Amrut Services

Mehul Dedhia

SEO Consultant · Amrut Services

Author: Mehul Dedhia

  • Location pages belong in the header menu

    The verdict

    If a clinic has location pages, they belong in the header menu, not only in the footer. A footer-only link is the one you add when you want a page to exist without committing to it. Social icons are the opposite case: footer only, always, because they are exits.

    A practice with three sites had all three location pages in the footer and none in the header. The header had About, Services, Blog and Contact.

    Somebody visiting that site has to already know there is more than one location before they can find out there is more than one location.

    Where a link sits changes what it does

    This is not about link equity arithmetic. It is simpler and more behavioural than that.

    A header link is a claim about what the site is. A footer link is a claim that the page exists. Both are links, both are crawlable, and they are not doing the same job.

    Google’s guidance on organising a site is that a logical organisation can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site. A practice that operates from three towns and puts all three in the footer has organised the site as though it operates from one.

    The three things a header location link does

    Why it belongs at the top

    • It answers a question the visitor has immediately. Which of these is near me is often the first thing someone needs to know, and it determines whether they read anything else.
    • It is on every page, in the place people look. So the visitor who landed on a condition page from search can find the right site without going back to Google.
    • It forces the pages to be real. Nobody puts a thin page in their main menu. Promotion to the header tends to be followed by somebody actually writing the page.

    The objection I get

    That the menu is getting long. It usually is, and the answer is not to demote the locations; it is that Services has eleven children and should have four.

    A menu with Home, Conditions, Services, Locations, About and Contact is not long. A menu with nine technique pages listed individually is long, and those are the items that belong one level down.

    The one that goes the other way

    Social icons, footer only. I am fairly firm about this.

    A social icon in the header is a link out of your website placed at the top of every page. The visitor arrived to find out whether you can help with their back; sending them to a feed is not serving that. In the footer they are findable by somebody who is specifically looking, which is the right amount of prominence for a link whose purpose is to leave.

    My note: the exception is a practice where the social account genuinely is the front door, usually because a practitioner posts clinical explainers there with a real audience. That is rare, and it is worth confirming from the analytics rather than from how it feels.

    Anchor text, since the link is being moved anyway

    Use the town. Not “Locations” as a single item with a dropdown of “Clinic 1” and “Clinic 2”, which happens more often than you would think.

    Google says that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page being linked to. The town name is all three, and it is also the word the visitor is scanning for.

    What this is a symptom of

    Footer-only location pages usually mean the pages were built for search and not for visitors. Somebody read that a practice should have a page per town, made them, and put them where they would not interfere with the design.

    That instinct is the tell. If a page is too thin to promote to the header, the fix is the page, not the placement. The floors that apply are in how long a clinic page has to be, and location pages carry the highest one for exactly this reason.

    The short version

    1. Location pages go in the header as well as the footer.
    2. A header link claims what the site is. A footer link only says the page exists.
    3. Promotion to the header tends to get the page properly written.
    4. If the menu is too long, the problem is nine technique pages, not the locations.
    5. Social icons stay in the footer. They are exits.
    6. Use the town name as the anchor, not Clinic 1 and Clinic 2.
    7. A page too thin to promote needs fixing, not hiding.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and local SEO is where the location pages and the profile get looked at together.

  • Twelve posts, three to six links each

    The verdict

    Take twelve posts at random from the blog and count the contextual links in the body text of each. Not the menu, not the sidebar, not the related-posts block. Three to six per post is where a blog is doing its job. On most clinic blogs the number is zero, and twelve posts is enough to prove it without reading a hundred.

    The finding I write up most often on a clinic blog is a count, and the count is usually zero.

    Not a low number. Zero contextual internal links across twelve posts sampled at random, on a blog that has been running for three years.

    The method, and you can run it yourself

    Twelve posts, half an hour

    • Take twelve posts at random. Not the twelve most recent, which are usually the best ones. Sort by date and take every nth post across the whole archive.
    • Count only links in the body text. A link that appears on every post is navigation. It tells you nothing about this post and it is not what you are measuring.
    • Count the destinations separately. Five links that all go to the same service page is one relationship, not five.
    • Note how many point at a service or condition page rather than at another blog post. A blog that only links to itself is a closed loop.
    • Three to six per post is the band. Below three the post is isolated. Above six in a 900-word post and you are usually linking for the sake of it.

    Why a sample rather than the whole archive

    Because the answer does not change and the practice owner needs to see it, not read a spreadsheet about it.

    Twelve posts fits on a page. If eleven of twelve have no contextual links, nobody asks whether post forty-seven was different. The point has landed and the remediation is obvious.

    Sampling also stops the audit turning into a project. An internal linking finding is only useful if somebody acts on it, and a finding that arrives as a 200-row spreadsheet gets filed.

    What the count is actually measuring

    Whether the blog is connected to the business.

    Google says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl, and that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page being linked to. A post with no links out is a post making no claim about what it relates to.

    It is also a reasonable proxy for whether the posts were written by somebody who knows the practice. A clinician writing about a condition they treat will link to the treatment page without being asked, because the link is the natural next sentence. A post bought by the batch will not, because the writer has never seen the rest of the site.

    The result that is worse than zero

    Three to six links per post, all of them to other blog posts, none to a service or condition page.

    That passes the count and fails the purpose. The blog is circulating attention among itself and never handing the reader to the page that describes what you do. I would rather find zero, because zero is obviously broken and this looks fine on a report.

    My note: I do not count links added retrospectively by a plugin that matches keywords. Those tend to point at whatever page happens to own that phrase, which is how a post about neck pain ends up linking to a blog post about office chairs.

    What to do with the number

    Fix the twelve you sampled first. They are a representative dozen and they will teach whoever is writing what a contextual link looks like in practice. Then apply it forward, and only go back through the archive if the blog is small enough that it is an afternoon.

    The pages the links should be pointing at are the ones with a floor under them, which is covered in how long a clinic page has to be. A blog linking into thin service pages does not help much.

    Google’s own guidance on people-first content asks whether readers leave feeling like they need to search again to get better information from other sources. A post that answers a question and then offers no way further into the site is that feeling, made structural.

    The short version

    1. Twelve posts at random, spread across the archive. Not the twelve newest.
    2. Count contextual links in body text only. Navigation is not a finding.
    3. Three to six per post is the band.
    4. Count unique destinations, not raw links.
    5. Zero is the usual answer on a clinic blog.
    6. Links only to other posts is worse than zero, because it passes the count.
    7. Fix the twelve you sampled first. They teach the pattern.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and internal linking is usually the cheapest thing on a site that already has the pages.

  • How long a clinic page has to be, and why I have numbers

    The verdict

    I give clinics enforced minimums. Home 1,200 words, service pages 900 to 1,200, location pages 1,200, About 500, Contact 300, blog posts 900. Google says it has no preferred word count and Google is right. These are not ranking targets. They are the point below which a page has not finished saying what it is for.

    I hand clients a table of numbers, and I know perfectly well that Google does not use them.

    Those two things sit together more comfortably than people expect, but only if you are honest about what the number is doing. It is not a lever. It is a brief.

    The numbers

    What I enforce on a clinic site

    • Home: 1,200 words. It has to say what you treat, where you are, who you are, and what happens when someone gets in touch. That is four jobs.
    • Service and technique pages: 900 to 1,200. A range rather than a floor, because above 1,200 you are usually writing a health article instead of describing your treatment.
    • Location pages: 1,200. The highest floor on the site, because this is the page most often written as a paragraph with a town name swapped in.
    • About: 500. Enough for the practitioners to be real people with credentials attached.
    • Contact: 300. A deliberately low number. This page has one job.
    • Blog posts: 900. Below that the post is usually a note that should have been a section on an existing page.

    Google’s position, and why it does not contradict mine

    Google’s guidance on people-first content puts the question in a list of warning signs that you are writing for a search engine rather than a person. It asks whether you are writing to a particular word count because you have heard or read that Google has a preferred word count, and answers its own question: no, it does not.

    That is correct, and I would not argue with it. There is no threshold at which a page starts ranking.

    What the number does is different. It is a test applied before the page is written, not after. If a practice cannot get to 900 words about a treatment they perform several times a week, the problem is not the writing. It is that nobody has worked out what the page is supposed to tell somebody.

    Where the numbers came from

    Not from a study. From the point in enough clinic audits where a page stopped being able to answer an obvious question.

    The 1,200 on a location page is the clearest case. At 400 words a location page says the town name, the address and a sentence about convenience. At 1,200 it has room for parking, the surrounding neighbourhoods, which practitioners work from that site, and what is different about that location. One of those is a page. The other is a placeholder with a keyword in it.

    The failure mode, and it is a bad one

    Somebody takes the 900 and pads to it.

    That produces exactly what Google’s spam policies describe as scaled content abuse, large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value, no matter how it is created. A padded 900-word page is worse than an honest 400-word one, because it takes longer to read before the reader works out that it says nothing.

    My note: if a page is short and correct, I will sign it off short. The minimum is a prompt to go and find out more, not a licence to write more about less.

    The page where the number is a ceiling

    Contact, at 300. I have seen clinic contact pages carrying the full practice history, three paragraphs on philosophy and a list of conditions. All of it pushes the phone number below the fold.

    That page is measured on one thing. Everything else on it is in the way, and I will cut a contact page down as readily as I will send a service page back for being thin.

    How this fits with the rest of the structure

    Word counts are the last check I run, not the first. The page has to exist and have a job before its length is worth discussing, and on a clinic site that means the condition pages and the hub above them come first. Google’s own advice on organising a site is that a logical organisation helps search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site, which is a structural question, not a length one.

    The short version

    1. Home 1,200, service 900 to 1,200, location 1,200, About 500, Contact 300, blog 900.
    2. Google has no preferred word count and says so directly. That is true.
    3. The number is a brief, not a target. It is applied before writing, not after.
    4. Location pages get the highest floor because they are the most often faked.
    5. Padding to the number is worse than missing it.
    6. Contact is a ceiling at 300. One job.
    7. Short and correct gets signed off. The minimum is a prompt to find out more.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the page inventory gets measured against what each page is for.

  • A licence number is a trust signal

    The verdict

    Publish the licence number. It is the one trust signal on a clinic website that a stranger can verify in under a minute, on a register you do not control, and almost no practice publishes it. Everything else on a bio page is a claim. This is the one thing that is checkable.

    Read a clinic’s About page and count the claims. Years of experience. Passionate about patient care. Committed to the highest standards. Advanced training in several things.

    Every one of those is unverifiable, and a reader knows it, which is why none of them do any work.

    The licence number is different. It resolves to a record on a public register maintained by somebody with no interest in flattering the practitioner.

    Why checkable beats impressive

    Google’s guidance on people-first content is built around who is behind the material. It asks whether it is self-evident who authored the content, whether bylines lead to real background, and states that of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, trust is most important.

    Trust is the one that is hard to assert. You can claim expertise in a sentence. You cannot claim trust; it has to be something the reader can confirm. A registration number is the cheapest confirmable fact a clinician has, and it takes one line.

    The same logic applies to certifications from named bodies. Schema.org has a property for exactly this: hasCredential, a credential awarded to a Person or Organization, expecting a credential rather than a string of text. Stated properly it names the qualification, who holds it, and who issued it, which is three facts instead of some letters after a name.

    The objections, and what I think of them

    “It looks defensive.” It looks the way a professional register looks. In most regulated professions the number is public anyway; you are not disclosing something, you are saving the reader a search.

    “Nobody checks.” Mostly true, and it misses the point. The value is not in the checking, it is in being checkable. A page that publishes a verifiable number reads differently from one that does not, to somebody who will never verify it.

    “It is a privacy issue.” Worth taking seriously for a sole practitioner working from a residential address, where the register may carry that address. That is a real consideration and it is the one case where I would leave it off. It is not a general objection.

    Where it goes

    Placement

    • The clinician’s bio page, near the top. With the qualification spelled out, not just the post-nominals.
    • The byline block on clinical content. Where the author or reviewer is named, which is the moment a reader most wants to know who this is.
    • In the markup, as a credential with its issuing body. Not as a line of prose that happens to contain digits.
    • Not in the footer. It is not a compliance badge, it is part of establishing a person.

    The registers are the underused part

    Most professional registers are public and searchable, and most practices have never linked to their own entry. A link from the bio page to the register record is an outbound link to an authoritative third party confirming exactly what the page claims.

    People are strangely reluctant to link out. On a bio page it is the strongest thing you can do.

    The related work

    This sits alongside the two other things that make a clinician real on a website rather than a name: a proper bio page, covered in doctor bio pages and what a clinic has to prove that a plumber does not, and credentials modelled as entities rather than text, in a credential is an entity, not a line of text.

    All three are unglamorous and none has a metric attached. They are what separates a clinic site from a template with a phone number on it.

    The short version

    1. Publish the licence number. One line, and almost nobody does it.
    2. It is the only checkable fact on a bio page. Everything else is a claim.
    3. Google says trust is the most important of the four. Trust has to be confirmable.
    4. Being checkable matters more than being checked. The page reads differently either way.
    5. Model credentials as entities with an issuing body, not as letters after a name.
    6. Link to your register entry. An authoritative third party confirming your own claim.
    7. The one exception is a home-address practitioner where the register carries that address.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the trust signals get checked alongside everything else.

  • Thirty condition pages with no link pattern

    The verdict

    Thirty condition pages with no link pattern is thirty orphans. Each one should link home with a brand anchor, down into the services that treat it, across to the two or three conditions people confuse it with, and out to the location page. Four directions, decided once, applied to every page. Without it the hub is a list and the pages are dead ends.

    The pages get written and then nothing connects them. Each one links back to the hub because the template does, and that is the whole internal structure.

    A visitor who lands on the wrong condition page has nowhere useful to go. A crawler following links sees a flat list. And the practice has built thirty pages whose only relationship to each other is that they share a folder.

    The four directions

    Every condition page links

    • Home, with a brand anchor. The practice name rather than “home” or “click here”. It is one of the few places where an exact brand anchor is both natural and useful.
    • Down into the services that treat it. This is the important one. The condition page catches the search; the service page describes the treatment. If the condition page does not link to the technique, the visitor has read about their problem and been told nothing about what you do.
    • Across to related conditions. Two or three, chosen by what patients actually confuse, not by anatomy. The person who searched one of them frequently has the other.
    • Out to the location page. Because at the end of reading about their problem the question becomes practical, and that is where the practical answer lives.

    Four links, plus whatever the prose naturally calls for. Not a related-content block with twelve entries, which dilutes rather than directs.

    Why the anchor text carries the work

    Google says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages to crawl, and that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page being linked to.

    Which means a link from a sciatica page to a treatment page anchored “learn more” has spent the link and communicated nothing. Anchored with the treatment’s name, it has told a reader and a crawler what the relationship is.

    The related-conditions links are where this matters most, because they are the only place on the site where one patient-language term sits next to another with a meaningful connection between them.

    The mistake that looks like thoroughness

    Linking every condition page to every other condition page. Thirty pages, twenty-nine links each, in a block at the bottom.

    That is not a link pattern, it is a sitemap repeated thirty times. It tells nothing about which conditions are actually related, it buries the four links that matter, and it is the shape that makes a site look automated.

    Two or three related conditions, chosen deliberately, beats twenty-nine chosen by a plugin.

    How this feeds the rest of the site

    The condition pages are the ones that catch the search, and their job is to route that visitor onward. Google names relevance as how well a business matches what someone is searching for, and a set of internally connected pages about the things you treat is a much stronger statement of that than a services list.

    It also means the service pages finally receive internal links from something other than the menu, which for most clinic sites is the first time.

    Decide it once

    Write the four directions into the page template before any of the pages are written. Retro-fitting a link pattern across thirty existing pages is a day of work that nobody ever schedules, which is how the orphan version becomes permanent.

    The spec those pages should meet is in what a condition page has to contain, and the structure that holds them is the Conditions Treated hub.

    The short version

    1. No link pattern means thirty orphans sharing a folder.
    2. Four directions: home by brand anchor, down to services, across to related conditions, out to the location page.
    3. The link down into the service page is the important one. Without it the visitor learns nothing about what you do.
    4. Related conditions chosen by what patients confuse, not by anatomy.
    5. Descriptive anchors. “Learn more” spends the link and says nothing.
    6. Do not link everything to everything. Two or three beats twenty-nine.
    7. Decide it before you write page one. Retro-fitting never gets scheduled.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and internal linking is usually the cheapest thing on a site that already has the pages.

  • What a condition page has to contain

    The verdict

    A specification, not a suggestion, because condition pages are the ones that get written thin. Nine hundred to twelve hundred words, an H1 naming the condition and the town, a predictable URL, the right two schema types, and a named clinician attached. Any page that cannot meet that is a page the practice does not have enough to say about yet.

    Condition pages fail in a specific way. A practice commits to thirty of them, writes four properly, and then produces twenty-six at four hundred words each because the deadline arrived.

    The specification exists to make that failure visible before it ships rather than after.

    The spec

    What every condition page has to have

    • 900 to 1,200 words. Below that you are describing the condition without saying anything about treating it. Above it you are writing a health information article, which is not your job and not a competition you win.
    • An H1 naming the condition and the place. The condition, then treatment, then the town. It is formulaic on purpose: this page is for a person in a place with a problem.
    • A predictable URL pattern. Everything under one path segment for conditions. Predictable URLs are how the hub stays navigable at thirty pages and how anyone can tell what a page is without opening it.
    • Two schema types, not one. The page itself and the thing it is about.
    • A named clinician. Author or reviewer, with a date, linked to their bio.
    • Links out in four directions. Home, the treating service pages, related conditions, the location page.

    The two schema types and why both

    The page is a MedicalWebPage, defined as a web page that provides medical information, with a medicalAudience property for who it is for.

    The subject is a MedicalCondition, any condition of the human body that affects normal functioning, carrying properties for signs and symptoms, possible treatments and the anatomy involved.

    Those are two different statements. One says what kind of page this is. The other says what it is about. Marking up only the first leaves the actual subject of the page unstated, which is most of the value.

    The properties on the condition type are also a usable content outline. Signs and symptoms, possible treatment, associated anatomy, risk factors, typical test. If you cannot fill several of those in prose, the page is not ready, and that is a better editorial test than a word count.

    What goes in the words

    What it feels like, in the patient’s language, first. What it usually is. What else it might be, including when to go somewhere other than you. What you do about it, linking to the technique pages. How long it typically takes. What happens at the first appointment.

    The section practices resist is when to go elsewhere. It is also the section that does the most for trust, and it is the one a content mill will never write, because it reads like turning work away.

    The rule that keeps it honest

    Everything in the markup has to be on the page and visible. Google’s structured data guidelines are explicit that structured data must be a true representation of the page content and you should not mark up content that is not visible to readers.

    On a condition page that is not a technicality. Marking up symptoms the page does not discuss, or a treatment it does not describe, is publishing medical claims in a layer nobody reads. Do not.

    The page you should not write

    One per keyword variation. Sciatica and sciatic nerve pain are one page. Lower back pain and lumbar pain are one page. If two pages would contain the same advice with different headings, they are one page with two phrases in it.

    That restraint is what separates a condition hub from a content farm, and it is why the list of conditions gets written before any of the pages do. The hub structure is in the Conditions Treated hub almost no clinic has.

    The short version

    1. 900 to 1,200 words. Below is thin, above is a health article you will not win.
    2. H1 names the condition and the town. Formulaic on purpose.
    3. One predictable URL path for all of them.
    4. Two schema types: the page, and the condition. Marking up only the page leaves out the subject.
    5. The condition properties are a content outline. If you cannot fill several, the page is not ready.
    6. A named clinician, with a date, linked to a bio.
    7. Write the when-to-go-elsewhere section. It is the one a content mill never writes.
    8. One page per condition, not per phrase.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and technical SEO is where the markup gets checked against what the page actually says.

  • Sciatica is a query. Adjustment is not.

    The verdict

    Sciatica is a query. Adjustment is not. Patients search for the thing that hurts, in the words they would use to a friend, and clinics publish pages about the techniques they perform. Those two vocabularies barely overlap, which is why a practice can have twelve well-written service pages and rank for almost nothing a patient would type.

    Nobody wakes up and searches for spinal manipulation. They search for the pain down the back of their leg, or the thing their jaw does, or why their heel hurts when they get out of bed.

    Then they land on a website whose navigation says Adjustments, Soft Tissue Therapy, Rehabilitation, and they have no idea which of those is for them.

    Two vocabularies, and only one of them gets typed

    A technique is what the practitioner does. A condition is what the patient has. Schema.org even has a formal type for the second one: MedicalCondition, defined as any condition of the human body that affects the normal functioning of a person, including diseases, injuries, disabilities, disorders and syndromes.

    There is no equivalent significance to the technique from the searcher’s side, because the searcher does not know the technique exists. They are not choosing between manipulation and mobilisation. They are trying to find out whether the thing they have is serious and who fixes it.

    This is not a subtle mismatch that better keyword research closes. It is two different languages describing the same appointment.

    What it costs

    Everything above the point where the patient already knows what they want.

    A site built on technique pages can rank for somebody who has already been diagnosed, already been told what treatment they need, and is now choosing a provider. That is the bottom of the funnel and it is a small fraction of the people who will eventually book.

    Everybody upstream of that, which is most people, is searching a symptom and finding somebody else. Often they find a national health information site, read about the condition there, and the practice that could have treated them never entered the picture.

    The test that settles it for a practice owner

    Two minutes, and it is uncomfortable

    • Write down the last five things patients came in with, in the words they used at the desk, not the clinical term.
    • Search your own site for each phrase. Not Google. Your site’s own search, or a site search in Google.
    • Count how many return a page about that thing. On most clinic sites the answer is zero or one.
    • Now check the navigation. How many of the five appear anywhere in the menu?

    Practices find this genuinely surprising, because the site feels comprehensive. It is comprehensive about what they do. It is silent about what people have.

    The objection, and the answer

    The objection is that condition pages are medical content and a clinic should be careful about publishing it. That is right, and it is an argument for who writes them, not for whether they exist.

    Google’s people-first guidance puts trust at the centre and says that clearly indicating who created content aligns you with experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, of which trust is most important. A condition page written or reviewed by the clinician who treats it, with their name on it, is exactly the shape that guidance describes. A condition page bought in bulk from a content mill is the thing to be careful about.

    What to do with this

    Build the list of conditions first, then the pages, under a parent that holds them together. That structure is in the Conditions Treated hub almost no clinic has, and the argument for condition pages over a services page is in a treatment page per condition.

    Do not delete the technique pages. They still serve the person who knows what they want, and they are what the condition pages link down into.

    The short version

    1. Patients search the symptom. Clinics publish the technique.
    2. The searcher does not know your techniques exist. They are not choosing between them.
    3. Technique pages only reach people who already know what they want. That is a small fraction.
    4. Everyone upstream finds a health information site instead.
    5. Test it: last five things patients said at the desk, searched on your own site.
    6. The medical-content objection is about who writes them, not whether they exist.
    7. Keep the technique pages. The condition pages link down into them.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the gap between what you treat and what you publish gets measured.

  • The Conditions Treated hub almost no clinic has

    The verdict

    Health is the one niche where I do not research the page structure per client, because the answer is always the same: a Conditions Treated hub with a page underneath it for each condition. Everywhere else I work out the supporting pages from the market. Here the structure is mandatory, and almost no clinic site has it.

    For a roofer I will spend an afternoon working out which supporting pages the market actually rewards. Financing, insurance claims, warranty, emergency callout, brand dealer pages. It varies by trade, by town and by ticket size, and copying a fixed list from another niche produces pages nobody wants.

    For a clinic I do not do that research, because after enough of them the answer stopped varying.

    The structure

    One hub page called Conditions Treated. Underneath it, one page per condition you actually treat. The hub links down to all of them, each condition page links across to related conditions and down into the services that treat it.

    That is it. It is not clever and it is not new. It is just absent from most clinic websites, which instead have a Services page listing techniques.

    Why the structure is fixed here and researched elsewhere

    Because the gap between what the practice sells and what the patient searches is wider in health than anywhere else, and it is wide in a consistent direction.

    A roofer sells a roof and the customer searches for a roof. The words match. A clinic sells adjustments, manipulation and soft tissue work, and the patient searches for the thing that hurts. Those vocabularies do not overlap at all, and no amount of optimising a page about a technique will make it match a query about a symptom. Sciatica is a query and adjustment is not covers that split in detail.

    Google names relevance as one of the three things behind local results, defining it as how well a business matches what someone is searching for. A site written entirely in practitioner vocabulary has a relevance ceiling it cannot get above by trying harder.

    Why a hub and not just a pile of pages

    Three reasons, and the third is the one people underrate.

    The hub is where somebody who does not know what their problem is called can find it. A patient with pain down the back of one leg may not know the word sciatica. A list they can scan solves that, and no individual condition page can.

    It gives the condition pages a parent, which stops thirty of them sitting in the site as orphans reachable only from the sitemap.

    And it forces a decision about scope. Building the hub means writing down which conditions you treat, which is a question most practices have never answered in one place. That list then drives the services on the profile, the page inventory, and what the practitioners actually get asked about.

    What makes it worth doing properly

    Health content is judged on who stands behind it. Google’s guidance on people-first content says that if you are clearly indicating who created the content you are likely aligned with the concepts of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and of those, trust is most important.

    Which means a set of thin condition pages written by a copywriter is worse than not having them. This is the structure that most rewards doing well and most punishes doing at volume, and the specification exists precisely so it does not become a content farm. What a condition page has to contain is that specification.

    The argument underneath all this

    I have made the case for condition pages over a services page before, in a treatment page per condition, not a Services page. This is the structural version: not just that the pages should exist, but that they need a parent, a specification, and a link pattern, or they become thirty orphans with a keyword each.

    The short version

    1. Health is the one niche with a mandatory page structure. Everywhere else I research it per client.
    2. A Conditions Treated hub, one page per condition. That is the whole structure.
    3. Patients search the symptom. Clinics publish the technique. The vocabularies do not overlap.
    4. The hub serves people who do not know the name of their problem.
    5. It gives the condition pages a parent instead of thirty orphans.
    6. Building it forces you to write down what you treat, which most practices have never done in one place.
    7. Done at volume it is worse than nothing. Trust is the thing being judged.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the condition list and the page inventory get compared.

  • Two email addresses on one clinic site

    The verdict

    One clinic site I looked at gives a generic practice email on one page and the practitioner’s personal address on another. Neither is wrong. Together they are a question the site refuses to answer, and the same pattern turns up with phone numbers, booking routes and opening hours. These are not errors. They are two true statements that cannot both be the answer.

    An error is when a page says something false. This is different and harder to find, because every individual page is correct.

    Two email addresses, both real, both monitored, on different pages. Which one is the address for this business? The site does not say, and nothing on it can tell you.

    The shapes this takes

    Contradictions I keep finding

    • Two email addresses. A generic one on contact, a personal one on a service page or a bio. Both work. Neither is identified as the primary.
    • A tracking number and the real line. Usually the tracking number on the pages a marketing agency touched and the real one everywhere else. Fine operationally, ambiguous as data.
    • Two booking routes. A form on one page, a third-party scheduler on another, sometimes with different availability.
    • Service areas that disagree. A service page naming towns that do not appear on the profile or in the site-wide markup. Somebody wrote that page knowing the practice takes patients from there, and nobody reconciled it.
    • Hours with an exception nobody carried across. The lunch closure on the contact page and not in the footer, or the reverse.

    Why it is worth fixing rather than shrugging at

    For a person, the cost is small and real: a moment of uncertainty at the point of contact, which is the worst moment to introduce one.

    For anything reading the site mechanically it is worse, because there is no basis for choosing. Google’s structured data guidelines require that your structured data is a true representation of the page content, and the guidelines for representing a business are built on the profile matching the details the business actually uses. Both assume there is a single answer to point at.

    When there is not, whatever gets picked was picked arbitrarily, and it might be the personal email address of a practitioner who would rather it were not on every listing of the practice.

    The fix is a decision, not an edit

    That is why this survives. Nobody at the practice wants to be the one who decides that the generic address is the official one and the practitioner’s is not, or that the tracking number is what goes in the markup.

    So the finding has to be framed as a question rather than a correction. Which of these is the answer? Then publish that one in the four canonical places and let the other exist wherever it is genuinely useful, clearly labelled as what it is: a direct line to a person, not the contact route for the business.

    How to find them

    Search your own site for the things that should be singular. Your domain plus the at sign for email addresses. The area code for phone numbers. The word “booking” or the name of your scheduler.

    Count distinct results. If a category returns more than one, you have found one, and the site has probably carried it for years.

    Service areas are the one people miss, because the contradiction sits between a page and the profile rather than between two pages. Read your service pages for place names and check them against what the profile claims, which is part of why building the service area list properly is worth the half hour.

    Where this sits

    It is the same failure as the address disagreement, one level out: not four copies of one fact, but two different facts competing to be the same field. Your NAP is in four places and they disagree is the version of this with a single right answer. This is the version where somebody has to choose one.

    The short version

    1. Not errors. Two true statements that cannot both be the answer.
    2. Two emails, two numbers, two booking routes, and service areas that disagree with the profile.
    3. Every page is individually correct, which is why nobody finds it.
    4. Machines have no basis for choosing. What gets picked was picked arbitrarily.
    5. The fix is a decision, and that is why it survives for years.
    6. Search your own site for what should be singular. Count distinct results.
    7. Label the survivor. A direct line to a person is fine, if the page says that is what it is.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and an SEO audit is where the contradictions get found and put in front of somebody who can decide.

  • The social profile cross-check

    The verdict

    List every social profile your website links to. List every one your Business Profile links to. They will not be the same list. Ten minutes of reconciliation, and the point is not vanity metrics: these are the public places that confirm you are one business with one name, and half of them are usually orphaned accounts nobody has posted to since 2019.

    Two lists. The icons in your website footer, and the links on your Business Profile. Write both out.

    On most local sites the two lists overlap by about half. There is a platform linked from the site that the profile does not know about, a profile linked from the profile that the site does not mention, and at least one account that has not been posted to in years and still carries the old branding.

    What this check is actually for

    Not engagement. I have no interest in whether a clinic posts on any of these.

    It is about the same thing as the rest of the NAP work: whether the set of public places representing this business agree that it is one business, at one address, under one name. Google describes prominence as resting partly on how many websites link to your business, and your own profiles are a controllable part of that web of references.

    An abandoned account under a former trading name is a reference pointing somewhere else. That is the problem, not the fact that nobody posts.

    How to run it

    Ten minutes

    • Write the two lists. Footer icons on one side, profile links on the other.
    • Search the business name on each major platform. Not just the ones you know about. This is where the forgotten accounts turn up, usually created by a previous marketing agency.
    • Open every one. Check the name, the address if it carries one, the phone, and the profile image.
    • Categorise: active, dormant but correct, or wrong. Only the third category is urgent.
    • Reconcile the two lists. Anything active and correct should be linked from both.

    What to do with the dead ones

    An account you will never post to again but which carries the correct name and details is harmless. Leave it. It is a consistent reference and it costs nothing.

    An account carrying an old name, an old address or an old phone number is the one to deal with. Update it if you can get into it. If you cannot, that is a genuine problem and worth the time to recover access, because an abandoned profile under a previous brand is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a rebrand ambiguous for years.

    Do not delete accounts as a tidiness exercise. A deleted profile is a broken reference wherever it was linked from, and the link equity and the entity signal both go with it.

    Why it matters more now

    Because more of the deciding happens before anyone reaches your site. SparkToro’s clickstream analysis found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024.

    When somebody searches your practice name, what assembles in front of them is drawn from every public surface carrying that name. If three of those surfaces disagree about your phone number, that is what gets assembled.

    The one that surprises people

    A video platform account, usually created years ago, with the old logo and one upload. Clinics forget these exist because nobody thinks of a video account as a profile. It is, it carries a name and a description, and it is frequently the most out-of-date thing representing the business anywhere.

    This is check six of eight in the profile audit order, and it pairs directly with the address work in the four places your NAP disagrees with itself.

    The short version

    1. Write both lists. Site footer, and profile links. They will not match.
    2. Search the business name on every major platform. The forgotten accounts are the point.
    3. This is not about engagement. It is about one business, one name, one address.
    4. Dormant but correct is fine. Leave it alone.
    5. Wrong name or old details is the urgent category. Recover access if you have to.
    6. Do not delete as tidying. A deleted profile is a broken reference.
    7. Check the video account. It is usually the most out of date thing you own.

    If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and local SEO treats the profile, the site and the other public surfaces as one entity problem.