A Root-Cause Framework for Auditing Your Dermatology Practice's SEO

This guide is built for dermatology practices that already have a website and a Google Business Profile—but aren't seeing the patient inquiries they expected from search. It's a diagnostic tool, not an implementation checklist. If you want step-by-step execution guidance, the dermatologists SEO resource hub links to a detailed checklist for that purpose.

The audit is structured in five layers, ordered by diagnostic priority:

1. Technical health — Can Google crawl, index, and render your site correctly?
2. Local signals — Is your Google Business Profile complete, and is your NAP data consistent across the web?
3. Content layer — Do you have dedicated, substantive pages for each procedure and condition you treat?
4. Trust and authority signals — Does your domain have enough external credibility to compete in your market?
5. Compliance alignment — Are your testimonials, before-and-after photos, and review responses consistent with HIPAA and FTC advertising guidelines? (This is educational context, not legal advice—consult your compliance counsel for individualized guidance.)

Work through each layer in order. In our experience working with healthcare practices, skipping to content or link-building before resolving technical blockers wastes time—Google won't rank pages it can't properly crawl or render. Use this framework to locate the layer where the breakdown is happening, then use the linked resources to execute the fix.

Technical issues are invisible to most practice owners but visible to every search engine crawler. Before anything else, run a crawl of your site using a tool like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Google Search Console's Coverage report. You're looking for four categories of problems:

• Crawl errors — Pages returning 4xx or 5xx status codes that Google cannot access
• Indexing gaps — Important pages marked noindex, or pages not appearing in Google's index at all
• Mobile usability failures — Text too small to read, clickable elements too close together, content wider than screen
• Core Web Vitals failures — Particularly Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which affect ranking directly on mobile searches

Page speed deserves particular attention for dermatology practices. High-resolution before-and-after photos are common on dermatology websites and are frequently uploaded without compression—a single image can add several seconds to load time. Industry benchmarks suggest that pages loading in under 2.5 seconds on mobile outperform slower pages in local healthcare searches, though results vary by market and competition level.

Check your canonical tags as well. If your site was migrated, redesigned, or built on a theme with auto-generated URLs, you may have multiple URLs serving duplicate content without a clear canonical signal to Google—this splits ranking potential across versions of the same page.

Red flag diagnostic question: If you search site:yourdomain.com in Google and see fewer indexed pages than you have published, something is actively blocking crawl or indexation. That's your first fix—nothing else matters until Google can reliably access your content.

For most dermatology practices, the majority of high-intent search traffic comes from local queries: "dermatologist near me," "acne treatment [city]," "Mohs surgery [neighborhood]." That traffic routes through the Google Map Pack—and your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the primary signal controlling whether you appear there.

Audit your GBP against this checklist:

• Category selection: Is "Dermatologist" set as your primary category? Additional categories like "Skin Care Clinic" or "Medical Spa" should be secondary, not primary.
• Services listed: Have you added individual services (acne treatment, Botox, skin cancer screening, etc.) to your profile? Incomplete service lists reduce relevance for specific procedure searches.
• Photo volume and recency: Profiles with regularly updated photos tend to receive more engagement—add new photos at least monthly.
• Q&A section: Unanswered questions from patients, or questions that have been answered inaccurately by strangers, are a direct trust problem. Audit and seed this section with accurate information.
• Review response rate: All reviews—positive and negative—should receive a HIPAA-compliant response. Never confirm that a reviewer is a patient or reference any treatment details in a public response. (See the compliance resources linked from the hub for full guidance on HIPAA-compliant review management.)

Separately, audit your NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency across directories: Healthgrades, Zocdoc, WebMD, Yelp, and any hospital or medical group directories where your practice is listed. Even minor inconsistencies—suite numbers formatted differently, phone numbers with and without area codes—can create conflicting signals that suppress local rankings. Tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark can surface these discrepancies automatically.

The most common content problem in dermatology SEO is one of scope, not quality: practices have a homepage and a general "services" page, but no dedicated pages for individual procedures. Google cannot rank a single services page for "laser hair removal," "rosacea treatment," "skin tag removal," and "Mohs surgery" simultaneously—each procedure needs its own page to compete in search.

To audit your content layer, build a simple spreadsheet:

1. List every procedure and condition your practice treats
2. Check whether a dedicated page exists for each one
3. For existing pages, verify they contain at least 400–600 words of substantive content (not boilerplate), a clear description of what the procedure involves, candidacy information, and a call to action
4. Check whether each page is optimized for a location-specific keyword where relevant (e.g., "eczema treatment in [city]")

Thin pages—those with fewer than 300 words, no internal links, and no clear patient-facing value—are often worse than having no page at all. They dilute crawl budget and can drag down overall site quality signals. Prioritize rewriting or consolidating thin pages before creating new ones.

A note on AI-generated content: Many dermatology practices have begun populating procedure pages with AI-generated text. Google's quality raters assess whether content demonstrates genuine expertise and is useful to real patients—not whether it was written by a human. Generic AI output that could apply to any practice in any city will not perform. Pages that include your specific protocols, your physicians' credentials, your clinical approach, and local context will.

Cross-reference your content gaps against what competing practices in your market rank for. Google Search Console's Performance report shows which queries are triggering impressions but generating few clicks—these are often your highest-priority content opportunities.

Technical health and local signals get your site into the game. Authority signals determine whether you win competitive positions against established practices and dermatology directories like Healthgrades and RealSelf that dominate many markets.

Audit your authority layer with three questions:

1. What does your backlink profile look like? Use a tool like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to review the domains linking to your site. You're looking for quality over quantity: links from hospital systems, medical associations, local news coverage, and university medical centers carry far more weight than links from generic directories. A profile dominated by low-quality links from link farms is a red flag that previous SEO work may have caused more harm than good.

2. What is your review velocity? Patient reviews on Google, Healthgrades, and Zocdoc function as trust signals both for search algorithms and for prospective patients evaluating your practice. In our experience, practices with a consistent stream of recent reviews (not just a large historical count) maintain stronger local authority than those with a burst of old reviews and nothing recent. Audit the date distribution of your reviews—if most are more than 18 months old, your review acquisition process needs attention.

3. Do you have any toxic or spammy links pointing at your domain? If a previous agency or contractor used black-hat tactics—private blog networks, paid links, mass directory submissions—those links may be suppressing your rankings. A disavow file in Google Search Console can address this, but it requires careful analysis first. Disavowing legitimate links by mistake causes its own ranking damage.

Authority-building takes time. Industry benchmarks suggest 6–12 months before significant authority improvements reflect in rankings, varying considerably by market competition and starting domain health.

Use this root-cause decision tree to prioritize your audit findings. Work top to bottom—each layer assumes the one above it is healthy.

1. Are important pages indexed? Check site:yourdomain.com and Google Search Console's Coverage report. If key pages are missing from the index, fix technical and crawl issues before everything else.
2. Are you appearing in the Map Pack at all? Search your primary procedure keywords with a city modifier (e.g., "dermatologist [your city]") from an incognito window. If you're not in the top 3 local results, Layer 2 (GBP and citations) is almost certainly the root cause.
3. Are you ranking on page 2-3 for target keywords? If you're appearing but not on page 1, you likely have content and authority gaps—Layer 3 and Layer 4 are your focus.
4. Are you ranking but not getting clicks? Check your meta titles and descriptions in Search Console's Performance report. Low click-through rates on ranking pages point to a messaging problem, not a visibility problem.
5. Are you getting clicks but no appointment requests? This is a conversion problem, not an SEO problem—your pages are working, but the patient experience or call-to-action structure on the site needs attention.

Most practices land in scenarios 2 or 3. The good news is that both are addressable with focused work. The risk is treating all five scenarios as equally urgent and spreading effort too thin across all of them simultaneously.

If you want a professional assessment of where your practice's specific visibility breakdown is occurring, our dermatologist SEO diagnostic service starts with a structured audit before recommending any engagement scope.