Healthcare SEO: what a healthcare SEO agency should do, and what you can do yourself

How patients search for care

• Care nearby: "urgent care open now", "pediatrician in [area]", "physiotherapy clinic"
• A named doctor: "Dr [name] cardiologist"
• Symptoms and conditions: "knee pain when climbing stairs", "what does a thyroid test show"
• Practical questions: "does [clinic] accept [insurer]", "MRI cost", "walk-in or appointment"

Map results or organic results?

Searches for care nearby are answered by Google's local results, which rank Business Profiles on relevance, distance and prominence; Google says there's no way to pay for a better local ranking. Symptom and condition searches are answered by ordinary results and AI Overviews, where a clinic competes with every health publisher writing on the topic. A clinic's realistic organic targets are its own services, its clinicians' names, and the local questions patients ask before they book.

Healthcare SEO services: the work, in order

1. A verified Business Profile for each location, with the category that completes "This business is a", accurate hours (holiday hours included) and the services offered.
2. Practitioner profiles that follow Google's rules: where several doctors see patients, the clinic has its own profile and each public-facing doctor may have one with only their name. Support staff shouldn't have profiles, and one doctor shouldn't have several to cover different specialties.
3. Separate profiles for hospital or clinic departments only where they work as distinct entities, with their own entrance and category; Google asks for department names that differ from the main organisation's.
4. A page per service or condition you treat, written or reviewed by a named clinician, with the date it was last reviewed.
5. A page per clinician: qualifications, registration details where your regulator issues them, specialties, languages and where they practise.
6. Booking, insurance or payment details and directions in plain text, not only inside a booking widget.

YMYL and E-E-A-T for health pages

Google calls health a Your Money or Your Life topic and says its systems give even more weight to content with strong experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (E-E-A-T), with trust the most important of the four. In practice, for a clinic's site, that means:

• A byline on every health page. Google strongly encourages accurate authorship information where readers would expect it.
• A medical reviewer and a last-reviewed date on condition and treatment pages, and a real review whenever guidance changes.
• Sources for medical statements: clinical guidelines, regulators and peer-reviewed research.
• Nothing that contradicts medical consensus. Google's policies for Search features, such as panels and carousels, don't allow content that runs contrary to scientific or medical consensus.
• A check of your medical regulator's advertising rules and patient-consent requirements, which differ by country, before you publish testimonials, before-and-after photos or outcome claims.

More on what these signals look like on a page: YMYL and E-E-A-T and authorship.

Schema types for clinics and doctors

Google's local business documentation asks for the most specific type, requires name and address, and recommends telephone, url, geo and opening hours. Mark up each location separately, and leave out star-rating markup for reviews of your own clinic, which Google says isn't eligible for review stars. Google also says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special schema: markup describes the clinic, it doesn't earn a place in an AI answer by itself.

What AI assistants need to recommend a clinic or doctor

Asked for "a dermatologist near me who sees children", an assistant combines map listings, reviews, directories and the pages it can read. It can only repeat facts it finds, so state them plainly on your site and keep them identical everywhere: specialties, each clinician's name and qualifications, languages, age groups seen, whether you take new patients, hours, insurance or payment options, and how to book. Condition pages that are clear, sourced and reviewed by a named clinician are also the kind of page an assistant can quote when it answers a health question.

Check that AI search crawlers can fetch the site at all: a firewall or bot protection can block them even when robots.txt allows them. The AI crawler list shows which ones matter.

Common mistakes

• Condition pages with no author, no reviewer and no date.
• A profile per doctor per specialty, or profiles for support staff, both against Google's practitioner rules.
• Clinic names padded with keywords on the Business Profile, such as "City Clinic - Best Skin Doctor".
• Hours, insurance and doctor lists that exist only inside a booking or JavaScript widget.
• Condition text copied from other sites, so the page adds nothing a patient can't already find.
• Expecting FAQ rich results: Google stopped showing them in Search in May 2026.

Google's advertising rules are separate

If you also run Google Ads, healthcare has its own policy. Google restricts ads for prescription drug services, online pharmacies, addiction services and several other categories, requires certification for some of them, and adds rules for particular countries; prescription drug terms are restricted in ads, keywords and landing pages. These rules govern advertising, not organic results, but any page you use as a landing page has to meet them.

Choosing a healthcare SEO company or consultant

• Health content experience: ask who writes the pages and which of your clinicians approves them before they go live.
• Knowledge of your regulator's advertising rules and of patient privacy law, not only of SEO.
• Answers to the questions Google suggests: examples of past work, experience in your country and city, and a promise to share every change they make to your site.
• No guaranteed rankings (Google says no one can guarantee a #1 ranking), no paid links, and no fake or filtered reviews.
• Every account, from the Business Profile to Search Console, kept in the clinic's name.

A general checklist for vetting any provider is in how to choose an SEO agency.