Blog
-
Services on your profile with no page behind them
The verdict List the services on the Business Profile, then find the page on the site for each one. The ones with nothing behind them are your content brief, already prioritised, already in the practice’s own words, and already known to be things they actually do. It is the fastest brief in local SEO and…
-
Predefined first, then custom
The verdict Work through Google’s suggested service options before you write a single custom one. A predefined entry maps to something Google already has a definition for. A custom entry is free text that you have asked a machine to interpret. Both belong on a profile, in that order, and most practices do it the…
-
The services list on your profile should come from your sitemap
The verdict Most clinics type six services into their Business Profile from memory. The list should be generated from the site: every service page and every condition page, predefined entries first and custom ones after, then counted against the competitors in the map pack. It is a mechanical job that takes an hour and almost…
-
The named medical reviewer
The verdict Health content should carry a named clinician who reviewed it and the date they did. That is a different person from the author and a different claim. Schema.org has properties for both, and almost no clinic site uses them, because the reviewer line is the only part of an SEO brief that needs…
-
Thin does not mean short
The verdict Thin content turned up in ten of the last eleven audits I wrote, at wildly different word counts. A 300-word contact page is correct. A 300-word service page is not. A 1,400-word service page can be thinner than either. The number is not the test, and treating it as one is how sites…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…