Medical SEO Services: What a Practice Should Actually Pay For

A practice that buys medical SEO services is usually offered a long menu: audits, content packages, link packages, local listings, reporting dashboards. Some of it brings patients. Some of it is padding, and a few items can put the site or patient data at risk. This article sorts the menu into what is worth paying for and what is not.

I have worked in SEO and digital marketing for more than 16 years, and I work with clients remotely from Bucharest. I charge by the hour rather than selling packages, so I have no reason to bundle things a practice does not need. I am not a lawyer or a compliance officer: anything below that touches patient data is for your own counsel or HIPAA privacy officer to confirm. This is not legal advice.

If you are still choosing who to hire, start with our guide to choosing a healthcare SEO agency. Here the question is narrower: once you are talking to a medical SEO company, which lines of the proposal should you keep?

What medical SEO services should cover

A useful scope has few lines, and each one produces something you can see on the site or in Search Console. This is how I sort the usual proposal items:

The right-hand column is not always useless work. It is work that is easy to sell by volume and hard to connect to new patients. When a proposal is mostly made of it, ask what the practice will have at the end that it does not have now.

Technical work: the foundation you pay for once

Technical SEO is the least visible service and often the best value, because most fixes are done once and keep working. For a medical site, I would expect the work to cover:

• Crawling and indexing: every provider, location and treatment page can be found and is indexed; old campaign pages and duplicates are not.
• Site structure: services, conditions, providers and locations sit in a clear hierarchy, with links between related pages.
• Booking paths: the route from a treatment page to booking works on mobile and does not depend on a script search engines cannot see.
• Redirects after mergers or redesigns: practices change names, join groups and move sites, and every move loses pages if no one maps them.

This is a project, not a subscription. Once the audit is done and the fixes are in, the ongoing technical work is light: checking new pages, watching Search Console and catching problems after updates. If you want an independent view of what is broken before you sign anything larger, a technical SEO review is a sensible first step.

Provider and location pages: where searches become bookings

Patients often search for a person or a place: a type of specialist near them, or a named doctor a friend recommended. Provider and location pages answer those searches, and they are where I would put most of the first budget.

Google’s guidelines for representing your business say “Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners.” A practitioner can have their own Business Profile if “They operate in a public-facing role” and “They can be contacted directly at the verified location during stated hours.” Two more lines matter for practices:

• “A practitioner shouldn’t have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations.”
• “Business Profiles for practitioners may include title or degree certification (for example Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).”

For hospitals and larger groups, the same guidelines say “Publicly-facing departments that operate as distinct entities should have their own page.” A medical SEO company that offers a profile for every specialty a doctor covers is offering something Google’s guidelines rule out.

On the website, structured data can describe the same facts. The schema.org Physician type is defined as “An individual physician or a physician’s office considered as a MedicalOrganization”, with properties such as medicalSpecialty, availableService and isAcceptingNewPatients. Markup only helps if the visible page says the same thing, so I treat it as part of building good provider pages, not a separate product.

Medically reviewed content: fewer pages, better signed

Google’s guide to creating helpful, reliable, people-first content says its systems give more weight to trust for “topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people”. It also says “E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor”, so no plugin or badge adds it. It comes from who writes the page and how carefully.

The same guide asks whether content is “written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well”, and says: “We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it.” It also lists a warning sign: “Are you using extensive automation to produce content on many topics?”

That changes what a content service should look like for a practice:

1. Start with the treatments you offer, not with a keyword list. A page for each main treatment, then supporting answers to the questions patients ask at the front desk.
2. A named clinician reviews every page, and the page links to their provider profile.
3. A review date and an owner for each page, so guidance changes do not leave old advice online.
4. No promises of outcomes, and plain advice on when to seek urgent care.

I would rather a practice publish ten pages its doctors are proud to sign than a hundred that nobody at the practice has read.

Our earlier article on the health content rules Google applies goes deeper into authorship and review. For buying decisions, the point is simple: pay for reviewed pages, not for a word count.

HIPAA-safe tracking: measure bookings without leaking data

Reporting is part of every SEO service, and in healthcare it is where marketing can create a privacy problem. HHS guidance on the use of online tracking technologies says “Tracking technologies on a regulated entity’s user-authenticated webpages generally have access to PHI.” It also covers public pages that let people book: tracking on a page “that permits individuals to schedule appointments or use a symptom-checker tool” may capture details such as an email address “or reason for seeking health care typed or selected by an individual”, and then the HIPAA Rules apply.

Where a vendor does receive PHI, HHS says “Regulated entities must ensure that all tracking technology vendors have signed a BAA”. The page also notes that a court order of 20 June 2024 vacated part of the guidance, the part about HIPAA obligations being triggered by IP addresses combined with visits to certain public health pages, and that “HHS is evaluating its next steps in light of that order.” How your practice applies all this is a decision for counsel.

What it means for the SEO scope:

A provider that wants to add tags before answering these questions is selling reporting, not measurement. Search Console needs no tracking script on your pages, so SEO reporting can start there (clicks, impressions, queries and pages) while the analytics set-up is checked.

What a practice should not pay for

Some services are sold to practices because they are easy to deliver at volume. Google’s spam policies describe the main ones plainly:

• Mass-produced pages. “Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings”. A package of hundreds of auto-written condition pages fits that description.
• Town pages without a clinic. “Doorway abuse is when sites or pages are created to rank for specific, similar search queries.” One page per real location is useful. The same page repeated for every nearby town is not.
• Bought links. The policies list “Buying or selling links for ranking purposes”, including “Exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links.”

Add two more of my own: guaranteed rankings (no one controls Google’s results) and long contracts with no exit before any work is visible. Neither is against a policy. Both move the risk from the provider to the practice.

How medical SEO companies shape the work

There is no standard price for medical SEO services, and I will not invent one. What I can describe are the usual shapes of an engagement, so you can see which one fits:

Ask any medical SEO company which shape it is proposing and why. If every practice gets the same monthly package whatever its starting point, the package was designed for the seller. For help reading proposals line by line, see how to compare SEO quotes.

FAQ

What does a medical SEO company actually do?

It improves how patients find a practice in search: fixing technical problems, building provider and location pages, producing clinician-reviewed content, cleaning up Business Profiles and reporting on bookings. A good one also tells you what it will not do, such as buying links or creating listings Google’s guidelines do not allow.

How long before medical SEO services show results?

It depends on the site’s starting point and how much needs fixing. Technical fixes and better provider pages can show in Search Console sooner than new content, which takes time to be crawled, indexed and trusted. Be wary of anyone who gives a fixed date.

Do medical SEO services need a BAA?

HHS guidance says regulated entities must have a BAA with tracking technology vendors that receive protected health information. Most SEO work never touches PHI, but analytics and tracking can. Ask your counsel or privacy officer to decide before any tags are added.

Should a practice pay for monthly blog posts?

Only if each post answers a real patient question, a clinician reviews it and someone keeps it current. A fixed number of unsigned posts a month is usually the weakest line in a medical SEO proposal.