Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Your Aesthetic Practice Website

SEO, search engine optimization, of your aesthetic practice’s website is the key to building long-term profitability into your marketing investment equation. Here’s why:
  • No other channel will ever deliver as-qualified patients – those who are actively searching for services on the web and looking at practice websites, are on the journey to becoming paying patients, and they’re usually towards the end of that journey
  • Since they’re usually toward the end of that journey, time to buying from visiting your website is shorter than other channels (where they might follow you on Instagram and casually watch your stories for years, those who visit your website are generally considering scheduling a consult), and time is money, because each month your practice is open, you assume certain staffing and operational costs, whether or not you treat that patient. The more expensive or invasive the procedure (i.e. surgical vs. nonsurgical), the truer this is.
  • It’s the only marketing investment that will continue to be valuable long after your initial investment (when the investment is done correctly, in good-quality SEO work).
SEO for Doctors
SEO can be a very profitable endeavor -- and in fact, we recommend this as the main source of new patients for your aesthetic practice -- but in order to make it successful, you'll need to be selective about who you delegate this work to.
There are 3 main types of SEO Work:
  1. Great content – not just the words, but the order of topics covered on your page, the level of detail in your writing, the photos you show, the questions you answer, and the ease which with visitors can find what they’re looking for on your page.
  2. Technical work – such as making your site load quickly (how well your before & afters images are compressed), the way your pages are set up in a hierarchy (does Breast Augmentation fall under plastic surgery or under breast surgeries?), and even the coding on your website (including Schema).
  3. The Websites That Link to Yours – Media outlets, web directories (both your listings and those of others), scientific communities, your social media posts, etc.
The problem is, most agencies focus on 1 or 2 of these, and we generally find they’re weakest at the content part – more on that below.

Most Agency writers do not understand your work.

They can’t tell you which breast implants just got pulled off the market, they don’t understand why Radiesse wouldn’t be used in the lips, and they usually can’t tell the difference between a photo of Botox injections vs. Filler injections.


Now you might be thinking “so what?”


the problem is, they don’t understand what you do in ways that make them poor writers about what you do — and if you can’t write about it 10x better than the competition, you’ll never outrank them in Google or other search engines, and that SEO investment is not going to pay off for your practice long-term.


Even if they interview you so that they get your wording about how the procedure works, they still won’t have the insights that come from having spoken to thousands of patients, about how to answer their fears in their own language, before they even ask.

What you want to find in an SEO partner – the kind of relationship that will pay dividends – is one where your messaging is improved upon and polished by the agency, so that you attract more of the right kind of patients than you would be able to on your own.

SEO Writers Need to Understand What They're Writing About to be Effective and Successful

Here’s what it takes to rank in a meaningful and defensible way:

  1. Understand the technical aspects of the procedure and the nuances of the technologies, so that your writing builds up the expertise of the practice in the readers’ eyes.
  2. Speak the language of your ideal patients (are they looking to not have to miss a date night with hubbie, or to not have their co-workers whisper behind their backs about how red they are after a laser treatment? That’s a pretty different way to convey that a procedure is no-downtime than what your website says right now, right?)
  3. Structure your content so that Google’s bots can read it and give each page more than 1 chance to show up on page 1 of the search results.
  4. Use images and videos that explain not just the results you can achieve, but the experience of the procedure at your office, under your care, and subconsciously quells their fears, too.

We Optimize for Your Profitability, and That Means We Do SEO a Bit Differently...

SEO (search engine optimization of your website), done correctly, is a long-term investment in your practice. It creates not only results today, but builds a website that performs better over time, and really builds onto the overall site’s strength (sometimes referred to as domain authority).

Done incorrectly, though, it’s a waste of time and money, because any impact is small and short-lived, and it can even damage your brand. Think of how poorly you think of ecommerce sites with product descriptions that were clearly written by people who didn’t understand the language, much less the product. We’ve seen that happen with aesthetic practices – and whether it’s the medical-ease taken directly from a laser company’s website, or simply failing to convey the difference between Botox and filler – the effect is the same: a lack of trust in you, the provider.

If you’re ready to build a website that ranks now and positions your brand even better over time, let’s schedule some time to chat.