Medical & Healthcare SEO

Why health content is held to a higher standard

Google calls topics that could significantly affect a person's health, financial stability or safety "Your Money or Your Life" topics, or YMYL. Its guidance on helpful content says its systems give more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T on those topics. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.

Two points from that guidance shape our method. Google says E-E-A-T is not itself a specific ranking factor, so there is no score to chase. And it says trust is the most important of the four, with the other three contributing to it. Medical SEO is therefore mostly the work of making a practice's real expertise and accuracy plain on the page.

Our method

Google's guidance asks three questions of any content: who created it, how it was produced and why it exists. We build the work around those.

1. Audit. We start with what exists: the pages you have, how they are built, what they rank for and where two pages compete for the same search.
2. One topic per page. We map conditions, treatments and services to single pages, so each search has one clear answer on your site.
3. Who. Every clinical page names the practitioner who wrote or reviewed it and links to that person's profile, with their qualifications and registration. Google encourages accurate bylines that link to background on the author. The authors are always real people. Google treats invented profiles and false credentials as deception.
4. How. Clinical pages carry a review date. We do not publish mass-generated copy. Either the practice supplies the clinical wording or we research and write it, and in both cases the practitioner verifies and signs it off.
5. Why. Each page is written to answer the question a patient is asking, in language a patient uses, not to fill a keyword list.
6. Upkeep. Health information dates. SEO is a monthly service, and part of each cycle is checking that practitioner details, hours and clinical pages are still correct.

Local presence

Most patients search for care near them. We manage Google Business Profile for the practice and, where Google's guidelines allow it, for individual practitioners. We keep names, addresses and hours consistent wherever they appear.

We also add structured data. Schema.org has types for physicians and dentists, with properties such as medical specialty, and Google's guidance is to use the most specific business type available. Google does not guarantee that structured data produces any particular search feature. For how this applies to individual practitioners, see websites for doctors and specialists.

Reviews

Reviews matter in local search, and they are the part of medical SEO with the most rules. Google's own policy prohibits offering payment, discounts or free services in exchange for reviews, and prohibits selectively asking only happy customers.

Your profession's advertising rules sit on top of that. How a practitioner asks for reviews and reuses them is a professional conduct question. This is general information, not legal advice. We give guidelines only, make no warranty of compliance, and the practitioner confirms the final rules with the HPCSA or their own legal counsel.

AI search

Patients also ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and similar tools about symptoms and where to go. Our approach is to get core SEO right first, then add a short summary at the top of key pages and questions and answers further down, so the facts about your practice are easy to extract and repeat accurately.

What we measure

We measure medical SEO on enquiries, calls and bookings, not on rankings alone. Tracking for those is set up before the work starts. We make no ranking or traffic guarantees, and nobody honestly can.

What we will not do

Next steps

This page covers what is specific to health. The general service is described on our SEO page, and our wider sector work is in the healthcare overview. To talk about your practice, get in touch. Quotes follow an initial discussion.