Spearleaf runs healthcare SEO, Google Maps and AI search for medical practices that want steadier new patients. Every tactic is planned around HIPAA, FTC and licensing board rules, and your attorney signs off.
A healthcare marketing agency gets a practice found by people looking for care, then turns those searches into booked visits. At Spearleaf that starts with healthcare SEO. It covers your Google Business Profile, a page for each problem patients search, honest reviews and the AI answers that read them.
Medical SEO is not a bakery's SEO with a stethoscope added. Google holds health pages to higher trust standards. Clinician bios, credentials and accurate condition pages do real ranking work. Medical practice SEO also runs under rules most businesses never meet.
Word of mouth works. Many owners still want steadier new patient flow from search. Unlike ads, search traffic does not stop the day a budget ends.
Knee pain, a chipped tooth, a laser hair removal series. Each search has its own intent, and the practice that answers it clearly is the one that gets the call.
Each specialty has its own searches, its own rules and its own page. Start with yours.
Hygiene recall, implant and Invisalign searches, HIPAA-aware review replies, and the Google listing that fills open chairs.
Treatment pages built around one entry service, before-and-after consent, and the directories ChatGPT cites for med spas.
Procedure pages, board certification stated correctly, honest galleries, and paid search that sends each ad to its procedure.
Condition pages for back pain, sciatica and auto injury, plus chiropractor SEO for the Google Map Pack.
We also work with mental health practices and multi-location injury clinics. The same method applies, so ask about your specialty on a call.
Five stages in order. Nothing gets built on a listing or a site that has not been cleaned first.
Your Google Business Profile, site health, current map position, listings across health directories and the tags running on your site.
Under Google's practitioner guidelines, a practice and its public-facing doctors may each have a profile. We set them up the way Google allows.
One page for each treatment or condition patients search. Each describes the visit and the plan of care, never a promised result.
A steady review ask with nothing offered in return, and the listings and mentions AI tools read when they name a practice.
Call and booking totals, plus the intake answer to "how did you hear about us", shared as counts only. Impressions alone never count as a win.
Our clients came to us after agencies that didn’t deliver. Here’s what happens when the fundamentals are done right.
Visits from Google for a mental health practice
Open since 2017, averaging about 17 Google visits a month. A few months after our rebuild, the practice asked us to slow down because it couldn’t keep up with the calls.
Google Analytics · Jun vs Sep 2026Visits from Google for a multi-location injury clinic
Struggling in the Southwest Florida market when it hired us, despite a doctor with 30+ years in practice.
Google Analytics · Nov 2025 vs Sep 2026Monthly Google impressions for a family dental practice
An established practice with 35+ years of family dentistry, left on an old WordPress site by its previous agency.
Search Console · 28 days, Jun 2025 vs Sep 2026Searches where the practice now ranks on page one, 250 of them in the top 3
Open since 2017, averaging about 17 Google visits a month. A few months after our rebuild, the practice asked us to slow down because it couldn’t keep up with the calls.
Search Console · Sep 2026These figures measure search traffic and visibility, not patient outcomes or revenue. Each comes from the practice's own Search Console or Google Analytics. Client names are withheld.
Health marketing carries rules a general agency can miss. We build around them from day one, and your attorney has the final word.
Review replies stay general. ADA News warned in March 2025 that disclosing patient details in a reply can bring legal action and fines.
Review requests offer nothing in return and go to every patient. Google's content policy bans incentives and asking only happy patients.
Ad pixels stay off patient portals and intake forms, and analytics never records what a patient types. Google says it offers no business associate agreement for Google Analytics.
Health claims on your pages need real evidence. The FTC's advertising guide says testimonials usually are not enough.
Health ads skip patient-list targeting. Google treats health as a sensitive category in its personalized ads policy, so campaigns run on keywords and location.
Patient photos and stories appear only with signed, written consent that the patient can take back.
ChatGPT names a short list of practices and leans on review and directory sites to build it. In our August 2026 study, ChatGPT cited psychologytoday.com in all 18 therapist markets. For dentists, the most cited site was reviews.birdeye.com, cited in 9 of 18 markets.
Google's AI Overview showed up less often, on 15.3% of dentist questions and 13.9% of therapist questions. Your listings, reviews and pages are what these tools read. Getting named in those answers is the work of AI search optimization. It runs on the same foundation as local SEO.
See which practices it names and which sites it cites. That list is where the work starts.
Pick by your gap. Empty new-patient slots point to search ads first. Patients who stop before they finish point to email first.
Google search ads launch fast. Google says most ads are reviewed within one business day.
Your Google listing takes an afternoon to fix and weeks or longer to climb.
Pages for each problem take months, and AI answers read them too.
Email reaches your own patients right away, once your email service signs a business associate agreement.
Social media builds trust slowly, one short teaching video at a time.
Watch the two-minute version, or read the video page with the full transcript.
You get a written quote after a free audit of your market.
A plastic surgeon in a large metro faces more competition than a solo dentist in a small town.
Each location and each public-facing doctor can carry its own profile, and each adds work.
Duplicate listings, a thin site or tags on intake forms add cleanup to the first 90 days.
Google holds health pages to higher trust standards, so credentials, clinician bios and accurate condition pages do real ranking work. Healthcare SEO also runs under HIPAA and licensing board rules, and the FTC holds health claims to a higher bar.
Expect months, not weeks. New pages usually take months to show up in search. Your market and how much cleanup your listings need both move that timeline.
Cost depends on your specialty, how many locations you run, local competition and how much listing cleanup comes first. The state of your current site matters too. You get a written quote after a free audit of your market.
No, and nobody can honestly promise that. Google sets rankings and changes them without notice. We build the signals Google names for local results: relevance, distance and prominence, which reviews feed.
We keep ad and analytics tags off patient portals and intake forms. Review replies confirm nothing about a patient, and we use only photos and words patients approved in writing. Your attorney signs off on anything that touches patient information.
No. Spearleaf markets dental offices, med spas, chiropractors, mental health practices and injury clinics, and builds plans for plastic surgeons. Each specialty gets its own search terms, rules and pages.
Joshua Albanese is the King of AI SEO and the founder of Spearleaf, an SEO and AI search optimization agency. He has built six service businesses from zero using organic content and SEO, and he delivers every Spearleaf engagement personally.
He wrote this page for owners of dental, med spa, plastic surgery, chiropractic and other medical practices. More about Spearleaf.
Tell us your specialty and the treatments you want more of. We will show you where you rank today and what it takes to be the practice Google and ChatGPT name.
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