Two proposals for medical search work will arrive with similar monthly figures and wildly different amounts of work inside them. One buys a named strategist, clinician reviewed pages and reporting joined to your scheduling system. The other buys four blog posts written offshore from a topic list and a ranking dashboard. Nothing on the cover page distinguishes them, which is why buyers in this sector so often conclude that the whole category is a waste of money. This page is a method for reading the documents so that the difference becomes visible before you sign rather than at month six.
Force an identical scope before you compare any figures
Write a one page scope yourself and send the same one to every candidate: the service lines you want more of, the locations, whether new pages are needed or existing ones rewritten, who reviews clinical accuracy, what reporting you expect and how often, and who owns each asset. Ask each candidate to price that, rather than sending you their own package. Three things become obvious immediately. Candidates who cannot price a defined scope are selling a template. Candidates whose price changes dramatically once clinician review is included were planning to publish unreviewed content. Candidates who add items you did not ask for should be asked to justify each one in terms of appointments, which is a question that ends a surprising number of upsells. Also ask every candidate, in writing, for the smallest engagement they will accept and the minimum term, since that single answer removes more unsuitable names than any other question.
Authorship, review and the part that cannot be outsourced
Medical content is one of the areas where accuracy affects real decisions, and Google's guidance on helpful content is explicit that evidence of expertise and first hand experience matters most in exactly those areas. Practically, that means a page about a procedure should say who wrote it, who reviewed it and when, and should be reviewed by someone who performs the procedure. Agencies dislike this because it slows production, and their proposals often quietly assume the practice will approve within days. Ask directly how many pages a month the retainer produces, how long they expect review to take, and what happens to the schedule when your reviewing physician is in theatre for a fortnight. A candidate who has done this work before will describe a realistic cadence. One who has not will promise a volume that assumes review takes no time at all, and the retainer will fund drafts sitting in a folder.
Reporting that a practice manager can act on
Insist that reporting answers three questions each month: how many appointment requests arrived, from which service lines, and how many were new patients rather than existing ones rebooking. Anything short of that is decoration. Calls matter more than forms in most practices, so agree on call tracking, on who owns the numbers, and on how recordings are handled given your state's consent requirements and the clinical detail patients volunteer on the phone. Ask for administrative access to your own analytics property and advertising accounts as a condition of the contract, not as a favour later. The single clearest signal of a healthy relationship is that you could log in tomorrow and see everything the agency sees. Where that is refused, the reporting has become a negotiation rather than a measurement, and you will not find out until you try to leave.
The contract clauses that decide what you keep
Name the owner of the domain, the website files and content, the analytics property, the advertising accounts, the call tracking numbers and the business profile listings. Set an offboarding period with a specific handover list and a deadline. Avoid arrangements where the agency hosts a proprietary site you cannot export, because the migration cost at the end is effectively a lock in fee you agreed to without noticing. Check whether the notice period matches the realistic point at which you could judge results, since a twelve month minimum with a ninety day notice period means an eighteen month decision. Where a practice is buying seo services for doctors as an ongoing retainer, these clauses matter more than the monthly figure, because they determine whether year two starts from progress or from scratch.
Questions people ask about doctors seo
Is a specialist medical agency worth paying more for?
Sometimes. The premium is worth it when it buys familiarity with privacy constraints, clinical review workflow and payer directories, because those are genuinely different from ordinary commercial work. It is not worth it when the only difference is the word medical on the website and a stock photograph of a stethoscope. Ask for the specifics and judge from the answers.
What should a practice expect to pay?
It depends on the number of locations, the number of service lines and whether pages are being written or repaired, which is why an identical written scope matters so much. Treat any published starting price as a floor for the narrowest possible engagement rather than a forecast, and compare candidates on what work is included at that figure.
Can we do some of this in house?
Yes, and the parts that benefit most from being in house are review generation, keeping listings and insurance directories accurate, and clinical review of content. Those need people who know the practice. The technical work and page production are the parts most sensibly bought in.
How do we judge the first six months?
Ask whether the foundations were fixed: accurate listings everywhere patients look, a fast mobile site, a working appointment path, and a reviewed page for each priority service. Those are verifiable regardless of where rankings sit, and if they are not done by month six the retainer went somewhere else.