“We need more patients, but nobody can find us online.”
That was a private clinic owner, summing up a conversation we hear constantly. And honestly, it is one of the most common problems facing healthcare businesses across the UK right now.
If you run a medical practice, dental surgery, physiotherapy clinic, or any private healthcare business, you already know the frustration. You have the skills. You have the facilities. You probably have a decent website. But patients are booking with your competitors because they found them first.
That’s a visibility problem. And it is exactly what healthcare SEO is designed to fix.
Here’s what most SEO guides will not tell you: getting found is only half the battle. You also need systems on your website that turn those visitors into booked appointments. Traffic without conversion is expensive wallpaper.
This guide covers what actually works for UK healthcare practices in 2026. No jargon. No fluff. Just practical guidance, realistic costs, and a few things your current agency probably has not mentioned yet.
What healthcare SEO actually means
Healthcare SEO is the process of making your practice visible when patients search for the services you provide. That means appearing in Google results, in local map listings, and increasingly in AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
The fundamentals are the same as any SEO: keywords, content, technical performance, backlinks. But healthcare adds layers of complexity that general SEO agencies often miss.
Google classifies healthcare content as YMYL, which stands for Your Money or Your Life. These are topics that can directly affect someone’s health, safety, or financial wellbeing. As a result, Google holds healthcare websites to a higher standard. Your content needs to demonstrate genuine expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness. Google calls this E-E-A-T, and in healthcare, it matters more than in almost any other sector.
That higher bar is exactly why generic SEO advice often falls flat for medical practices. What works for a plumbing company or an e-commerce store will not necessarily work for a clinic handling patient care. If you are weighing up your broader SEO strategy, understanding this distinction is the first step.
How patients find healthcare services in 2026
Patient search behaviour has changed significantly, and it is still changing.
Google remains dominant. According to Google’s own data, the search engine receives over one billion health-related searches every day. That is roughly 7% of all Google searches globally. In the UK, research from Eurostat found that over 63% of internet users search for health information online. And 94% of patients use online reviews to evaluate providers before making contact.
Those numbers alone should tell you that if your practice is not visible in search results, you are invisible to the majority of potential patients.
But here is what most healthcare SEO guides completely ignore: Google is no longer the only place patients search.
Patients are now asking AI tools for recommendations. Questions like “best physiotherapist near me” or “private dermatologist in Birmingham” are being typed into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude every day. And the practices these tools recommend? They tend to be the ones with strong online signals: good content, solid reviews, clear service descriptions, and consistent information across the web.
This is a new visibility challenge. If AI does not know your practice exists, you are losing patients before they ever reach Google. Early data suggests that traffic from AI platforms converts at significantly higher rates than traditional search traffic, because these visitors arrive having already been recommended your practice. They are not comparing ten options. They are verifying one.
Research from BrightEdge found that AI Overview presence in healthcare grew from 59% to 89% between 2023 and 2025. Interestingly, Google removed AI Overviews entirely from local provider searches like “dentist near me” by December 2025, meaning traditional local SEO still drives new patient acquisition. But for informational and treatment-related queries, AI is increasingly shaping what patients see first.
The practices that will grow fastest over the next few years are the ones visible across both traditional search and AI platforms. Ignoring either one is leaving patients on the table.
Local SEO: where most healthcare practices should start
If you only do one thing after reading this article, sort out your local SEO. For most healthcare practices, this is where the biggest gains come fastest.
Local SEO determines whether your practice appears in Google’s map pack, the three listings that show up when someone searches for a service in a specific area. For searches like “GP near me” or “private dentist Birmingham”, these map results get the majority of clicks.
Google Business Profile is your foundation.
Claim it if you have not already. Fill in every single field. Add your services, opening hours, photos of your premises, and make sure your contact details are correct. This sounds basic, but the number of healthcare practices with incomplete or outdated profiles is remarkable.
A few specifics that make a difference: add your service areas, select accurate categories for your practice type, upload new photos regularly (Google rewards active profiles), and use the posts feature to share updates. If you offer multiple services, list each one with a description. The more complete your profile, the more queries Google will consider showing you for.
NAP consistency matters more than most people realise. NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. These details need to be identical across every directory, listing, and website that mentions your practice. If your Google Business Profile says “Suite 4, 12 High Street” but your website says “12 High St, Unit 4”, that inconsistency weakens your local rankings. Check NHS directories, Yell, Yelp, Thomson Local, and any healthcare-specific directories you are listed on.
Local citations build authority. Get listed on healthcare-specific directories: the NHS website, CQC listings, professional body directories relevant to your specialism, and local business directories. Each consistent mention reinforces to Google that your practice is real, established, and located where you say it is. For practices serving a specific region, a structured local SEO approach covering all of these elements will typically deliver visible results within three to four months.
Getting reviews without breaking rules
Reviews are one of the strongest ranking signals for local SEO. They also directly influence whether a patient chooses you over the practice next door.
But healthcare reviews need careful handling. You cannot offer incentives for reviews. You need to respect patient confidentiality. And for CQC-regulated practices, how you solicit and respond to feedback matters.
The best approach is simple. After a positive interaction, ask patients if they would mind leaving a Google review. Make it easy by sending a direct link to your review page via email or text. Do not push. Do not pester. Just ask.
Responding to reviews matters too. Thank patients for positive reviews. For negative ones, respond professionally, acknowledge their experience, and offer to resolve the issue offline. Never disclose any clinical information in a public response. Ever.
A practice with 50 genuine reviews and a 4.7 rating will almost always outperform a competitor with five reviews and a perfect 5.0. Volume and authenticity matter.
Content that builds patient trust
Patients searching for healthcare information are often anxious. They want answers, reassurance, and evidence that you know what you are talking about.
This is where content earns its keep.
The mistake most healthcare websites make is talking about themselves. Pages full of “we are passionate about patient care” and “our state-of-the-art facilities” do nothing for someone googling “what happens during a root canal” at 11pm.
Write content that answers the questions your patients actually ask. Your reception team hears these questions every day. What does the procedure involve? How long is recovery? Will it hurt? How much does it cost? What should I expect at my first appointment?
Each of those questions is a content opportunity, and each piece of content that answers them well does three things:
- It brings patients to your website through search
- Builds trust before they ever pick up the phone
- Signals to Google that your practice has genuine expertise in your field.
Some practical examples.
A dental practice could create pages covering “what to expect during a root canal”, “how long do dental implants last”, and “is Invisalign worth it for adults”.
A physiotherapy clinic might write about “exercises for lower back pain”, “how to recover from a torn ACL”, and “when to see a physio vs a GP”.
A private GP practice could cover “private GP costs in the UK”, “how quickly can I get an appointment”, and “what does a health check include”.
Each of these targets a real search query that real patients are typing into Google right now.
The compliance balance is worth acknowledging. Healthcare content needs to be accurate without making clinical promises. You can explain procedures, share general recovery timelines, and describe what patients typically experience. You should avoid guaranteeing outcomes, making comparisons with specific competitors, or using before-and-after imagery without proper context and consent.
Creating this content consistently is the hard part. Most practices start strong and then run out of steam by month three. If that sounds familiar, outsourcing your content production to a team that understands healthcare can keep the momentum going without adding to your workload.
Free resource: Healthcare content checklist A practical checklist covering what every healthcare website should include to build patient trust and meet E-E-A-T requirements. Covers service pages, FAQ content, trust signals, and compliance basics.
Technical SEO for healthcare websites
Technical SEO is the stuff happening behind the scenes that patients never notice, until something goes wrong.
Site speed is the obvious one. If your website takes more than three seconds to load on a mobile phone, you are losing patients. They will hit the back button and book with whoever loads faster. Google knows this, which is why page speed directly affects your rankings.
Mobile performance is critical. The majority of healthcare searches happen on mobile devices. If your site looks brilliant on a desktop but requires pinching and zooming on a phone, you have a problem. Test your site on your own phone right now. If it is frustrating to use, your patients think so too.
HTTPS is non-negotiable. If your website still uses HTTP instead of HTTPS, fix it today. Google flags non-HTTPS sites as “not secure”, which is the last thing a healthcare practice wants patients to see. Beyond rankings, it is a basic trust signal.
Accessibility deserves a mention too. Healthcare websites should be usable by people with visual impairments, motor difficulties, and other accessibility needs. Proper heading structures, alt text on images, and keyboard navigation are not optional extras. They are good practice and they help SEO. If your website structure is not built with accessibility in mind, it is worth addressing sooner rather than later.
Building authority through links
Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to yours. In SEO terms, they act as votes of confidence. The more reputable sites that link to your practice, the more authority Google assigns to your website.
In healthcare, backlinks carry extra weight because of the YMYL classification. Google wants to see that trusted sources vouch for your content before it will rank you for health-related queries.
But here is what a lot of practices get wrong: not all links are equal. Relevancy matters enormously.
A link from a healthcare directory, a medical publication, or a professional body carries far more weight than a listing on a random business directory. Google evaluates the relationship between the linking site and your site. A dental blog linking to a dental practice makes sense. A technology blog linking to a dental practice does not. The link might not hurt you, but it will not help much either.
A practice with 20 relevant, high-quality healthcare links will consistently outperform one with 200 irrelevant ones. Quality over quantity, every time.
Whatever you do, avoid buying cheap backlinks from Fiverr or similar marketplaces. We see this constantly with businesses that come to us after previous agency experiences. They have paid for hundreds of links that turned out to be from spammy, no-follow, blacklisted sites that never even get indexed by Google. That money is gone, and in some cases those links can actively damage your rankings. If you are considering outsourcing your link building, make sure whoever does it understands healthcare specifically. The opportunities are different, the standards are higher, and getting it wrong costs more.
Healthcare-specific link opportunities
The good news is healthcare practices have link building opportunities that most other businesses do not.
Professional associations and directories are a starting point. CQC listings, GMC registration, relevant Royal College directories, and NHS directories all provide authoritative links. If you are a member of a professional body, check whether your membership includes a directory listing with a link back to your website.
Healthcare publications and trade media are another avenue. Offer expert commentary on health topics in the news. Position your clinicians as sources for journalists covering health stories. Most local and national publications are actively looking for qualified medical professionals to quote.
Community health partnerships can generate links too. Charity involvement, local health initiatives, university partnerships, and speaking at healthcare events all create natural linking opportunities that also build your practice’s reputation offline.
Measuring healthcare SEO results
This is where most healthcare SEO campaigns go wrong. Not in the execution, but in how success gets measured.
If your current agency sends you a monthly report showing keyword rankings and traffic numbers, and that is all, you are measuring the wrong things.
Rankings and traffic tell you whether people can find your website. They tell you nothing about whether those people are becoming patients. The metrics that actually matter for a healthcare practice are enquiries, appointment bookings, phone calls, and form submissions. These are the numbers that connect directly to revenue.
Attribution is important too. You need to know whether a new patient found you through Google search, a local map listing, an AI recommendation, or a paid advert. Without this information, you cannot tell which parts of your marketing are working and which are burning money.
GA4 is the standard analytics tool, and it is powerful. It is also complex enough to make most practice managers want to close the browser tab immediately. Most healthcare businesses set it up and then never look at it, or look at the wrong reports and draw the wrong conclusions.
The better approach is a custom reporting dashboard that strips away the complexity and focuses on the metrics that matter for your specific practice. Something that tells you, in plain language, how many new patient enquiries came through this month, where they came from, and what that means for your growth. Good agencies build these dashboards for their clients so that marketing decisions are based on real data rather than guesswork. Understanding how this fits into your broader marketing funnel is essential for getting measurement right.
As for timelines: expect three to six months for initial movement in rankings, and six to twelve months for meaningful, sustained results. Anyone promising page one in 30 days is either targeting keywords nobody searches for or doing something Google will eventually penalise.
Free healthcare AI visibility and SEO report
Find out where your practice appears across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. See who gets recommended instead of you, where the untapped keyword opportunities are, and what needs fixing on your website to turn visitors into booked patients. This is not a generic audit. It is a personalised report built around your practice, your services, and your local market.
What healthcare SEO costs in the UK
Straight talk on pricing, because this is probably the question driving your interest in this article.
Healthcare SEO in the UK typically costs more than general business SEO because of the additional expertise required. Compliance awareness, YMYL content standards, and the competitive nature of healthcare search all increase the scope of work.
Based on current UK market rates, here is what you can expect:
Freelancers: £300 to £1,000 per month. You might find someone capable at this price, but capacity is limited and healthcare-specific experience is rare. Reporting can be inconsistent.
General SEO agencies: £1,000 to £2,500 per month. This covers the basics: technical audits, on-page work, some content, and a monthly report. The risk here is that general agencies treat your healthcare practice the same way they treat a plumbing company. Same templates, same approach, different logo on the report.
Specialist healthcare SEO: £2,500 to £5,000 per month. Agencies with specific healthcare experience will understand compliance requirements, patient search behaviour, and the E-E-A-T standards your site needs to meet. At this level, you should expect a dedicated strategy, regular content production, link building, and detailed reporting tied to actual patient enquiries.
Project work: £1,000 to £10,000 depending on scope. Audits, website migrations, and strategy development are typically one-off projects with a defined scope and timeline.
The question is not really “how much does it cost?” but “what are you getting for your money?” A practice paying £500 per month for SEO that generates zero enquiries is spending more than a practice paying £3,000 per month that brings in 20 new patients.
Think about it in terms of patient lifetime value. If a new private patient is worth £2,000 to £5,000 over their relationship with your practice, and your SEO generates even five new patients a month, the maths works in your favour quite quickly. The practices that struggle with SEO investment are usually the ones measuring cost rather than return.
One more thing on costs: be cautious of very long contracts with no break clauses. Reputable agencies are confident enough in their work to let results do the talking. Six-month initial commitments are common and reasonable. Eighteen-month lock-ins with no performance review should make you nervous.
Ask for case studies. Ask what metrics they track. Ask whether they understand the difference between healthcare SEO and everything else. If the answers are vague, the results probably will be too.
Choosing a healthcare SEO agency
Choosing an SEO agency is a bit like choosing a builder. Everyone says they are great, the quotes vary wildly, and you will not know if they are any good until the work is done.
A few questions worth asking before you commit:
How many healthcare clients have you worked with? General digital marketing experience is fine, but healthcare has specific requirements. If they cannot name healthcare clients or show relevant results, proceed carefully.
What do you track and report on? If the answer is “keyword rankings”, keep looking. You want to hear about enquiries, bookings, phone calls, attribution, and return on investment.
How do you handle E-E-A-T and compliance? If they look confused, they are not ready for healthcare.
Can you show before and after performance comparisons? Real results from real clients. Not projections, not case studies from five years ago.
What is your approach to AI search visibility? This is the question that will separate agencies thinking about the future from those still operating on 2019 strategies.
Red flags to watch for: guaranteed rankings (nobody can guarantee this), unusually low pricing with vague commitments, long contracts with no performance clauses, and an inability to explain their process in plain language.
We know a lot of healthcare practice owners have been burned before. You signed up with an agency that promised the world, received monthly reports full of graphs and jargon, but never actually saw more patients walk through the door.
That experience makes it harder to trust the next agency, which is understandable. The best way to protect yourself is to tie everything back to the metric that matters: patient enquiries.
If an agency cannot explain how their work connects to more patients contacting your practice, they are probably better at selling SEO than delivering it. If you want to see examples of results from an agency that integrates marketing, design, and data, take a look at our case studies.
Getting started: your next steps
If you have read this far, you are already ahead of most healthcare practice owners who know SEO matters but have not worked out where to start.
Here is a practical starting point:
First, fix your Google Business Profile.
Complete every field, add current photos, and make sure your contact details match your website exactly. This is free and takes an hour.
Second, check your website on your phone.
If it is slow, hard to navigate, or missing clear calls to action, those are your immediate priorities.
Third, find out where you actually stand.
In Google, yes, but across AI platforms too. Understanding your current visibility is the only way to build a realistic plan for improving it.
That third point is where most practices get stuck, because checking your visibility across multiple platforms manually is time-consuming and easy to get wrong.
Free healthcare AI visibility and SEO report
We will show you exactly where your practice appears across Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. You will see who gets recommended instead of you, which keywords represent immediate opportunities, and what is stopping your website from converting visitors into patients.
It is not a generic template. It is built around your practice, your services, and your local market.
Because for us, it is not about traffic for the sake of traffic. It is about having the systems in place on your website that turn visitors into customers.If you would rather skip straight to a conversation, get in touch here.
No sales pitch. Just a straightforward chat about where your practice stands and what would actually make a difference.
