A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework for Treatment Facilities — Run It This Week

This diagnostic framework is written for admissions directors, marketing managers, and treatment center operators who suspect their SEO isn't performing — but don't have a clear picture of why. It's also useful for facilities that recently launched a redesigned website, changed their service offerings, or expanded to a new location and want to verify that search visibility transferred correctly.

You don't need to be a technical SEO expert to work through this guide. Some sections will require access to tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, or a site crawler (Screaming Frog has a free tier that works for smaller sites). Others require nothing more than a browser and your facility's own listings.

A few situations where this audit is especially relevant:

• Organic traffic has dropped — a sudden or gradual decline that doesn't correlate with a known site change
• You're invisible in local search — your facility doesn't appear in Google's map results for relevant searches in your service area
• A competitor recently overtook your rankings — and you're not sure whether it's their growth or a problem on your end
• You just migrated your website — platform changes frequently break redirects, canonical tags, and structured data
• Your paid search costs are rising — when organic visibility declines, facilities often compensate with ad spend, masking the underlying problem

One clarification on scope: this guide covers organic and local SEO diagnostics. It does not cover paid advertising compliance, which has its own regulatory considerations under SAMHSA, state licensing rules (including Florida HB 807 and California DHCS advertising regulations), and platform-specific policies. If your facility runs paid ads, verify those separately with counsel familiar with substance abuse advertising law.

Technical SEO problems are the most common silent killers of rehab center search visibility. They don't announce themselves — they just quietly prevent pages from being indexed, slow down load times until users abandon the site, or break the structured data that helps Google understand your facility's services.

Start with Google Search Console. If your facility doesn't have it configured, that's your first finding. Navigate to the Coverage report and look for:

• Excluded pages — pages Google found but chose not to index, often due to duplicate content, noindex tags, or soft 404 errors
• Crawl errors — 404s and server errors that indicate broken internal links or missing pages
• Core Web Vitals failures — pages with poor loading performance, interactivity scores, or layout stability scores

Next, run a crawl using Screaming Frog or a comparable tool. Export your full URL list and flag:

• Pages returning 3xx redirect chains (more than one hop adds latency and dilutes link equity)
• Missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions
• Pages without canonical tags, or pages with self-referencing canonicals pointing to the wrong URL
• Images without alt text — common on facilities that use before/after gallery content

For structured data, check whether your facility has LocalBusiness or MedicalOrganization schema implemented. Many treatment center websites use generic themes that don't include healthcare-appropriate schema. Use Google's Rich Results Test to verify markup is valid.

Finally, check mobile performance. In our experience working with healthcare sites, treatment center pages are often designed on desktop and under-tested on mobile — despite the fact that a significant share of people searching for addiction treatment are doing so on a phone, often in a moment of acute need. A slow or broken mobile experience is a clinical conversion problem, not just an SEO problem.

Severity note: Indexing errors and Core Web Vitals failures on key admission pages are critical-priority findings. Redirect chains and missing schema are meaningful-friction findings. Isolated missing alt text is low-priority cleanup.

For most treatment facilities, local search is the highest-use SEO channel. When someone searches "drug rehab near me" or "alcohol treatment center in [city]", the map pack results — the three facilities shown before organic listings — capture the majority of clicks. If your facility isn't in that pack, it's worth understanding exactly why.

Google Business Profile Audit

Pull up your Google Business Profile and work through this checklist systematically:

• Primary category: Should be set to a specific treatment category (e.g., "Drug Addiction Treatment Center") — not a generic health category
• Service area vs. address: Residential facilities should display their physical address. Outpatient facilities serving a broader region may benefit from configuring a service area instead of a single address
• Profile completeness: Verify hours, phone number, website URL, services listed, and photos are all populated — incomplete profiles rank lower
• Review recency: A cluster of reviews from two years ago with nothing recent is a ranking signal problem. Review velocity matters, not just review count
• Posts and updates: Inactive profiles signal low engagement to Google's local algorithm

Citation Consistency Audit

Search your facility name in Google and look at the top 10-15 directory listings that appear. Check each one for NAP (name, address, phone number) consistency. For multi-facility operators, this is particularly error-prone — suite numbers, phone numbers, and facility names often vary across listings after rebrands or expansions.

Priority citations for rehab centers include SAMHSA's treatment locator, Psychology Today's treatment center directory, and Healthgrades. Inconsistent or missing listings on these sources affect both local rankings and the trust signals Google uses to validate your facility's legitimacy.

For a deeper breakdown of GBP optimization and local citation strategy for treatment facilities, see our rehab center SEO resource hub.

Severity note: Wrong primary GBP category and NAP inconsistencies on high-authority directories are critical findings. Missing posts and incomplete photo galleries are meaningful-friction findings.

Rehab center content exists at the intersection of two different review standards: Google's quality assessment (which applies E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — especially rigorously to health pages) and regulatory requirements from the FTC, LegitScript, and federal confidentiality rules under 42 CFR Part 2.

Disclaimer: This section is educational and does not constitute legal or compliance advice. Verify your specific obligations with qualified legal counsel familiar with substance abuse advertising law and your state's licensing requirements.

E-E-A-T Content Audit

Review your key service pages and ask:

• Do pages include author bylines from licensed clinicians (LCSW, LMFT, MD, CADC)?
• Is there a clear "About" page that describes your facility's accreditations, licensing, and treatment philosophy?
• Are outcome claims and testimonials qualified appropriately — or do they imply designed to results?
• Does the content cite credible sources (SAMHSA, NIDA, peer-reviewed research)?

FTC and LegitScript Compliance Review

The FTC requires that testimonials and endorsements reflect typical outcomes, not exceptional ones, or include a clear disclaimer. Many treatment center websites use testimonials without these disclosures — this creates both regulatory risk and a trust deficit with Google's quality raters.

LegitScript certification has become an increasingly important trust signal for rehab center websites, particularly for facilities running or planning to run paid ads. Even for organic SEO, having LegitScript certification status visible on your site strengthens E-E-A-T.

Check your contact and intake forms: do they include appropriate confidentiality language acknowledging that communications may be protected under 42 CFR Part 2? This is both a compliance item and a trust signal for prospective patients and their families.

Content Gap Analysis

Map your existing pages against the questions your target patients are actually searching. Common gaps include condition-specific pages (e.g., fentanyl treatment, dual diagnosis), insurance and financing content, and location-specific pages for facilities serving multiple metro areas.

Link authority is the fourth diagnostic layer — and often the most misunderstood by treatment center marketers. The goal of this section isn't to identify every backlink problem; it's to understand whether your facility's link profile is competitive in your market and whether any existing links are actively harming your visibility.

Baseline Authority Assessment

Use a tool like Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush to pull your domain rating or domain authority score. Then look up two or three competing facilities that consistently outrank you for target keywords. The gap between your authority and theirs gives you a rough sense of how much link-building work your SEO strategy needs to prioritize.

Industry benchmarks suggest that treatment center websites in competitive metro markets (major cities, Florida, California) often require meaningful domain authority to rank organically for high-volume keywords — but authority alone doesn't predict rankings. Relevance of linking domains matters significantly in healthcare verticals.

Toxic Link Assessment

Some treatment center websites carry legacy link profiles from an era when the industry used aggressive, sometimes deceptive link-building tactics. If your facility has a backlink profile that includes link farms, offshore directories, or paid link schemes, these can suppress rankings or — in severe cases — trigger manual penalties.

Pull your backlink report and look for links from domains with no topical relevance to healthcare, treatment, or local communities. A pattern of links from gambling, pharmaceutical, or unrelated commercial sites warrants closer review.

Link Gap Analysis

Beyond your own profile, identify the link sources your top-ranking competitors have that you don't. Common high-value link sources for rehab centers include local news coverage, hospital and health system partner pages, state behavioral health agency resource lists, and professional association directories (NAATP, NAADAC).

Severity note: Evidence of manual penalties or a high concentration of low-quality links is a critical finding. A large authority gap relative to competitors is a meaningful-friction finding requiring a sustained link-building strategy.

Running an audit produces findings. Scoring them tells you what to do first. Use this three-tier framework to categorize everything your audit surfaces:

Critical — Address Within 30 Days

• Indexing errors on key service or location pages
• Core Web Vitals failures on admission/contact pages
• Incorrect or missing Google Business Profile primary category
• NAP inconsistencies on high-authority directories (SAMHSA, Healthgrades)
• FTC-noncompliant testimonials or unqualified outcome claims
• Evidence of a manual penalty in Google Search Console

Meaningful Friction — Address Within 90 Days

• Redirect chains longer than one hop on primary pages
• Missing or invalid LocalBusiness/MedicalOrganization schema
• Content pages lacking licensed clinician authorship
• Significant authority gap relative to top competitors
• Missing LegitScript certification disclosure
• Low review velocity on Google Business Profile

Low Priority — Batch and Address Quarterly

• Missing alt text on non-critical images
• Minor duplicate meta description issues on blog or FAQ content
• Incomplete photo galleries on GBP
• Minor citation inconsistencies on low-authority directories

When to Bring in a Professional

If your audit surfaces more than three or four critical findings, or if acting on findings requires technical resources your team doesn't have, professional support typically recovers ground faster than DIY remediation. Treatment center SEO also carries compliance dimensions — HIPAA, FTC, LegitScript, and state-level advertising rules — that benefit from oversight by someone who has worked within those constraints before.

If you'd like a structured assessment of your facility's current SEO health across all four diagnostic layers, you can request a professional SEO audit for your rehab center from our team.