Three clinics, three audits, the same five gaps

I audited three healthcare clinics this year. Two chiropractic practices and a med spa, in three different towns, with three different web builds and no connection to each other.

Five things were missing from all three.

Three sites is a small sample and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But these were not five subtle judgement calls. They were five things that a local business is either doing or not doing, and none of the three was doing any of them. That’s fifteen out of fifteen, and after fifteen years I can tell you it’s not a coincidence. It’s what the standard local build leaves out.

Here they are, in the order I’d fix them.

1. The Google Business Profile map is missing, or it’s the wrong map

None of the three had this right.

One had no map embedded anywhere on the site at all. One had it embedded on the home page and the FAQ page, which are not the pages anybody looks for it on, and the embed was pointing at the wrong location. The third had a map on the contact page showing a different business entirely.

Let me be straight about why this is check one, because the usual justification for it is wrong. Embedding a Google map does not make you rank. I’ve seen that claim made a lot and I’ve never seen evidence for it.

What it does is settle the question of which business you are. Your Business Profile, your footer address, your contact page and the map all need to describe one entity in the same terms. When they don’t, and on one of these three they actively contradicted each other, you have handed Google an ambiguity to resolve, and it may not resolve it your way.

It also just helps the customer, who is trying to work out whether you’re close enough to bother with.

Put it in the footer, on the About page, and on the Contact page. Take it from your own Business Profile listing rather than by searching the address, which is how you end up embedding the neighbour.

2. No schema markup

Absent on all three. On one it was completely absent: nothing, anywhere on the site. On another the service pages had none. On the third there was no LocalBusiness markup on the home page.

This is the one I find hardest to be interesting about, because the advice is boring and correct: a local business should have LocalBusiness markup on the home page with name, address, phone, hours, and links out to the profiles that confirm it’s you.

What I will say is what it’s for, since this gets oversold. Schema doesn’t rank you. It tells a machine, unambiguously, facts that it would otherwise have to infer from your page copy. For a local business the facts that matter most, who you are, where you are and when you’re open, are exactly the ones that are usually sitting in a footer image or a styled div where nothing can read them reliably.

Two notes, since both came up in these audits.

Don’t add FAQ schema expecting to see anything. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites in 2023, and removed them entirely in May 2026. The Search Console reporting for it is being switched off through this summer. The markup still helps a machine read the page and it does no harm, but if somebody is selling you FAQ schema as a visibility win in 2026, they haven’t read the release notes.

Don’t mark up things that aren’t on the page. Reviews you don’t display, hours you don’t publish. It’s a rich results violation and it’s the fastest way to lose the markup entirely.

3. No reviews page on the website

All three had reviews. One had 44 five-star reviews on its profile, one had 93, one had 8.

None of the three had a page on their own website about them.

I recommend one to every local client, and the reasoning is straightforward. The reviews sitting on your Google Business Profile are on Google’s property. They do their job in the map pack and that’s valuable. But they are not content on your site, they are not something you control, and a person comparing three clinics on a laptop is often reading the websites rather than the profiles.

A reviews page carrying real quotes, attributed, ideally with the treatment or service named, and a link out to the profile so it can be verified, is a page that can rank, that you own, and that answers the question every prospective patient is actually asking.

The scale of that is easy to underestimate. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, covering 1,002 US consumers and published February 2026, found 97% read reviews for local businesses, and that 31% will now only use a business rated 4.5 or higher, nearly double the 17% who said so a year earlier. The bar is moving, and quickly.

The number I would put in front of the clinic with 8 reviews, though, is a different one: 74% are looking for reviews written in the last three months, and 32% want something from the last two weeks. That reframes the whole problem. It is not that eight is too few. It is that a review count is a stock and what people are reading is a flow, and a practice with no process for asking has no flow regardless of what the total says.

The gap between 93 reviews and 8 reviews is also worth naming. The clinic with 8 had a perfectly good practice and no process for asking. That is not an SEO problem and I’d be overreaching to call it one, but it’s the single biggest local visibility difference between those three businesses and no amount of work on the website closes it.

4. No video anywhere

None of the three had a YouTube channel. One of them had a video about their practice on somebody else’s channel, which is a strange position to be in. The content exists and the competitor of nobody in particular owns it.

I want to correct something here that I’ve said myself in the past, including in one of these audits. The usual line is that YouTube is mandatory because Google owns it. That reasoning doesn’t hold up. Ownership isn’t why video shows up.

The real reasons are narrower and they’re enough on their own:

• Video appears in search results, in Business Profiles, and increasingly inside AI-generated answers. It’s surface area you don’t otherwise have.
• For a treatment nobody has had before, ninety seconds of the practitioner explaining what happens does more for a booking decision than a page of text.
• It’s the cheapest trust signal available to a small clinic. A real person, in the real room, on camera.

Three videos is enough to start. What the treatment is, what to expect at a first appointment, who you are.

And it is unoccupied ground, which is the part I would emphasise over any of the above. HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac found a video element on just 5.7% of mobile pages. Ninety-four per cent of the web has none. For a clinic competing against four other clinics in the same suburb, that is not a box to tick. It is the one differentiator on this list that nobody in the local market is likely to have taken.

5. The location question was never answered

All three sites were ambiguous about where they operate. Not wrong. Ambiguous. Service pages with no place name anywhere. Contact pages listing four towns. Blog posts targeting one town while the service pages targeted none.

There are two legitimate answers and the sites had chosen neither.

If you want one location, then commit. The service pages carry the town in the URL, the title, the H1 and some of the H2s. Everything on the site points at one place and Google gets a very clear signal.

If you want several, you need a real page for each, with genuinely different content, staff, directions, parking, local specifics. Not a template with the town name swapped out. I’ve seen that build fail more than once, and it fails as a set: forty near-identical pages don’t rank individually and they drag the site down collectively.

The med spa’s contact page named four towns. Nothing else on the site did. That’s the most common version of this. The business knows its catchment perfectly well and the website has never been told.

Pick one. The wrong answer, executed properly, beats no answer.

What wasn’t on the list

The short version

Five gaps, all three clinics, none of them exotic:

None of this is clever. All of it was missing from three out of three practices that were paying for a website and wondering why it wasn’t working.

There is a sixth thing missing from all three, and I left it off the list deliberately because it is a different kind of gap. Not one of them had a page saying which insurers they take or what a visit costs. That does not stop Google understanding the practice, so it never shows up in a crawl. It just quietly costs you the patient who was comparing three clinics and could only find prices on one. I have written about that separately in the sixth gap, and what a clinic should publish about cost.

If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. Local SEO is where most of this sits. If you’re not sure which of several plausible problems is costing you, that’s what an SEO audit is for, and if I look and there’s nothing worth fixing, I’ll tell you that.