The Vetting Framework Physicians Use to Find a Medical SEO Agency Worth Hiring

This guide is written for physicians, practice managers, and healthcare group administrators who are actively evaluating SEO agencies — not casually browsing. If you are trying to understand whether SEO is worth it, start with our Doctor SEO hub first. This guide assumes you have already decided to invest and want a framework for choosing the right partner.

The vetting process for a medical SEO agency is meaningfully different from hiring a general digital marketing agency. Healthcare introduces constraints that most generalist agencies have not worked within:

• HIPAA compliance affects how patient data is handled in analytics, contact forms, and remarketing pixels
• FTC advertising guidelines restrict before-and-after claims and testimonial language
• healthcare SEO requires familiarity with HIPAA, FTC advertising guidelines, and [state medical board rules](/resources/doctor/medical-practice-advertising-compliance) — not all agencies have this background vary significantly and can affect how services are described on your website

An agency unfamiliar with these constraints will not just underperform — they may create compliance exposure for your practice. This is educational content, not legal advice; verify current regulatory requirements with your legal counsel or licensing authority.

Beyond compliance, medical SEO has its own technical and editorial dynamics. Google applies heightened scrutiny to health content under its E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). A physician's credentials, when properly structured on a website, carry genuine ranking weight. Agencies that understand this will build content strategies around your clinical expertise. Those that do not will produce generic health articles that compete against WebMD — and lose.

When you interview an agency, you are not just evaluating their pitch deck. You are evaluating whether their actual working process fits your practice's needs. Here are the five criteria worth examining in depth.

1. Healthcare-Specific Portfolio

Ask for examples from practices similar to yours — same specialty, similar market size, comparable patient demographics. Generic traffic growth charts are insufficient. You want to see local Map Pack movement, condition-specific page rankings, and ideally patient inquiry volume trends. If they cannot show healthcare examples, they are learning on your budget.

2. HIPAA and Regulatory Awareness

A qualified agency should be able to explain, without prompting, how they handle analytics tagging in compliance with HIPAA, why they avoid certain remarketing configurations for healthcare clients, and how they approach patient testimonial content under FTC guidelines. If these topics are new to them in the interview, that is a meaningful signal.

3. Transparent Deliverable Scope

Every proposal should specify exactly what is included each month: how many pages of content, what technical audit cadence, how link-building is approached, and what the reporting cycle looks like. Vague scope language — phrases like "ongoing optimization" with no specifics — makes it impossible to hold the agency accountable.

4. Realistic Timeline Communication

In managed physician reputation, or ranked a practice in a [competitive market](/resources/doctor/multi-location-seo-medical-groups). Here is how to tell the differences, meaningful ranking movement for a medical practice typically takes 4-6 months at minimum. Agencies that promise faster results are either targeting low-competition keywords with limited patient search volume, or overstating what is achievable. Either way, it is a problem.

5. Reporting Depth and Accessibility

You should receive monthly reports that connect SEO activity to business outcomes — not just keyword rank changes. Qualified agencies track call volume, form submissions, Google Business Profile actions, and ideally new patient appointment trends where attribution is possible. If the report only shows traffic and rankings, the agency is not measuring what matters to a practice.

The following patterns, individually or in combination, should prompt you to pause and ask harder questions — or walk away.

• designed to #1 rankings. No agency can guarantee a specific ranking position on Google. Google's algorithm is not negotiable. Any agency making this promise is either misrepresenting the industry or planning to use tactics that risk penalizing your site.
• Generic proposals. If the proposal you receive looks like it could have been sent to a law firm, a landscaper, or a dental practice with minimal edits, the agency is not thinking specifically about your market, your specialty, or your patients.
• Lock-in contracts longer than 6 months with no performance clause. Long contracts without exit provisions signal that the agency is not confident enough in their results to earn your continued business. Month-to-month or quarterly arrangements with defined performance benchmarks are the more physician-friendly structure.
• Outsourced content with no clinical review process. Health content requires accuracy. If an agency cannot explain how clinical claims in patient-facing content are reviewed before publication, that is a liability for your practice — reputationally and, in some cases, regulatorily.
• No discussion of your Google Business Profile. For most medical practices, local search is where new patients begin. An agency that leads entirely with website SEO and does not address your GBP optimization is missing a significant portion of the patient acquisition picture.
• Vanity metric reporting. If an agency's sample reports lead with impressions, social reach, or domain authority scores without connecting those numbers to appointment volume or patient inquiries, they are optimizing for metrics that look good in a slide deck — not metrics that grow a practice.

These questions are designed to surface real capability, not rehearsed sales answers. Listen for specificity. Vague answers to specific questions are data.

On Healthcare Experience

• "Walk me through a medical practice you have worked with that competes in a market similar to ours. What did the ranking situation look like when you started, and where is it now?"
• "How do you handle HIPAA considerations when setting up analytics and conversion tracking on a medical website?"

On Content and E-E-A-T

• "How do you incorporate a physician's credentials and clinical experience into the content strategy? What does that look like in practice?"
• "Who writes the content, and what is your review process before anything goes live on a healthcare site?"

On Local and GBP

• "What is your approach to Google Business Profile optimization for a medical practice, and how does that connect to the broader SEO strategy?"

On Reporting and Accountability

• "What does your monthly reporting look like? Can you show me a sample report from a current healthcare client?"
• "What metrics do you use to define success for a medical practice SEO engagement, and at what point would you recommend we change course if those benchmarks are not being met?"

On Contract Terms

• "What is your contract structure, and what are the exit terms if we decide the engagement is not working?"
• "Do you work with competing practices in our market simultaneously?"

Contract terms in the SEO industry are not standardized, which means the terms you accept are largely what you negotiate. Here is what a physician-friendly engagement structure typically includes.

Scope of Work Specificity

The contract should list deliverables by category and volume — not just by dollar amount. If the proposal says "content creation included," the contract should specify how many pages per month, what type of pages, and who owns the content after publication. You should own all content created for your website, full stop.

Reporting Cadence and Format

Monthly reporting should be contractually required, not optional. Specify what is included: keyword rankings, local visibility, Google Business Profile performance, and conversion metrics tied to patient inquiries where measurable.

Exclusivity Clause

Ask whether the agency will take on a directly competing practice in your geographic market during your engagement. Some agencies will not; others work with multiple practices in the same specialty and city. Neither is automatically wrong, but you should know which applies before signing.

Ownership of Assets

Confirm in writing that your website, its content, your Google Business Profile access, and any analytics accounts belong to your practice — not the agency. Some agencies retain ownership of sites they build or GBP access as use to retain clients. This is a non-negotiable point.

Exit Terms

A 30-day written notice clause is reasonable. Longer exit requirements benefit the agency, not you. If performance benchmarks are not met within an agreed timeframe, you should have the right to exit without penalty.

The criteria in this guide reflect how we structure our own engagements at AuthoritySpecialist.com. We work specifically with healthcare practices — not as one vertical among many, but as a primary focus. That means the vetting questions above are ones we are prepared to answer in full, with examples.

When a physician engages our team, the first 30 days are diagnostic: a technical audit of the existing site, a local search visibility assessment, a Google Business Profile review, and a content gap analysis against the conditions and services the practice actually wants to rank for. We do not start writing content before we understand the competitive landscape in your market.

Our reporting connects to patient acquisition metrics — call tracking, form submissions, GBP actions — not just keyword ranks. And we structure engagements on a month-to-month basis after an initial setup period, because we would rather earn your continued business than lock it in contractually.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, see what our doctor SEO services include or work with our physician-focused SEO team directly.

If you are still working through the budget question, our Doctor SEO hub links to cost breakdowns and ROI analysis resources that can help you build the internal case for the investment before you have that conversation with an agency.