Strategic by default
You get someone who will tell you that fixing the provider directory template matters more this quarter than a blog program, and then show you the traffic sitting behind that one template.
Industries
Healthcare SEO Services
Patients rarely start with a health system's name. They search a symptom, a procedure, or a doctor they were referred to, then pick from what the first page shows. We build the service-line pages, provider profiles, location pages and the technical foundation that put your organization in that set.
We work with healthcare, B2B and service organizations that want senior SEO judgment and hands-on execution, without the agency overhead, the account layers, or a monthly report that never answers a business question.
What we do
What your fractional SEO covers for healthcare companies
One person owns the whole picture: the technical foundation, how service lines, conditions, providers and locations are structured, the content and who signs it, the authority behind your name, and the tracking that ties a search to an appointment request without putting patient data somewhere it should not be.
Fractional SEO Leadership
Service-line priorities, marketing budget and clinical review time all compete, and someone senior has to arbitrate. That is the seat we sit in: making the call on what gets built this quarter and defending it to whoever funds it.
- Quarterly roadmap by service line
- Priority calls by revenue impact
- Working sessions with marketing and clinical leads
- Agency and web vendor oversight
- Hiring and mentoring your in-house marketer
Technical SEO
Most health-system sites are large, old and stitched together from a CMS, a provider directory and a scheduling tool. The directory is usually the part Google struggles to crawl, which quietly costs you every provider and location page at once.
- Crawl and index audit
- JavaScript rendering checks
- Core Web Vitals
- Schema markup for providers and locations
- Site architecture
- Migration and replatform support
AIO/GEO Strategy
Patients now ask an assistant about a symptom or a procedure before they open Google, and for medical questions those systems lean hard on sources with visible credentials. Getting cited rewards clear, specific, clinically attributable answers, not volume.
- AI answer visibility tracking
- Author and credential markup
- Entity consistency across directories
- Question-led condition content
- Structured data for answers
- Citation source audits
Service & Location Page Strategy
Patients search a condition or a procedure and a city, then decide. A single orthopedics department page cannot rank for knee replacement, sports medicine and every suburb at once, which is what most health-system sites ask of it.
- Service line page architecture
- Condition and procedure pages
- Location and clinic pages
- Provider profile templates
- Internal linking
- Appointment conversion paths
Content Strategy
Content with teeth means the questions patients actually ask before booking: what it costs, whether insurance covers it, what recovery looks like. We build it so a clinician can review and sign it without a two-month delay.
- Topic plan by service line
- Cost and insurance explainers
- Condition and treatment guides
- Medical review workflow
- Author bios and credentials
- Briefs your writers can use
Local SEO
Every clinic, and in many systems every practitioner, has its own Google Business Profile, often dozens of them, half unclaimed. Reviews matter, but responses cannot acknowledge that someone was a patient, which trips up most review software.
- Google Business Profile management at scale
- Practitioner listing cleanup
- Category and service selection
- Compliant review process
- Location page builds
- NAP consistency across directories
Authority & Digital PR
In a space this trust-sensitive, where a link comes from counts more than how many you have. Medical societies, hospital affiliations, residency and university pages, licensing boards and local health reporting carry weight a paid guest post never will.
- Medical society and board profiles
- Hospital and academic affiliations
- Expert commentary for journalists
- Local press and community sponsorships
- Digital PR campaigns
- Toxic link review
Analytics & Lead Tracking
Measurement here carries a constraint other industries do not: standard pixels and call recordings can hand protected health information to vendors with no agreement to hold it. We set up tracking that answers the revenue question without creating that exposure.
- HIPAA-conscious analytics setup
- Vendor and BAA review
- GA4 and Search Console
- Call and form attribution
- CRM and intake system handoff
- Reporting on qualified inquiries
SEO for healthcare companies, run like a senior hire, not an agency retainer
Generic SEO agencies struggle in healthcare because most of what decides a ranking sits outside the usual playbook. Patient searches start with symptoms and insurance questions, not service names. Medical content has to be accurate and attributable to a named clinician before it earns trust. Provider and location pages carry more weight than the blog. Measurement runs into privacy rules most marketing tracking ignores. We work as your senior SEO, owning strategy and doing the work across technical SEO, clinically reviewed content, service-line and location pages, authority, AI search visibility and appointment tracking, measured in qualified inquiries, not sessions.
Still paying agency prices for junior-level work?
Book a callHow this compares
Fractional SEO vs a healthcare marketing agency
Three ways a healthcare marketing team usually solves this, and what each one costs in seniority, speed and attention.
VS
Fractional SEO
Straight to Results →
DiscoveryWe audit and uncover opportunities
Technical FixesWe fix what’s holding you back
ContentContent that ranks and converts
GrowthMore leads and revenue
Senior strategist, hands-on every week
You work directly with a senior SEO who knows your business.
Strategy built around your business
No templates. Just what moves the needle for you.
Full visibility into what’s being done and why
No black boxes. Just clarity.
Agency SEO
The Long Way Around →
IntakeForms, calls, and hand-offs
Strategy MeetingWeeks later, if you’re lucky
Wait & ApprovalsMore delays, more meetings
ReportingData without context
Work handed off to junior account staff
You rarely work with experienced SEOs.
One playbook applied to every client
Cookie-cutter strategies for everyone.
Your point of contact rotates every few months
You start over again and again.
Fractional SEO
Straight to Results →
-
DiscoveryWe audit and uncover opportunities
-
Technical FixesWe fix what’s holding you back
-
ContentContent that ranks and converts
-
GrowthMore leads and revenue
-
Senior strategist, hands-on every week
You work directly with a senior SEO who knows your business.
-
Strategy built around your business
No templates. Just what moves the needle for you.
-
Full visibility into what’s being done and why
No black boxes. Just clarity.
Agency SEO
The Long Way Around →
-
IntakeForms, calls, and hand-offs
-
Strategy MeetingWeeks later, if you’re lucky
-
Wait & ApprovalsMore delays, more meetings
-
ReportingData without context
-
Work handed off to junior account staff
You rarely work with experienced SEOs.
-
One playbook applied to every client
Cookie-cutter strategies for everyone.
-
Your point of contact rotates every few months
You start over again and again.
| Fractional SEO | A traditional agency |
|---|---|
| Who does the work | |
| Fractional SEO: One senior SEO with over a decade of enterprise experience, who plans the work and then does it. Technical, local, content and measurement held in one head, working with your privacy and clinical reviewers directly. | A traditional agency: Usually a junior, briefed secondhand by someone who is not doing the work. |
| Who you talk to | |
| Fractional SEO: The same person every time, on a call every two weeks. | A traditional agency: An account manager who carries your questions to the team and the answers back. |
| What it costs | |
| Fractional SEO: From $2,500 a month, scoped to the work actually in front of you. | A traditional agency: A fixed retainer, billed whether or not the month earned it. |
| How long you are tied in | |
| Fractional SEO: Six months to start, then month to month, with 30 days' notice. | A traditional agency: Commonly a twelve-month agreement, up for renewal before you have had time to judge it. |
| What the first 90 days produce | |
| Fractional SEO: A full SEO and AI-search audit, HIPAA-safe tracking in place, the quick wins already implemented, and a six-month plan you can see. | A traditional agency: Discovery, a strategy deck, and work starting somewhere in month two. |
| How success is measured | |
| Fractional SEO: Appointment requests and qualified calls, measured without sending patient information to ad or analytics vendors. | A traditional agency: Sessions, impressions and keyword positions, sometimes collected with tracking that was never reviewed for HIPAA. |
| What you own | |
| Fractional SEO: The strategy, the accounts and the documentation, all in your name from day one. | A traditional agency: Often held by the agency, and hardest to get back at the moment you want to leave. |
An agency is the better call when you need paid media, creative and SEO run as one programme, or when the volume of execution is past what one senior person can cover. We will say so on the call rather than take the retainer.
One partner. One strategy. One clear path to growth.
Senior expertise and real strategic leadership for healthcare marketing teams, without the overhead, the red tape, or execution that gets watered down before it reaches your site.
Industry challenges
Unique SEO challenges healthcare companies face
Healthcare sits in a trust-sensitive corner of search. Patients look up symptoms, treatments, providers, insurance, locations and reviews long before they call, and Google grades your pages accordingly.
Trust has to be visible
The challenge
Google's quality guidelines put health in the category raters scrutinise hardest, where experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust are weighed most heavily. A treatment page published under "Admin," with no credentials, no reviewer and no sources, gives neither a rater nor a patient a reason to believe it. Most practice and group sites publish exactly that way, because nobody owns the review step.
How we solve it
We build a content model that carries its credentials on the page: a named clinical author, a reviewer with their board certification, review dates, and links to primary sources. The review workflow is designed around how much time a physician can realistically give, which is usually the reason these programs stall.
Departments are not searches
The challenge
Health systems organise their websites the way they organise their org chart: by department, by service line, by facility. Patients search by symptom and body part: why a knee clicks, how long shoulder replacement recovery takes, what an ENT actually treats. A large orthopedics section with real clinical depth behind it loses to a content site that simply answered the question.
How we solve it
We map the conditions and procedures that drive appointments in each service line, then build pages for those alongside the department structure rather than instead of it. Internal linking points a symptom searcher toward the right clinic and the right provider, which is where the department page earns its keep.
Providers are the search term
The challenge
A referred patient searches the doctor's name, not the group's. What usually ranks is a third-party profile the provider never claimed, sometimes with the wrong specialty or a clinic they left three years ago. When a physician joins or leaves, most groups update the staff page and nothing else, so old bio URLs 404 and new ones start from zero.
How we solve it
We treat each provider as an entity to keep consistent: claimed directory profiles, matching credentials and locations, structured data on your own bio pages, and a redirect plan for departures so those URLs keep working. The aim is that your profile is what a patient finds when they search the name.
Measurement you cannot run
The challenge
Standard marketing tracking assumes you can hand everything to a third party, and on patient-facing pages that assumption breaks: an appointment URL containing a condition, a call recording, or a session replay can put protected health information in a vendor's hands. Federal guidance on tracking technologies has been revised once and partly vacated in court since 2022, so the line is genuinely unsettled. A lot of healthcare marketers responded by switching tracking off and losing any way to show what organic search is doing.
How we solve it
We build the measurement setup with your compliance or privacy officer rather than around them: identifiers scrubbed out of URLs and parameters, a check on which vendors will sign a BAA, and conversion tracking kept at the level of counts rather than individuals. You get attribution you can defend internally.
Why healthcare brands choose fractional SEO
A true partner
We work alongside your compliance officer, your clinical reviewers and whoever owns the scheduling system, because a page that ranks and then hands the patient a broken booking flow has not earned anything.
Built for real impact
Success is measured in appointment requests and qualified inquiries traced back to organic search, counted in a way your privacy officer is comfortable signing off on, not in impressions.
Andrew was amazing to work with from the first time we meet. He was very efficient in updating our existing website to create more activity from our website. I highly recommend Andrew to anyone looking to improve their SEO for better results.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Do you have experience with healthcare SEO?
Yes, healthcare and other trust-sensitive, regulated categories are a meaningful part of the work. What transfers between organizations is the mechanics: content that has to carry visible clinical credentials, provider and location pages that matter more than the blog, directory profiles nobody has claimed, and measurement that has to respect patient privacy. What changes is which service lines carry the margin and how much clinical review time you can realistically get.
How is this different from hiring a healthcare marketing agency?
The difference is who does the work. At most agencies the senior person in the pitch sets direction, then hands execution to a junior team with an account manager in between. That is a problem in healthcare, because the person writing about a procedure needs to talk directly to the clinician reviewing it and to whoever owns privacy. Fractional means the senior person is in the account. You buy the hours you need, and you keep the strategy, the accounts and the documentation.
How quickly can healthcare companies see SEO results?
Local work usually moves first: claiming and correcting Google Business Profiles and provider listings can show up within weeks. Condition, procedure and location pages typically take three to six months to settle, and competitive metro service lines can take longer. Clinical review adds real calendar time, so we plan around your reviewers' availability from the start. In the first 30 days expect a prioritised plan, the technical blockers identified, and measurement in place, not rankings.
Can you help healthcare companies show up in AI search results?
Yes, with a caveat we will say out loud: this is early and the evidence base is thinner than it is for classic rankings. What we can see is that for medical questions, AI systems lean on sources with clear authorship, stated credentials and citations to primary research, which is the same work that makes a page trustworthy to a human. We track where you currently get cited for the questions that matter, then build the content, author markup and entity consistency to widen that.
How do you measure success for healthcare SEO?
Appointment requests, calls and qualified inquiries attributed back to organic search, not sessions or keyword counts. The constraint is that this has to happen without shipping protected health information to a vendor, so we set up event-level conversion tracking, review which tools will sign a BAA, and keep condition detail out of URLs and parameters. Reporting is monthly, compares against the same period last year, and leads with what changed for the business.
Can SEO help generate more appointment requests and qualified patient inquiries?
It can, and the honest version of that answer has a limit in it. SEO puts you in front of people already searching for care you provide; it does not create demand that is not there, and no one can promise a number of patients or a clinical outcome. What we can influence is how much of the existing search demand in your area reaches you rather than a competitor or a directory, and whether the page a patient lands on makes booking obvious instead of burying a phone number.