A Step-by-Step technical & content audit checklist Built for Addiction Treatment Websites

This guide is written for marketing directors, digital managers, and operators at addiction treatment centers who already have a website but aren't confident it's working as hard as it should. If you're seeing flat organic traffic, low call volume from search, or program pages ranking inconsistently, this audit framework will help you find out why.

It's also useful if you're evaluating an SEO agency's work — or considering hiring one for the first time. Running a structured diagnostic on your own site gives you a baseline. You'll know what's broken before anyone pitches you a fix.

A few honest caveats upfront:

• This guide covers SEO diagnostics, not HIPAA legal compliance. Regulations like 45 CFR Parts 160 and 164 and 42 CFR Part 2 have specific requirements that vary by state, facility type, and data handling practices. The sections below flag common risk areas, but compliance determinations require a qualified healthcare attorney or compliance officer — not an SEO audit.
• Audit outputs are only as good as the tools you use. A basic crawl with a free tool will miss things a full technical diagnostic catches. The framework below notes where professional tooling makes a meaningful difference.
• Addiction treatment SEO operates in a high-scrutiny environment. Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines classify health content as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), which means quality, authority, and trustworthiness signals are weighted heavily. An audit that ignores E-E-A-T factors — clinical credentials, staff qualifications, accreditation signals — is incomplete.

If your site is brand new or pre-launch, the addiction treatment SEO hub has a checklist-first approach that's better suited to that stage.

A thorough SEO audit for an addiction treatment website isn't a single task — it's five overlapping diagnostic layers. Run them in this order, because findings in early layers often explain problems you'll see in later ones.

Layer 1: Technical Foundation

Start with a full site crawl using a tool like Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, or Ahrefs Site Audit. You're looking for: broken internal links, redirect chains, pages blocked by robots.txt that shouldn't be, missing or duplicate title tags and meta descriptions, slow Core Web Vitals scores, and orphaned pages (pages with no internal links pointing to them).

Treatment center sites often have orphan pages because program content gets reorganized without updating navigation. These pages may still be indexed but receive no internal authority — they effectively don't exist in Google's model of your site.

Layer 2: Index Health

Open Google Search Console and check your Coverage report. Identify pages marked as Crawled — currently not indexed and Discovered — currently not indexed. Then cross-reference with your crawl. If Google is choosing not to index pages you want indexed, the most common causes are thin content, near-duplicate content, or crawl budget issues from bloated URL parameters.

Layer 3: Keyword Cannibalization

This is where most treatment center audits find the most damage. Run a cannibalization check by exporting all indexed URLs and their target keywords, then identify where two or more pages are competing for the same query. IOP, PHP, detox, and residential pages are frequent offenders — especially when each page was written by a different vendor or staff member at a different time.

Layer 4: Content Quality

Pull your top 20 organic landing pages by clicks (from Search Console). For each, assess word count, whether clinical claims are sourced, whether author credentials are visible, and whether the page answers the searcher's actual question. Pages that rank but don't convert are often answering the wrong question.

Layer 5: Trust and Schema

Check for implemented structured data using Google's Rich Results Test. Treatment centers should have, at minimum, LocalBusiness or MedicalOrganization schema, FAQPage schema on FAQ sections, and correct NAP (name, address, phone) markup. Missing or broken schema won't tank rankings, but it forfeits rich result eligibility that competitors may be capturing.

Keyword cannibalization is the single most common structural problem we see in addiction treatment websites. It happens because treatment centers offer multiple program types — detox, residential, PHP, IOP, outpatient — and often build a separate page for each. If those pages aren't clearly differentiated by keyword intent, they compete with each other rather than complementing each other.

Here's how to diagnose it:

1. Export your indexed URLs from Search Console or your crawl tool.
2. Map target keywords to each URL. If you don't have keyword mapping documented, use the primary search query driving clicks to each page (available in Search Console's Performance report by page).
3. Flag any keyword that appears as the primary driver for more than one URL. Common examples: "intensive outpatient program" splitting impressions between /iop/ and /programs/intensive-outpatient/, or "drug detox [city]" splitting between /detox/ and /locations/[city]/detox/.
4. Check which page ranks higher and whether it's the page you'd prefer to rank (usually the one with more authority and better conversion design).

The fix isn't always to delete pages. Often, the right solution is to consolidate content onto one canonical page and 301-redirect the weaker variant — but this depends on whether both pages carry inbound links. A hasty consolidation can lose link equity. Map the link profiles before redirecting anything.

Thin content on insurance and payment pages is a separate but equally common problem. These pages exist on almost every treatment center site, but many are 150-word placeholders that list accepted carriers with no explanation of the verification process, what out-of-pocket costs look like, or what a caller should expect. High-intent searchers — people actively looking for a facility that accepts their insurance — land on these pages and leave.

A well-developed insurance page answers: which carriers are in-network, how to verify benefits before calling, what the typical coverage gaps are for residential versus outpatient levels of care, and what financing options exist for uninsured patients. This isn't just good content — it directly supports admissions conversion.

This section identifies common technical SEO audit items related to form design and structured data. It is not legal advice. HIPAA compliance determinations — including whether a specific form, analytics configuration, or CRM integration is compliant — require review by a qualified healthcare attorney or HIPAA compliance officer.

During a technical audit, two areas consistently surface risk signals that affect both SEO and regulatory standing:

Contact and Intake Form Issues

Standard website analytics tools — including Google Analytics and Meta Pixel — can capture form field data if implemented without proper configuration. For treatment centers, this can mean Protected Health Information (PHI) is inadvertently sent to third-party platforms, which raises issues under HIPAA's Privacy and Security Rules (45 CFR Parts 160 and 164) and, for substance use disorder records specifically, 42 CFR Part 2.

From an SEO audit standpoint, flag the following for compliance review:

• Contact forms that collect diagnosis, substance use history, or insurance ID numbers in plain text fields
• Analytics scripts that fire on form confirmation pages (where submitted data may be captured in referral strings)
• Chat widgets or third-party lead capture tools without documented Business Associate Agreements
• Intake forms hosted on HTTP rather than HTTPS

Google's quality raters are instructed to evaluate whether health-related sites handle sensitive information responsibly. A site with visible security gaps is more likely to receive a low Page Quality rating in manual review — which can suppress rankings even without a direct algorithmic penalty.

Schema Markup Audit

Use Google's Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator to check every page type. Common issues in treatment center sites include:

• LocalBusiness schema with incorrect or inconsistent NAP data (doesn't match Google Business Profile)
• FAQPage schema applied to pages where the questions aren't actually in the visible HTML (Google will not render rich results for hidden or injected FAQ content)
• MedicalOrganization schema missing medicalSpecialty or availableService properties
• BreadcrumbList schema that references URLs returning 404 errors

Fix schema errors in this order: NAP consistency first (it affects local rankings), then FAQPage (direct rich result opportunity), then MedicalOrganization (E-E-A-T signal for healthcare vertical).

An audit that surfaces 40 issues and doesn't rank them by impact is just a to-do list. Treatment center marketing teams — especially in-house teams managing multiple channels — need a way to decide what to fix this week versus what goes in the backlog.

Score each issue on two dimensions:

• Estimated impact on rankings or conversions (1–5 scale, where 5 is highest)
• Estimated effort to fix (1–5 scale, where 5 is hardest)

Prioritize issues with high impact and low effort first. Here's how common treatment center audit findings typically score:

Fix Immediately (High Impact / Low-Medium Effort)

• Broken schema on location pages (impact: 4, effort: 2)
• Pages blocked by robots.txt that should be indexed (impact: 5, effort: 1)
• Missing HTTPS on intake forms (impact: 5, effort: 2 — also a compliance flag)
• Duplicate title tags across program pages (impact: 3, effort: 2)

Fix This Quarter (High Impact / Higher Effort)

• Cannibalized program pages requiring content consolidation and 301 redirects (impact: 5, effort: 4)
• Thin insurance/payment pages requiring full content development (impact: 4, effort: 4)
• Internal linking gaps leaving key program pages orphaned (impact: 4, effort: 3)

Monitor and Schedule (Lower Impact or Ongoing)

• Core Web Vitals improvements beyond passing threshold (impact: 2–3, effort: 3–5)
• Schema additions for service-level pages (impact: 2, effort: 3)
• Image alt text audit (impact: 1–2, effort: 2)

This matrix isn't universal — impact scores shift depending on your starting position, market competition, and how much organic traffic is already flowing through specific page types. A cannibalization issue on a page that drives 80% of your organic leads scores higher than the same issue on a page that gets 12 visits per month. Always weight impact against your actual traffic data, not assumed importance.

If your team is unsure how to score issues or the crawl surfaces more than 20 distinct problem categories, that's typically the point where a professional diagnostic saves more time than it costs. You can request a professional SEO audit for your treatment center to get a prioritized issue list built from your actual data.

A self-audit using free or low-cost tools (Google Search Console, Google's Rich Results Test, Screaming Frog's free version) is a reasonable starting point for most treatment center marketing teams. It will surface obvious technical errors, index coverage gaps, and missing metadata. For a site under 100 pages that hasn't had major structural changes, a self-audit done carefully can generate a solid action list.

There are situations, though, where a professional diagnostic is the more efficient path:

• The site has had multiple agency engagements and no one documented what was changed when. Layered technical debt — redirect chains from old domain migrations, orphaned subfolders from discontinued campaigns, conflicting canonical tags — typically requires professional tooling and pattern recognition to untangle.
• Organic traffic has declined significantly (30%+ over a rolling 12-month period) without a clear explanation. Manual action? Algorithm update impact? A crawl budget problem caused by URL parameter proliferation? These require deeper investigation than a surface crawl provides.
• The site serves multiple locations. Multi-location treatment networks have distinct cannibalization risks at the city and state level, and NAP consistency across Google Business Profiles, directories like the SAMHSA Behavioral Health Treatment Locator, Rehabs.com, and Psychology Today adds complexity that's hard to manage manually.
• You're preparing for a major site migration — new domain, CMS change, or URL restructuring. The cost of getting this wrong (losing rankings built over years) substantially exceeds the cost of a professional pre-migration audit.

A professional audit should deliver more than a crawl export. It should include a prioritized issue list tied to your actual traffic and conversion data, keyword cannibalization mapping across all indexed program and location pages, a schema implementation review, and a clear explanation of what each fix is expected to accomplish and why.

If the deliverable you're being offered is a 150-line spreadsheet of technical errors with no context, no prioritization, and no connection to business outcomes — that's a crawl report, not an audit. They're not the same thing.