promotional sense, which is exactly why they work. They are the answers to the questions people are actually asking.
Pregnancy and gynaecology generate more research than almost any clinical topic.
This is both the opportunity and the trap, and the difference between them is whether the reader could plausibly attend your practice.
Search volume for pregnancy questions is enormous and largely informational. A practice that writes about what happens at each stage of pregnancy will attract a great deal of traffic from people who live nowhere near it, and a report that celebrates that traffic is celebrating nothing.
The version that works is anchored to the practice. What your first prenatal appointment involves. How your practice handles on call and who the patient is likely to see at delivery. What happens if a patient goes into labour early. What your approach is to a particular procedure and where it is performed. These are questions a local patient is asking about you specifically, and no national publisher can answer them.
There is a second reason to write this way. Much of the general informational demand now resolves on the results page rather than in a click, which makes competing for it a diminishing exercise even when you win.
Pew measured the behaviour directly.
Pew Research Center studied 900 US adults who shared browsing data, covering 68,879 Google queries, of which 12,593 produced an AI summary, in March 2025.
SourcePew Research Center, 2025, 900 US adults and 68,879 Google queries
This is independent academic quality research rather than vendor data, which is why we lean on it. The implication for a practice is to write the content only you can write, and to accept that general explanatory content is increasingly read without a visit.
This is a category where tracking decisions deserve real thought.
Gynaecological and obstetric topics are sensitive in a way that goes beyond the general healthcare position. Patients research privately, often before telling family, and sometimes about matters they would not want inferred by anyone.
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.
Read the full breakdown: This is a category where tracking decisions deserve real thought.Hide the full breakdown: This is a category where tracking decisions deserve real thought.
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.
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.
Practically, that means no retargeting from condition or pregnancy pages, no audience lists assembled from site behaviour, forms that ask for the minimum, and a deliberate decision about what the analytics and advertising tools are allowed to see.
It also means care with the details that seem harmless. A page name in an analytics report, a chat transcript held by a third party, or a call recording can each carry more than intended. None of that is a reason to measure nothing. It is a reason to design the measurement rather than accept the default.
What patients read before they commit.
BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers covers local businesses generally. In a category where the relationship may last decades, these signals are read carefully rather than skimmed.
SourceBrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026, base 1,002 US consumers
Replies in this category need particular care, because the temptation to correct the record can lead a practice into disclosing something about the patient. The safe reply acknowledges, describes the process, and moves the conversation offline.
The rules that apply.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Birth stories and patient photographs are among the most powerful assets in this category and among the most carefully governed. Written authorisation, every time, with a clear scope covering where the material may appear.
What a new OB-GYN patient is worth, and how to tell the marketing is careless.
LocalIQ's 2026 benchmarks put physicians and surgeons at a $40.04 average cost per lead. In this specialty that understates what an acquisition is worth, because a patient who joins for a first pregnancy may remain for two decades, which changes what a practice can rationally spend to reach one.
Define qualified around the practical filters that actually decide it: insurance participation, the hospital you deliver at, and whether you have appointment availability in the window the patient needs. An enquiry failing any of those is not a lead, it is a phone call you were always going to lose.
Read the full breakdown: What a new OB-GYN patient is worth, and how to tell the marketing is careless.Hide the full breakdown: What a new OB-GYN patient is worth, and how to tell the marketing is careless.
The compliance surface in this specialty deserves more care than most. A contact form asking about a due date or a reason for visit has collected clinical information. A call recording of a booking conversation contains it. A chat widget holds transcripts with a third party. An advertising pixel on a pregnancy or fertility page can pass an identifier alongside an inference somebody may not have shared with their own family.
Design the measurement deliberately: aggregate conversions rather than page level detail in ad platforms, forms that collect the minimum, a written agreement with any vendor genuinely handling protected health information, and a decision about call recording rather than a default.
How you tell it is being done badly: retargeting running from pregnancy pages, an insurance page with no date on it, a content plan full of general pregnancy explainers, and reporting that counts sessions rather than appointments booked.
What we would build.
SEO Content Strategy
Practice specific content that a local patient is asking about you, not general pregnancy explainers.
Local SEO
Visibility in the catchment your patients travel from, with each site distinct.
Conversion Tracking Setup
Measurement designed deliberately rather than accepting a default that sees too much.
Review Management
Collection and replies that never disclose anything about a patient.
Website Accessibility
WCAG 2.1 AA work, tested with keyboard and screen reader, on a site read under stress.
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. New patient paperwork is where this category loses people, so the handoff worth getting right is often the intake link rather than the calendar.
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 an OB-GYN practice audit.
We look at how easy your practical information is to find, what your content is actually attracting, and whether your tracking is built the way you would want it described.
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.
What brings new OB-GYN patients to a practice?
A small set of switching moments: a positive pregnancy test, a move, an insurance change, a referral or dissatisfaction elsewhere. Outside those moments very few people are looking.
That makes practical information the deciding factor. Insurance participation, hospital affiliation and how soon somebody can be seen settle most of these decisions.
Should we publish which insurance plans we accept?
Yes, with a date on the page and a review schedule. It is the single most common question and the one most likely to end an enquiry on the phone.
Practices avoid it because networks change. The cost of avoiding it is a slower funnel and a front desk doing qualification work a web page could have done.
Is a pregnancy blog worth writing?
Only the part of it that is about your practice. General pregnancy explainers attract national readers who cannot attend, and much of that demand now resolves on the results page without a click.
Write what only you can write: your first appointment, your on call arrangement, where you deliver, and what happens in specific situations at your practice.
Can we retarget visitors who read our pregnancy pages?
No. Google treats health as a sensitive interest category and an advertiser promoting products or services that fall within it cannot use advertiser curated audiences, and that group includes your data segments, which is the ordinary site visitor list. This is also a category where inference about a person's situation is particularly intrusive, so the rule and the right thing to do point the same way.
Campaigns are built on search intent and location instead, which works perfectly well here.
How should we respond to a difficult review?
Briefly, without confirming or denying that the person was a patient, and without any clinical detail. Acknowledge, describe the process generally, and offer a direct route to discuss it offline.
Half of consumers view generic templated replies negatively, so the reply should read as written by a person. It should also read as written by somebody who knows what they cannot say.
Can we share birth stories and patient photographs?
With written authorisation covering exactly where the material will appear, yes, and they are among the most persuasive assets in this category.
Without that authorisation, no. A patient who happily shared something in the practice has not consented to it appearing in an advertisement. Results vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. Nothing here is a guarantee of a ranking, a lead volume or a revenue outcome.
How do we know whether our marketing is working?
Count new patients by source and by switching moment, not sessions. A practice that grew traffic and not appointments has usually published general content that reaches people nowhere near it.
Ask specifically about the insurance page and the availability question, because those two settle more decisions than anything else on the site and both are easy to leave out of date.
Is it safe to record calls at the front desk?
It is a decision rather than a default. A recorded booking conversation frequently contains clinical information, which means where the recording lives, who can access it and how long it is kept all matter.
Some practices record for training and keep the retention short with tightly limited access. Others decide the value does not justify the exposure. Either is defensible; accepting the vendor default without asking is not.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- LocalIQ: search advertising benchmarks (opens in a new tab)
- HHS: HIPAA privacy rule and marketing (opens in a new tab)
- 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 business associates (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.
- Meta Transparency Center: privacy violations and personal attributes in ads (opens in a new tab)
- American Hospital Association: court ruling vacating the HHS online tracking bulletin (opens in a new tab)
- Pew Research Center: Google users click less when an AI summary appears (opens in a new tab)
- 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.
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.