Author: Mehul Dedhia

Take the business schema off almost any chiropractic website, paste it into the schema.org validator, and watch the business disappear.

Not degrade. Not validate with warnings. Disappear. The type is not recognised, so the entire node is discarded and everything inside it goes with it: the address, the hours, the phone number, the lot.

What actually happens

Both Chiropractor and Chiropractic return an invalid item type. Neither exists. And if you try to keep the word by setting a medical specialty of Chiropractic instead, that fails too, because it is not one of the values in that enumeration.

You can check this yourself without taking my word for it. The MedicalBusiness page on schema.org lists 23 subtypes, and you can read the list in about fifteen seconds: community health, dentist, dermatology, diet and nutrition, emergency, geriatric, gynecologic, medical clinic, midwifery, nursing, obstetric, oncologic, optician, optometric, otolaryngologic, pediatric, pharmacy, physician, physiotherapy, plastic surgery, podiatric, primary care, psychiatric, public health.

Chiropractic is not there. It never has been.

Why everybody gets this wrong

Because the correct-sounding advice leads you straight into it. Google’s own guidance on local business markup says to use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible, giving Restaurant, DaySpa and HealthClub as the examples.

That is good advice. Follow it as a chiropractor and you reach for the most specific type you can think of, which is the name of your profession, which does not exist. The instinct is right and the outcome is a dead block of JSON.

It compounds, because generators and templates copy each other. I was sent a published chiropractic schema example this year, offered as a reference implementation. Its entire business block was invalid. Whoever built it had never run it through a validator, and neither had anyone who copied it since.

What to use instead

To keep the word chiropractic in machine-readable form, do not force it into the type. Attach it as an additional type pointing at a stable public URL for the concept, and state what the practice knows about alongside. That says the same thing without asserting a type that does not exist.

How to check yours in ten seconds

Open the validator at schema.org, paste in your page URL or the JSON block itself, and look at whether a business node appears in the parsed output. If the panel comes back with your organisation missing, that is the failure. It does not announce itself, it just quietly is not there.

Do this before you pay anyone to add more structured data, because adding valid markup next to a dead block leaves the dead block sitting there.

What this buys you, honestly

Not rich results. Nothing here puts stars or an accordion in your search listing, and I have written separately about why FAQ markup will not get you the accordion for the same reason.

What it buys is that a machine reading your site can tell what the business is, where it is, when it opens and who works there, without inferring any of it from prose. That is worth having and it is not worth overpaying for. It is a couple of hours of work that should be correct rather than a line item that recurs monthly.

The short version

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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 markup gets checked against what the page actually says.

Two people need a chiropractor. One has had a sore lower back for four months. The other was hit from behind on Tuesday. Nothing about how those two search is the same, and the second one is usually served by a page written for the first.

What changes when there is an event

The wellness search is open-ended. It repeats over weeks, drifts between symptom language and treatment language, and eventually resolves into comparing named practices. There is no deadline in it.

The accident search starts from a thing that happened. It is time-bound, it often carries a date or a circumstance in the phrasing, and it stops the moment somebody has been seen. It also tends to arrive at unsociable hours, because that is when people sit down and deal with the aftermath of their day.

The consequence for a practice is that ranking well in November does nothing for the person who was hit in October. The wellness half rewards patience. The injury half only rewards being there.

The questions are not clinical

This is the part most clinic pages get wrong. Someone who has been in a collision is not primarily wondering which treatment technique you use.

They want to know how soon they should be examined, whether it matters that they feel fine so far, whether this affects a claim, who pays, whether they need to tell anyone before they come in, and how quickly you can see them. Those are administrative and procedural questions wearing clinical clothes, and a page that answers only the clinical part has answered the small half.

A clinic page that plainly answers the money and process questions will outperform a better-written page that only describes the treatment. That is the same pattern I have seen in every vertical where an event starts the search.

Who you are actually competing with

Not only other clinics. Law firms are chasing the same person, from the same event, often on the same query, and they have far more money.

WordStream’s analysis of 13,474 US campaigns between April 2025 and March 2026 put the median cost per click in the legal category at $9.87, with a median cost per lead of $131.63. That is the price of the attention around a road traffic accident. A practice is not going to outspend that and should not try.

What a practice can do is own the questions the law firms do not answer. A solicitor’s page is about the claim. Nobody is writing the clear, unhurried page about what happens at the examination, why you might feel fine for three days, and what the clinic actually does with an insurer. That page has almost no paid competition because it does not convert a legal lead.

Speed still decides it

Once the page has done its work the enquiry is a phone call, and the phone call is a race. The Lead Response Management study of over 15,000 leads found the odds of qualifying a lead fall by 21 times between a five minute response and a thirty minute one.

That study is about sales leads rather than patients and I am not going to pretend the numbers transfer exactly. The direction does. There is no point winning the search if the enquiry sits in an inbox until tomorrow, which is the argument I make at more length in why a chiropractic practice is two businesses sharing one website.

The short version

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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 you find out whether you are missing the searches or missing the calls.

Most clinic websites have a Services page. On it, in the same list, in the same typeface, sit ongoing wellness care and treatment after a road traffic accident. Those are not two services. They are two businesses, and the only thing they have in common is the practitioner.

Buyer one: slow, considered, reads everything

This is the patient the vertical is written around, and the one I describe in how SEO for a chiropractic practice actually works. Nobody wakes up with a stiff back and books a course of care that afternoon. They put it off for weeks, mention it to someone, look at three practices and read.

Everything that matters for that buyer is on the website. Reviews, conditions, who the clinicians are, what it costs. The map pack gets you into the set of three and the site closes it, which is why the content work pays here in a way it does not for a trade.

Buyer two: fast, prompted, and already halfway through a process

Now take the person who was rear-ended on Tuesday.

They are not weighing up whether to try chiropractic. Something has happened, there is probably a claim attached to it, and somebody has told them to get checked. They may already be talking to an insurer or a solicitor. The window in which they choose a practice is days, sometimes hours, and it closes when someone answers the phone.

Response speed decides more of these than anything on the site. The Lead Response Management study of over 15,000 leads and 100,000 calls found the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 21 times between a five minute response and a thirty minute one. That research is about sales leads rather than patients, and I would not stretch it further than it goes. But the shape is right, and it is the opposite shape to the wellness buyer, where nobody is in a hurry and the reading does the work.

What that does to the website

Four things follow, and they are all things a single Services page cannot do.

The last one is worth sitting with. If a meaningful share of your injury work arrives via a solicitor’s recommendation, then the page those patients land on still matters enormously, and it will look like it produces nothing.

Relevance is the reason this is an SEO problem

Google describes local ranking as relevance, distance and prominence, and defines relevance as how well a business profile matches what someone is searching for. A practice that offers accident care but says so only as one line inside a general services list has told Google almost nothing about that half of the business.

It is not that the injury pages would rank better if they were optimised. It is that on most clinic sites they do not exist, so there is nothing to rank.

Where to start if you only do one thing

Pull the injury work off the Services page and give it its own page, written for someone who had an accident this week rather than for someone considering their options. Then look at what happens when that page’s phone number gets rung at four in the afternoon.

I have written up the query side of this separately in auto accident patients do not search like wellness patients, and the insurer-facing half in workers’ compensation is a page, not a footnote.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the work goes in a practice, and local SEO is where the profile and the pages get treated as one job rather than two.

The post had a title, a target keyword and about eight hundred words. What it did not have was a person. Nowhere on the page, or anywhere the page linked to, was there a name attached to the claims in it.

It had clearly been produced by somebody doing SEO for the practice. The clinic had almost certainly never read it.

Why this is worse than an empty blog

An empty blog says nothing. An unattributed article about a treatment says something specific and dangerous: that this practice will publish clinical material without anyone taking responsibility for it.

A patient reading it either does not notice, in which case they have been given health information by an anonymous source, or they do notice, in which case the effect on trust is worse than the page not existing. There is no version where it helps.

And it is not a hard problem. The clinician is right there. Adding a name takes thirty seconds.

What Google actually asks for

The Who question in Google’s people-first content guidance is direct: do pages carry a byline, where one might be expected, and do bylines lead to further information about the author. On a page about a medical treatment, a byline is very much expected.

The Why question in the same guidance is the sharper one, though. Google calls it perhaps the most important thing to answer about your content: why is it being created in the first place. Content made primarily to rank rather than primarily to help is the thing the guidance exists to separate out, and it is also close to what the spam policies describe as creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating ranking signals.

A post summarising forum chatter about a treatment, with no named clinician, published on a clinic site, fails both questions in the same sentence.

What to do instead

The last one does more work than the other three combined, because it changes what gets commissioned. Nobody asks a copywriter for a forum round-up if a named doctor has to sign it.

The uncomfortable part for agencies

Unattributed clinic content exists because attribution is friction. Getting a busy clinician to review eight hundred words is slower than publishing it, and volume is easier to invoice than sign-off.

I would rather a practice published one post a quarter with a real name on it than twelve a year with none. That is not a content strategy anyone can sell you a package around, which is probably why you do not hear it often.

This is the content half of a job whose other half is the people. Doctor bio pages, and what a clinic has to prove that a plumber does not covers the pages the bylines point at, and there is no point doing either one alone.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors sets out where the effort is worth spending in a practice, and an SEO audit will tell you whether your blog is helping or quietly costing you.

A roofer and a chiropractor sell into completely different levels of scrutiny. Nobody asks where the roofer trained. They ask whether he can come Thursday. A patient deciding on a course of care wants to know who is going to put their hands on their spine, and they will look you up before they call.

That asymmetry should shape the website, and on most clinic sites it does not. Of the eleven audits I have written across every kind of business, author information was missing on the sites where it mattered most.

What Google asks, in its own words

Google’s guidance on people-first content sets out a self-assessment built on Who, How and Why. The Who question is the one clinics fail. It asks: is it self-evident to your visitors who authored your content, do pages carry a byline where one might be expected, and do bylines lead to further information about the author, giving background about them and the areas they write about.

The same page adds the line worth pinning up: 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 four, it says trust is the most important, with the others contributing to it.

That is not a ranking trick. It is a description of what a health website has to do anyway.

Why a paragraph on the About page is not enough

Three reasons, and they compound.

The first is that the About page is not where the reading happens. A patient arrives on a page about the thing that hurts. If the clinician is established only two clicks away, the establishing does not happen.

The second is that one paragraph cannot carry a career. Qualification, where they trained, years in practice, what they actually treat most, what they do not do, professional memberships, any specialist certification. That is a page, and cramming it into two sentences is why every clinic About page reads identically.

The third is that search results increasingly resolve before the click. SparkToro’s clickstream analysis found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026. More of the impression of who you are is now formed from material read off your site rather than on it. Content that only exists as an unlabelled paragraph gets read as belonging to nobody.

What a bio page has to contain

That last one is where the value is, and it is the part that gets skipped. A bio page nothing links to is an orphan with a headshot on it.

What this is not

It is not a ranking play and I am not going to sell it as one. It will not move a map pack position and it does not have a metric attached to it. It is the difference between a site that reads as a practice with named clinicians and a site that reads as a template with a phone number, at the exact moment somebody is deciding whether to let you treat them.

The attribution half of the same job, which is about the content rather than the people, is in who wrote this page and why a clinic has to say. And the machine-readable half, where a credential stops being a sentence and becomes something a search engine can resolve, is in a credential is an entity, not a line of text.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort goes in a practice, and an SEO audit is where you find out whether trust signals or something more basic is the thing costing you.

A Google Business Profile is the best free asset a local clinic has and you do not own any of it. The layout changes without notice, the features come and go, and the whole thing can be suspended by a process you cannot appeal to a person. Building your entire reputation presence on it is a decision most practices have never actually made, they have just never considered the alternative.

Here is what the page on your own site does instead. I have set out the build in why a reviews page you own beats a review widget. This is the argument for bothering at all.

One: it ranks on its own terms

The profile competes in the map pack for queries about your category near your location. That is it. Your reviews page competes in ordinary search results for anything the text on it happens to match.

That matters because patients do not describe their problem the way you do. Your service pages say spinal manipulation and soft tissue therapy. Your reviews say “could not turn my head for a week” and “back pain after a car accident” and “was pregnant and could not sleep”. A hundred patients writing in their own language produce a page that matches queries no clinician would have thought to target.

Two: it carries the words, not just the number

A profile renders as a rating and a count. The words are a click away, behind a panel, sorted by a relevance algorithm you do not control.

On your own page the words are the page. Someone comparing three clinics can read forty accounts of the exact condition they have without leaving your site, which is the moment the decision actually gets made in this vertical.

Three: it survives

Profiles get suspended. Sometimes for a real violation, often for a change of address handled clumsily, sometimes for reasons that never get explained. Reinstatement takes weeks and there is nobody to ring.

If that happens and every review you have ever earned was on the profile, your public evidence goes to zero overnight. If you have republished them on your own site, you still have them. This is the argument I find hardest to get across before it happens and easiest afterwards.

Four: it is readable by everything

Search results increasingly answer the question in place. SparkToro’s clickstream analysis of US Google searches found 68.01% ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024.

More of the decision now happens before anyone reaches your site, which means the material that decides it has to exist somewhere machine-readable on the open web. Text on your own domain is that. A review panel inside a profile is not.

What it will not do, and the trap

It will not put star ratings in your search results, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

Google’s guidance on review snippets is unambiguous: if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness or any other Organization type are ineligible for the star review feature. Your own reviews on your own site are exactly that case. No amount of markup changes it, and adding the markup anyway to see what happens is a manual action risk for a reward that does not exist.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors sets out where the work goes in a practice, and local SEO covers the profile and the pages behind it together, because treating either one on its own is how this gets expensive.

Eight reviews. Ninety-three reviews. Forty-four reviews. Three healthcare practices, same profession in two of the three cases, same year, same kind of town, and no connection to each other.

The clinic sitting on eight had a perfectly good practice. Patients liked it. It had simply never built a habit of asking.

Why I will not dress this up

It is the single biggest local visibility difference between those three businesses, and no amount of work on the website closes it. Not better service pages. Not schema. Not a faster theme. Not me.

Google’s own list of things that improve local ranking includes getting more reviews and responding to them, alongside verifying the business and keeping the information complete. The same page says plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. There is no route around this one. You either collect them or you do not.

The bar moved, which makes it worse

BrightLocal’s February 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 or above, nearly double the 17% who said so previously, and 74% want to see reviews from the last three months.

Read the second half of that carefully, because it is the part clinics miss. Recency is a separate problem from volume. A practice with sixty reviews where the newest is from 2023 fails a test that a practice with twenty-five fresh ones passes. Sitting on a good historical number is not the same as being current.

What a process actually looks like

Not a campaign. A habit, attached to a moment that already happens.

What I can do while you do that

Make the reviews you already have work harder. On all three of those sites they were sitting on Google’s property and nowhere else, which is what a reviews page you own rather than a review widget is for. Twenty-five reviews republished on a page that ranks, in the patient’s own words, beats ninety-three that only exist on a profile.

That is a real piece of work and it is worth doing at any review count. It is just not a substitute for the asking.

The uncomfortable version

If you are choosing this year between paying someone to work on your site and putting a process in place to ask every satisfied patient for a review, and your count is in single figures, choose the second one. Come back to me next year with sixty reviews and there will be considerably more worth doing.

I am aware of how that sounds coming from someone who sells the first thing. It is still true, and the alternative is taking a retainer to work around a problem I cannot reach from the outside.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors is where I set out what actually moves the needle for a practice, and an SEO audit will tell you whether reviews are your constraint or a distraction from the real one.

Three healthcare practices I audited this year had 44, 93 and 8 Google reviews between them. Two chiropractic, one med spa, three different towns, no connection to each other. What they also had in common: not one of them had a reviews page on their own website.

Every review those practices had ever earned lived on a profile they do not own, on a page they cannot edit, ranking for nothing.

Why this matters more in this vertical

Nobody wakes up with back pain and books a course of care that afternoon. They put it off, they mention it to someone, they look at three practices and they read. That is the argument behind how SEO for a chiropractic practice actually works, and reviews are the single heaviest thing on the reading list.

BrightLocal’s February 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 97% read local reviews, and 31% will only consider a business rated 4.5 or above, up from 17%. The reading is not optional and the bar has moved. The question is whether any of that reading happens on a page you control.

Why not a widget

Review widgets are the default answer and I do not use them. Two reasons.

The first is that a widget shows a rotating subset. Five reviews, eight reviews, whatever fits the carousel. If you have ninety-three, the widget is hiding eighty-five of them, and the eight it picked were picked by a script.

The second is technical and it is the one that decides it. Widgets inject their content with JavaScript after the page loads, so the review text is frequently not in the HTML that gets served. You cannot rank a page for words that are not in it. A page carrying a hundred real patient descriptions of back pain, sciatica, whiplash and pregnancy care in plain server-rendered text is a genuinely useful page. The same page with a widget on it is an empty div.

What to put on it

Leave off the rating-only reviews. A five-star rating with no words is worth something on the profile and nothing on the page, because there is nothing to read.

What it will not do

It will not move you up the map pack on its own. Google describes local ranking as relevance, distance and prominence, and is explicit that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. A page on your site is not a lever on the profile.

What it does is different and worth more than it sounds. It gives you a page that can rank for treatment language your service pages do not use, because patients describe their problem in words clinicians do not. And it puts your strongest evidence on the one property nobody can suspend, reprice or redesign underneath you.

It also does something the profile structurally cannot, which I have written up separately in what a reviews page does that your Google profile cannot.

If your number is closer to 8

Then this is the second job, not the first. The review count no amount of website work will fix is the honest version of that conversation, and I would rather have it now than in month six of a retainer.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO covers the profile and the pages behind it, and an SEO audit is where you find out which of the two is actually costing you patients.

I stopped selling guest posting as a service a long time ago. I still write for other people’s sites. Those two facts are not in tension, and the distance between them is the whole of this post.

Read what the policy actually names

Google’s spam policies list, under link spam, advertorials or native advertising where payment is received for articles that include links that pass ranking credit, or links with optimized anchor text in articles, guest posts, or press releases distributed on other sites.

Look at what is doing the work in that sentence. Payment. Optimised anchor text. Distribution at scale. The words “guest posts” appear inside a description of a paid placement, not as a category of their own. The same page names creating low-value content primarily for the purposes of manipulating linking and ranking signals, which is the same idea from the other direction.

Writing an article for somebody else’s audience has never been against anything. It is one of the oldest ways to reach people who do not know you exist. What the industry built on top of it is the problem.

What is being sold

A list of sites with domain ratings next to them. A price per placement. A slot for your keyword-rich anchor text. Frequently a writer who has never used the product and a site whose only editorial policy is an invoice.

That is not adjacent to the policy. It is a line-by-line match for what the policy describes, and the fact that it is marketed as content rather than as links does not change what it is. If the deliverable is measured in links and priced per link, it is links.

The test I use

Would you still write this if the link were nofollowed?

That question sorts almost everything. If you would still write it, the audience is the point and the link is a byproduct, which is the arrangement that has always been fine. If you would not, then the article is the price of the link, and you have bought a link and written six hundred words of receipt.

Since 2020 nofollow has been a hint rather than a directive, which some people read as making the test weaker. It makes it cleaner. The tag was never the thing being judged. Intent was, and the test asks about your intent in the only way that gets an honest answer.

What is left, and it is not nothing

The common thread is that the piece would exist even if links did not. That is also why most content does not earn links, incidentally: not because it is badly written, but because it was made to be linked to rather than to be useful, and the difference is visible from a distance.

Where I will not pretend

Paid placements still move rankings sometimes. That is why the market exists and why the prices have gone up rather than down. I am not going to claim the tactic never works, because anyone who has watched a profile after a campaign knows better.

What I will say is that the downside is not symmetrical. The link is worth something until the day it is not, and on that day the vendor is not the one holding the problem. You are, along with several hundred placements you now have to explain or decide whether to disavow, which is its own bad afternoon. I am not willing to put a client in that position for a gain I cannot guarantee and cannot measure cleanly.

That is a judgement, not a rule, and it belongs alongside the other recommendations I have stopped making. The reason for writing it down is the same one each time: the old advice is in documents clients still have, and quietly changing the template does nothing for somebody holding a proposal from four years ago.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Link building covers the off-site half, including what not to bother with, and an SEO audit is where you find out whether links were ever your constraint.

Three phone numbers. A financing directory had one. A provider directory had another. The number the practice actually answers was neither of them.

I went looking for branded backlinks for a clinic in the Denver suburbs and found almost nothing, which made no sense for a business that had been at the same address for years. Then I searched the old name.

What a rebrand does to a citation profile

The practice had rebranded. Same address, same physician, new name and new domain. Nearly every citation I could find still carried the previous brand and pointed at the previous domain.

Two legacy domains turned up in the wild. One of them still resolves and serves a blank page containing a viewport meta tag and nothing else. Yelp had a page for the old brand marked CLOSED, and no page for the new brand at all. So a person searching the business on Yelp learns it has shut down.

That is the actual cost, and it is not a ranking cost. Google describes prominence as being based on how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. Directory listings are not what that sentence names. What the stale listings were doing was telling humans the business was closed and telling Google that two entities at one address disagreed about who was there.

The fix that beats a subscription

If the practice still controls the old domain, a single 301 redirect to the new one recovers the entire legacy citation trail in one move. Every directory link pointing at the old site starts resolving to the new one, without touching a single listing.

A year of citation management would not do that. It would update the listings it can reach, one at a time, and leave the links pointing where they always pointed.

I could not confirm whether the client still owns that domain, and it is the first question I would ask. It is also the question nobody asks, because “do you still pay for the old domain” does not sound like SEO work.

The subscription trap

Citation services charge monthly to keep listings synchronised across a network. The work is real and the tooling is genuinely useful at a certain scale.

The trap is where it sits in the order. It is sold first because it is easy to price, easy to dashboard, and produces a number that goes up. It is also, on most local sites I audit, the cheapest problem present. A practice with no reviews page, a broken map embed and thin service pages does not get fixed by 87 synchronised listings, and the retainer that buys the listings is the retainer that could have bought the pages.

Directories last, not first.

When citations genuinely matter

Notice what unites the first three. They are all situations where the business has more than one identity in circulation, which is the underlying problem when a single business shows up online as two. Citations are not a ranking asset in those cases either. They are a source of contradiction, and the job is to stop contradicting yourself.

The honest version of the advice

A citation you never built cannot hurt you. A citation you built and abandoned can, because it keeps publishing a version of your business that is three years out of date, and it does it with more confidence than your own website.

So the question is not “how many citations do I have.” It is “what is out there saying something that is no longer true.” Those are different audits and only one of them is worth paying for monthly.

Google’s guidelines for representing your business are written around the same idea: the profile is supposed to describe the business as it actually exists, using the name and details it actually uses. Everything a directory publishes is either supporting that or arguing with it.

The short version

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If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO covers the profile, the listings and the pages behind them, and an SEO audit is where you find out which of those is actually costing you.