Healthcare marketing is the work of making a medical practice easy to find and easy to choose for the patients it wants: on Google’s map, in the ordinary results, in the ads above them and in the reviews beside them. Medical marketing differs from marketing for other local businesses in one way that changes everything else. A practice holds patient information, and federal privacy law, state conduct rules and the ad platforms each limit what may be done with it and what may be said.
Advernation is a marketing agency in New York, started in Queens in 2007 by Christopher Maddaloni, a former electrician, and working from 1115 Broadway in Manhattan. We are not lawyers or compliance officers, and nothing here is legal advice. We plan medical SEO and advertising around the rules below, and the practice’s own compliance contact approves what we publish.
Tell us your specialty, your locations and the patients you want more of. We will show you what they see today when they search.
Who this page is for
This page is for private and group medical practices: primary care, specialists, urgent care, physical therapy, behavioral health and the like, from a solo doctor to a group with several offices. Some fields have enough of their own to need a separate page: dental marketing, med spa marketing, plastic surgeon SEO and chiropractor marketing.
How patients search for a doctor
Patients search in four ways, and a practice needs an answer for each.
- By specialty and place: “dermatologist near me”, “pediatrician Upper West Side”. Google answers with a map and three practices. This is the search local work is aimed at.
- By symptom or condition. The person does not yet know which kind of doctor they need. A practice is found here only if its site explains the conditions it treats in plain words.
- By what is practical: who takes their insurance, who is open on Saturday, who has an appointment this week. These details belong on the site and the profile where a patient can find them without calling.
- By name. A patient referred by another doctor, or by a friend, looks the doctor up before booking. What appears, the profile, the photo, the reviews, either confirms the referral or sends the patient elsewhere.
Urgency varies by field. Urgent care is searched on a phone by someone who wants to be seen today. A specialist for a planned procedure is chosen over days, at a desk, by someone reading closely. The keyword research sorts a practice’s services between the two.
The rules that shape medical marketing
Three sets of rules shape medical marketing, and we plan around all three before any page is written.
HIPAA
The Privacy Rule’s general standard is that a covered entity or business associate may not use or disclose protected health information except as the rule permits or requires. It defines marketing as a communication about a product or service that encourages the recipient to purchase or use it, and it says a covered entity must obtain an authorization for any use or disclosure of protected health information for marketing, with exceptions for face-to-face communication and promotional gifts of nominal value. Communications for a patient’s own treatment are outside the definition, unless a third party pays the practice to make them.
In practice that gives us fixed habits. We do not build ad audiences from patient lists. We keep what a patient types into an appointment form out of advertising and analytics tools. We do not use a patient’s story, photo or name without the written authorization the practice obtains. And we ask the practice whether its vendors, including us, need a business associate agreement before we are given access to anything.
State conduct rules
States set their own advertising rules for licensed professionals. In New York the definition of professional misconduct for physicians includes advertising that is false, fraudulent, deceptive or misleading, that guarantees any service, or that makes claims of professional superiority the licensee cannot substantiate. The same list includes advertising that uses testimonials. It also treats revealing personally identifiable facts obtained in a professional capacity, without the patient’s prior consent, as misconduct. We write to the rules of the state where the practice is licensed and ask the practice to confirm them.
Platform rules
Google Ads restricts the use of prescription drug terms in ads, landing pages and keywords, does not allow the promotion of speculative or experimental medical treatments, and allows telemedicine providers in the United States only with an outside certification. Separately, Google lists health among its sensitive interest categories, and advertisers in those categories cannot use advertiser-curated audiences such as customer match or the data segments that used to be called remarketing lists.
Medical SEO on the map: practices and practitioners
Google ranks the three practices on the map mainly by relevance, distance and prominence, and says a better local ranking cannot be requested or bought. For a medical practice the first decision is which profiles should exist at all. Google’s guidelines name doctors among individual practitioners. A doctor may have a profile of their own if they are public-facing and can be reached directly at the verified location during stated hours. Where several practitioners share a location, the practice has its own profile and each doctor’s profile carries only the doctor’s name. A practitioner should not hold several profiles to cover several specializations.
That choice matters because patients search both ways, for the practice and for the doctor, and because doctors move. A profile left behind when a doctor leaves keeps sending patients to the wrong place. We list every profile, decide which to keep, and set the categories, hours, services and photos on each within Google’s rule that the name is the real-world name and nothing more.
The practice website and its pages
A practice site needs a page for each service and each condition it wants to be found for, a page for each provider and a page for each location. A condition page says what the condition is, how the practice evaluates and treats it, and what a first visit involves, in words a patient would use. A provider page states training, board certification and languages spoken, accurately. A location page gives the address, hours, insurance accepted and how to book.
Health pages are read by people making decisions that matter, so each one is reviewed by a clinician at the practice before it is published and, if the practice wishes, carries that reviewer’s name. We make no claims about outcomes. We do not write a page for every nearby neighborhood: Google’s spam policies call pages made to rank for similar searches and funnel visitors to one place doorway abuse.
Patient reviews and replies
Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a local ranking, requires that reviews reflect a genuine experience, and prohibits incentives in exchange for them. A practice may ask patients for a review, with a link or a QR code, and should ask all of them the same way.
The reply is where practices get into trouble. A reply that confirms the reviewer is a patient, or says anything about the visit, puts patient information in public. We treat a patient’s own public comment as no permission for the practice to add to it. We draft replies that thank the reviewer or invite a call to the office and say nothing else. They read the same whether or not the reviewer was ever a patient. The practice approves each one.
Medical marketing beyond SEO
A medical marketing agency has four tools besides SEO, and each has a limit set by the rules above.
- Search ads. They reach a patient at the moment of the search and can be limited to the areas the practice serves. We write them to Google’s healthcare policy and the state’s conduct rules and run them under Google Ads management, from $500 per cycle. Because health is a sensitive category, we plan medical campaigns without re-targeting.
- Pay-per-lead ads. Google’s program lists health categories that include primary care physician, dermatologist, orthopedic surgeon and physical therapist. For most of them it checks the provider and the practice, their licenses and malpractice insurance, and verifies the National Provider Identifier.
- The website. Booking that works on a phone does more for a practice than any design. If the present site cannot do that, we rebuild it under web design.
- Social media and AI search. Social is for showing the practice and its people, never patients without authorization; see social media marketing. Google says its AI features need no special optimization beyond indexed, readable pages, which is covered under AI search optimization.
What we do, month by month
| When | What we do | What you see |
|---|---|---|
| Month one | Audit of the site and of every practice and provider profile. A read for claims the conduct rules would not allow and for tracking tools on pages where patients enter information. The searches patients make, by service and area. | The plan, the list of profiles to keep or close, and what has to be corrected. |
| Months two and three | Service, condition, provider and location pages drafted, reviewed by a clinician, published. Profiles corrected. Listings made consistent. Review requests set up. | Reviewed pages live, reviews arriving, appointment requests counted by source. |
| Months four to six | Answers to patients’ common questions. Links from hospitals, societies and community sources the practice already belongs to. Search ads for chosen services, if wanted. | Positions moving for the services chosen, with new patient counts beside them. |
| Every month after | New pages as services and providers change, review replies for approval, profile upkeep. | One report: calls, booking requests, positions, traffic. |
What it costs and how to judge a quote
Judge a quote by new patients of the kind the practice wants. Take what a new patient brings the practice in a year for a given service, after costs, and divide the monthly fee by it. That is the number of new patients a month the work must add. A healthcare marketing agency that cannot say how new patients will be counted, without touching patient records, has not thought the job through.
We quote monthly SEO plans for medical practices after the free audit, with no contract. Get a quote.
The SEO audit is free. Google Ads management is from $500 per cycle; a cycle is one test of a campaign and the practice sets its length: a day, a week or a month. Our re-targeting service, from $400, is one we do not expect to use for a medical practice, for the reason given above. Prices are kept on the pricing page.
What we need from the practice
We need access to the website, the profiles and any ad account. We need one clinician to review pages and one person to approve replies. We need the list of services, providers, locations and insurance accepted, the state or states of licensure, and the practice’s decision on a business associate agreement. And we need a monthly count of new patients by service, as a number only.
What we can and cannot show
We have not published a result for a medical practice, so we will not quote you one. Our published case studies are from other fields. For a practice we show the audit and the method, and the first reports show whether booking requests moved. We will not promise a position, because Google says no one can guarantee a first place ranking, and we will not promise patient numbers.
Related pages: local SEO services for the map, the New York SEO company page for practices in the city, and the other industries we work with. SEO for law firms is our page for another profession whose advertising is governed by conduct rules.
Ask for the free audit of your practice’s site and profiles. No patient information is needed for it.
Questions people ask
What does a healthcare marketing agency do?
It makes a practice findable and choosable: medical SEO, the practice and provider profiles on Google, reviews, the website and ads. For a medical practice it also has to plan all of that around HIPAA, the state’s conduct rules and the ad platforms’ health policies.
What is the difference between healthcare marketing and medical SEO?
Medical SEO is one part of healthcare marketing: the part that earns unpaid positions on the map and in the results. Marketing also covers ads, the website, reviews and how the practice appears in AI answers.
Is medical marketing covered by HIPAA?
Marketing that uses or discloses protected health information is. The Privacy Rule requires a patient’s authorization for that, with narrow exceptions. Marketing that uses no patient information, such as a page describing a service, is not a use of protected health information.
Can a doctor reply to a Google review?
Yes, with care. A reply should not confirm that the reviewer is a patient or mention anything about a visit. We draft short replies that thank the reviewer or invite a call and that read the same whoever wrote the review.
Can a practice use patient testimonials?
Under HIPAA, using a patient’s information for marketing requires the patient’s authorization. State rules may go further: New York’s misconduct definitions for physicians list advertising that uses testimonials. Ask your counsel before publishing any.
Does re-targeting work for a medical practice?
We plan without it. Google treats health as a sensitive interest category and does not let advertisers in those categories use their own audience lists, which is what re-targeting depends on.
How long does doctor SEO take?
Profile corrections can show within days. Ordinary rankings usually take three to six months. Google’s guidance is that some changes take effect in a few hours and others take several months.
Should every doctor have a Google Business Profile?
Google allows one for a doctor who is public-facing and reachable directly at the location during stated hours. It helps when patients search for doctors by name. Each profile then has to be kept up, and closed or moved when the doctor leaves.
Do you sign a business associate agreement?
That is the practice’s call to make with its counsel. We ask before we start. Our preference is to do the work without access to any patient information, which keeps the question simple.