A Step-by-Step SEO Diagnostic Framework for Physician Practices

An SEO audit is not a report card. It is a diagnostic — a structured process for identifying the specific gaps between where your practice website ranks today and where it needs to rank to attract new patients consistently.

For physician practices, a complete audit covers four diagnostic domains:

• Technical SEO: Can Google crawl, index, and render your site correctly? This includes page speed, mobile usability, structured data (schema markup), HTTPS security, and crawl errors.
• On-Page Content: Does your content match what prospective patients are searching for? Does it demonstrate physician expertise, credentials, and clinical specificity that satisfies Google's E-E-A-T standards for health content?
• Local SEO: Is your Google Business Profile complete, verified, and actively maintained? Are your Name, Address, and Phone number (NAP) consistent across directories? Do you have a strategy for patient reviews?
• Backlink Authority: Are credible, relevant websites linking to your practice? Medical directories, hospital affiliations, and local business citations all contribute to domain authority.

These four domains interact. A technically clean site with weak content will plateau. Strong content on a slow, mobile-unfriendly site will underperform. Local citations that contradict your website suppress your Map Pack visibility. The audit connects the dots across all four before any fixes are recommended.

Educational note: This guide provides general SEO diagnostic guidance. It does not constitute legal, HIPAA compliance, or medical board advertising advice. Consult qualified professionals for regulatory questions specific to your practice and state.

Technical issues are frequently the fastest path to ranking improvement for medical practices — not because they are exciting, but because they are often overlooked during initial website builds and content migrations.

Core Technical Checks

• Crawlability: Use Google Search Console to confirm your key pages are indexed. Look for crawl errors, blocked resources in robots.txt, and noindex tags applied to pages that should rank.
• Page Speed: Google's Core Web Vitals measure loading speed, visual stability, and interactivity. Medical practice sites frequently fail on mobile due to unoptimized images, render-blocking scripts, and low-quality hosting. Run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights and note your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score specifically.
• Mobile Usability: Most patients search on smartphones. Check for tap targets that are too small, text that requires zooming, and content wider than the screen.
• Schema Markup: Physician and medical practice sites benefit from structured data that tells Google exactly what your practice is, who the doctors are, what services you offer, and where you are located. Missing or malformed schema is a common gap.
• HTTPS and Security: An unsecured (HTTP) medical site erodes patient trust and is penalized in rankings. Confirm your SSL certificate is valid and not expiring.
• Duplicate Content: Practices with multiple location pages or templated service pages frequently generate duplicate content that dilutes ranking signals.

When scoring technical findings, weight issues by their direct impact on crawling and indexing first. A page Google cannot index cannot rank, regardless of how well-written the content is.

Google applies heightened scrutiny to health and medical content. Its Quality Rater Guidelines classify medical practice websites as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) pages — meaning the bar for demonstrated expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness is significantly higher than for general commercial websites.

E-E-A-T Signals to Audit

• Physician bios: Are credentials, board certifications, medical school, residency, and fellowship listed clearly? Thin or missing bios are a recurring E-E-A-T gap on medical sites.
• Author attribution: Are service pages and blog posts attributed to a named, credentialed physician or reviewed by one? Anonymous health content scores poorly.
• Content specificity: Generic condition descriptions copied from health reference sites do not differentiate your practice or rank well. Content should reflect the specific conditions you treat, your clinical approach, and your patient population.
• Keyword alignment: Map your current pages to the terms patients actually search. In our experience working with physician practices, many sites have content organized around internal specialty names rather than the plain-language terms patients type into Google.
• Thin pages: Service pages under 300 words rarely rank competitively for anything beyond branded searches. Identify pages with minimal content that cover services you actively want to grow.

During a content audit, flag each key page with one of three statuses: Optimize (strong topic, weak execution), Expand (right direction, needs depth), or Replace (misaligned with patient intent or practice goals). This triage prevents wasted effort on content that should simply be rewritten from scratch.

For most physician practices, the majority of new patient inquiries come from local searches — either the Google Map Pack or organic results filtered by location. This makes the local SEO diagnostic one of the highest-impact components of the entire audit.

Google Business Profile Checks

• Verification status: Is the profile claimed and verified by the practice? Unclaimed profiles can be edited by anyone and frequently contain errors.
• Category selection: Your primary category should match your specialty precisely. Secondary categories can capture adjacent searches. In our experience, incorrect or generic category selection is one of the most common Map Pack suppressors for physician practices.
• Business hours and contact information: Mismatches between GBP hours and your website hours create patient friction and a trust signal inconsistency.
• Photos and posts: Profiles with recent photos and regular Google Posts demonstrate active management, which correlates with stronger local pack visibility.
• Review volume and recency: Review signals — quantity, rating, and recency — directly influence local rankings. Flag the gap between your current review count and the top 3 competitors in your market.

Citation Consistency Check

NAP (Name, Address, Phone) data must be identical across your website, GBP, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Vitals, WebMD, Yelp, and major data aggregators. Even minor variations — suite number formatting, abbreviations in the practice name — create conflicting signals that suppress local rankings. Pull your citations from a tool like BrightLocal or Whitespark and document every discrepancy.

Multi-location practices face additional complexity: each location needs its own GBP listing, its own location page on the website, and consistent citation coverage. Missing any of these for a satellite office effectively makes that location invisible in local search.

A thorough audit on a physician practice website can surface 20 to 40 individual issues. Without a prioritization framework, practices either fix the easiest things first (often the least impactful) or become paralyzed by the volume of findings.

Score each finding across three dimensions:

• Patient-Acquisition Impact: How directly does fixing this issue affect a patient's ability to find, evaluate, and contact the practice? Issues that block indexing or break contact forms score highest.
• Implementation Effort: Is this a 30-minute fix or a multi-week development project? Quick wins with high impact go first.
• Compounding Effect: Does fixing this issue make other fixes more effective? For example, resolving page speed issues before launching a content campaign means the new content ranks faster.

Priority Tiers

1. Critical (fix within 30 days): Pages not indexed, broken contact forms, missing or expired SSL, GBP listing unclaimed or suspended, major mobile usability failures.
2. High (fix within 60 days): Thin service pages on high-priority specialties, missing physician bios, NAP inconsistencies across top directories, no schema markup, Core Web Vitals failures.
3. Medium (fix within 90 days): Content gaps on secondary services, low review volume relative to competitors, missing location pages for satellite offices.
4. Low (ongoing improvement): Backlink acquisition, content expansion into informational search queries, Google Posts cadence.

Presenting findings in this tiered format — rather than a flat list of 35 issues — gives physician practice administrators and office managers a clear execution roadmap rather than an overwhelming inventory of problems.

Many of the checks in this guide can be run by a practice administrator with access to Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and a basic familiarity with your website platform. The question is not whether you can do a self-audit — it is whether a self-audit will surface all the issues that are costing you patients.

Self-Audit Is Reasonable When:

• Your website was recently built by a reputable agency and has no known technical issues
• You are in a low-competition market and ranking reasonably well for your specialty and location
• You want a quarterly check-in between professional audits
• You are learning SEO basics to better evaluate agency partners

A Professional Audit Is Worth the Investment When:

• Your rankings have dropped noticeably without an obvious explanation
• You recently launched a new website, migrated domains, or changed your practice name
• You are expanding to a new location and want to compete in an unfamiliar market
• Your competitors consistently outrank you despite your practice having stronger credentials
• You are preparing to invest in ongoing SEO and want a clean baseline before spending further

A professional audit goes beyond what surface-level tools report. Log-file analysis, competitor gap analysis, content scoring against search intent, and technical crawl interpretation require expertise that prevents costly misdiagnoses — like investing in content when the real problem is a canonical tag error that is consolidating all your ranking signals onto the wrong URL.

If your practice falls into any of the professional-audit scenarios above, request a professional SEO audit for your practice to get a complete diagnostic with a prioritized action plan.