A Step-by-Step SEO Diagnostic for Medical Practice Websites You Can Run This Month

This diagnostic is written for practice administrators, office managers, and physician-owners who suspect their website isn't generating consistent new patient inquiries — but aren't sure where the problem lives.

You don't need to be technical to complete most of this audit. Some steps require a free or low-cost crawl tool (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Google Search Console). Others are straightforward manual checks any non-developer can run in a browser.

Run this audit if any of the following apply:

• You launched or redesigned your website in the past 18 months and haven't checked search performance since
• You're on a healthcare-specific CMS (PatientPop, Healthgrades Publisher, WebPT, or similar) and have limited control over your site structure
• Your Google Business Profile impressions have declined over the past 90 days
• New patient volume is flat despite the practice adding providers or services
• A competitor practice opened nearby and your rankings shifted

Run it annually at minimum. Run it immediately after any site migration, CMS update, or URL restructure — these events frequently create indexing problems that go unnoticed for months.

What this audit does not replace: a formal technical SEO audit from a specialist who can interpret crawl data in context. This guide helps you identify where problems likely exist. Knowing the category of a problem is not the same as diagnosing its root cause or fixing it correctly. This guide is educational — not a substitute for professional evaluation of your specific site.

Technical SEO issues are invisible to patients but fully visible to Google's crawlers. A practice website can look polished and still have crawling or indexing problems that prevent pages from ranking.

What to check:

• Crawlability: Open Google Search Console and check the Coverage report. Any pages marked "Excluded" or "Error" need investigation. Pay attention to "Noindex" tags — healthcare CMS platforms sometimes apply these to service pages by default during setup and never remove them.
• Site speed: Use Google PageSpeed Insights on your homepage and on two or three service pages. Mobile scores below 50 are a meaningful ranking disadvantage, particularly for local searches on mobile devices where most patient searches originate.
• Duplicate content: Many healthcare CMS platforms auto-generate provider profile pages, location pages, and service pages with near-identical content. Run a crawl and look for pages with the same or nearly identical title tags — this is the most common structural problem we see on medical practice sites.
• HTTPS and secure forms: Every page should load over HTTPS. Any contact or appointment request form must also be on a secure page. Mixed-content warnings (HTTP assets on HTTPS pages) create both SEO and patient trust issues.
• Broken links and redirect chains: Use Screaming Frog's free version (crawls up to 500 URLs) to identify 404 errors and redirect chains longer than one hop. Redirect chains slow crawl efficiency and dilute link equity.

Healthcare CMS platforms deserve extra scrutiny. Vendor-built sites often prioritize patient portal integration over SEO architecture. The result: auto-generated pages, JavaScript-rendered content that crawlers can't index reliably, and canonical tag configurations that consolidate authority away from the pages you actually want to rank.

If you're on a restricted CMS with limited template control, document what you find here and use it to make the business case for either a platform change or a custom-coded front end.

Most medical practice websites describe services but don't answer the questions patients type into Google before choosing a provider. The gap between "we offer colonoscopy" and "what to expect during a colonoscopy" is where most organic traffic opportunity sits.

The content audit checklist:

1. Do you have a dedicated page for each core service or condition you treat? One combined "Services" page does not rank for individual procedures. Gastroenterology practices, for example, should have separate pages for colonoscopy, endoscopy, GERD treatment, and Crohn's disease management — not a single list page.
2. Does each service page have at least 400–600 words of original, useful content? Thin pages — under 200 words of visible text — rarely rank for competitive healthcare queries. Industry benchmarks suggest that service pages addressing patient questions in depth consistently outperform short description pages.
3. Are your provider bios detailed and individually optimized? Provider pages are among the highest-converting pages on a medical practice site. A bio that lists credentials without describing the conditions the provider specializes in or the patient populations they serve is a missed opportunity.
4. Do you have location-specific pages if you operate multiple offices? Each office location should have its own page with unique content — address, hours, parking, which providers are on-site, and any location-specific services offered.
5. Is your content written for E-E-A-T? Google's quality guidelines for health content are explicit: medical content should reflect first-hand expertise and authorship. Pages without a named, credentialed author and a clear review date are at a disadvantage in healthcare verticals specifically.

After this review, you should have a list of missing pages and a list of existing pages that need to be expanded. Prioritize pages tied to your highest-margin services and the conditions driving the most inbound patient calls.

For most medical practices, the majority of new patient search traffic comes from local searches — either map pack results or localized organic results. Both depend heavily on the consistency and completeness of your business listings across directories.

Check these directories manually or with a citation audit tool:

• Google Business Profile
• Healthgrades
• Vitals
• WebMD Doctor Directory
• Zocdoc (if applicable)
• Yelp
• Bing Places
• Apple Maps
• Facebook Business Page

What to look for: Your practice name, address, and phone number (NAP) must be identical across all listings — not just similar. "Suite 200" on your website and "Ste. 200" on Healthgrades counts as an inconsistency to Google's matching algorithms. Abbreviation differences in street names and phone number formatting differences both create citation noise.

Google Business Profile specifically: This is your most important local listing and deserves its own review. Check that your primary category is accurate ("Cardiologist" not just "Doctor"), your services list is populated, your hours are current including holiday exceptions, and your photo library has been updated within the past 12 months. Profiles with outdated photos or zero practice images consistently underperform in the map pack relative to competitors with complete profiles.

Duplicate listings: Search Google Maps for your practice name and address. Duplicate GBP listings — common after office moves or provider departures — split authority and confuse patients. If you find duplicates, request removal through Google Business Profile support.

Review volume and recency: Note your current review count and the date of your most recent review on each platform. In our experience working with medical practices, review recency has a meaningful effect on local visibility — a practice with 80 reviews but the most recent from 14 months ago often ranks below a practice with 30 reviews and consistent recent activity.

Educational note: This section identifies content patterns that healthcare compliance professionals commonly flag as risk areas. This is not legal advice. Confirm specific obligations with your healthcare attorney or HIPAA compliance officer.

Most medical practice SEO audits ignore HIPAA entirely. That's a problem — because several common website content patterns create real compliance exposure that a website redesign or content push can accidentally introduce.

Content patterns to review:

• Patient testimonials: Written testimonials or video reviews that include identifiable details — diagnosis, treatment type, outcome — may constitute a disclosure of protected health information if the patient authorization language wasn't specific enough. Review existing testimonials against your authorization forms.
• Before/after photos: Particularly common on aesthetic medicine, dermatology, and orthopedic sites. Ensure each photo has a signed, HIPAA-compliant patient authorization that explicitly covers use on a public website and in marketing materials.
• Embedded intake forms: Third-party form tools (Typeform, Google Forms, JotForm free tiers) that collect any patient health information are generally not appropriate for medical websites — most do not offer Business Associate Agreements. Check all forms on your site and confirm the vendor has signed a BAA with your practice.
• Chat widgets: If your website uses a live chat or AI chat tool that can receive health questions from patients, the vendor needs a BAA. Review your chat vendor's HIPAA compliance documentation.
• Analytics and tracking pixels: As of HHS guidance updates in recent years, certain uses of tracking pixels (Meta Pixel, Google Analytics event tracking) on pages where patients enter health information or schedule appointments have been identified as potential HIPAA risks. This is an evolving area — verify current guidance with your compliance officer before your next site update.

During your audit, flag each of these areas as either clean, needs review, or confirmed risk. Don't attempt to resolve compliance questions without qualified legal guidance.

The audit is only useful if it drives decisions. After completing all four layers, score each finding by two dimensions: estimated impact on new patient visibility and effort required to fix it.

Simple prioritization framework:

• High impact, low effort: Fix immediately. Examples: correcting NAP inconsistencies across listings, removing accidental noindex tags from service pages, updating GBP hours and photos.
• High impact, high effort: Schedule and resource properly. Examples: creating dedicated service pages for each core specialty, rebuilding provider bios with structured E-E-A-T content, migrating away from a CMS that prevents indexing of key pages.
• Low impact, low effort: Batch and handle when convenient. Examples: fixing broken internal links, consolidating duplicate blog tags, updating outdated staff photos.
• Low impact, high effort: Deprioritize or defer. Not every finding needs to be acted on in the next quarter.

Document your findings in a simple spreadsheet: URL or element affected, issue category (technical / content / local / compliance), severity, and recommended action. Share this with whoever owns your website — whether that's an internal team, a web developer, or an SEO partner.

When the audit reveals issues beyond your team's capacity: Some findings require specialist skills — crawl data interpretation, technical implementation on complex CMS platforms, or structured citation cleanup across dozens of directories. If your audit produces a list longer than your team can realistically address in 90 days, that's a signal to bring in outside help.

If you'd prefer to have a trained eye walk through your site's data before committing to a full engagement, a professional diagnostic is a low-risk starting point. You'll get a clear picture of where your practice stands — and what's worth fixing first.