SEO for clinics, hospitals and specialist doctors.
Health searches are held to the highest standard of evidence Google applies, and more of them are now answered by AI before anyone clicks. This is how we approach both.
50K+
Search visits to healthcare practice sites in 12 months
12.6M+
Times those sites were shown in Google Search
2M+
Appearances in Google's AI Overviews
7.7
Average search position, weighted by impressions
Healthcare practices only: clinics, hospitals and specialist doctors in India, the UAE and Mauritius. Client search data, Sep 2025 – Sep 2026.
Why health search is different
A wrong answer here can hurt someone. Search treats it that way.
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines class health as a "Your Money or Your Life" topic: one where inaccurate information can cause real harm. Pages in this category are judged on who wrote them, whether that person is qualified, and whether the claims hold up. A well-optimised page with no visible clinical authorship is working against the standard it is measured by.
Health is also where AI answers have moved furthest. Across the practices our team worked on, 16% of search impressions came with an AI Overview, against 0.6% to 3% for product, B2B and local sites. For a patient searching a symptom, the AI answer is often the first thing they read.
So the job is two things at once: rank the pages patients choose between, and be the source the AI answer cites. The same qualities decide both: clear clinical authorship, specific answers, and a practice that Google can recognise as a real, accountable organisation.
What the work involves
Six things we build for a practice. Each one built for how patients search.
Condition pages
One page per condition, written around what patients actually search for: symptoms, causes, tests and when to see a specialist. Every page is reviewed by the treating doctor before it goes live.
Procedure and treatment pages
What the procedure involves, who it suits, what recovery looks like, and the questions patients ask before they book. Each one links to every condition it treats.
Doctor and specialist entities
A profile for each clinician with qualifications, registrations, publications and the conditions they treat, marked up as structured data. Authorship on every page then resolves to a real, checkable person.
Linking conditions to procedures
A fixed internal link model, so a patient reading about a condition reaches the right treatment, and search engines can see the clinical relationships between pages.
Local SEO for each location
Location pages, consistent practice details across directories, and Google Business Profile work for every clinic and city the practice serves.
Patient questions, answered directly
Short, specific answers near the top of each page that an AI Overview can quote, supporting the treatment pages rather than competing with them.
Where we draw the line
Health is where shortcuts cost the most.
It is the one area where a shortcut can mislead a patient, and it is where Google is least forgiving of them. These are the things we will not do on a practice's site, whoever asks.
- Publish medical claims the treating clinician has not reviewed
- Write, buy or incentivise patient reviews
- Mark up review stars about the practice on its own site
- Show before-and-after images without the patient's documented consent
- Promise rankings or patient numbers
- Build near-identical city pages with nothing local on them
Questions
About healthcare SEO.
Tell us about your practice.
Which conditions you treat, where your patients are, and what search looks like for you today. We will tell you what we would fix first.