A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Optometry Practices

This guide is designed for optometrists, practice administrators, and office managers who want to understand why their website isn't generating consistent new patient inquiries — and who want a structured way to find the answer before deciding whether to hire outside help.

You don't need to be technical. Each audit layer includes observable checks: things you can see in a browser, in Google Search Console (free), or in your Google Business Profile dashboard. Where a check requires a paid tool, we note it — and offer a manual alternative where one exists.

The audit is organized into four sequential layers:

1. Technical Health — Is your site crawlable, fast, and mobile-friendly?
2. Local Presence — Can nearby patients find you in map results?
3. Content Relevance — Does your site answer what prospective patients are actually searching?
4. Compliance — Are your forms, testimonials, and health claims within HIPAA and state board guidelines?

Work through the layers in order. Technical problems compound everything downstream — a slow site undermines local rankings, and local rankings mean nothing if your service pages don't convert. Fix the foundation first.

Realistic scope-setting: A thorough self-audit typically takes three to five hours spread across a week. If you complete it and the problems are clear but the fixes feel beyond your team's capacity, that's the natural entry point for a professional engagement. This guide is intentionally structured as a try-before-you-hire resource.

Technical SEO determines whether Google can find, crawl, and understand your website. For optometry practices, this layer tends to surface problems that predate whoever built the current site — outdated themes, accumulated redirect chains, or a page speed score that was never tested on mobile.

Core checks to run

• Mobile usability: Open your site on a phone. Can you tap the phone number? Can you read service descriptions without zooming? Google indexes the mobile version of your site first. A poor mobile experience directly suppresses rankings.
• Page speed: Use Google's PageSpeed Insights (free). Target a mobile score above 60 and a desktop score above 80. Optometry sites built on heavy visual themes — large hero images, sliders, autoplay video — often score poorly here.
• Indexability: In Google Search Console, check the Coverage or Indexing report. Any important pages marked as "Excluded" or "Crawled — currently not indexed" are invisible to Google and generating zero search traffic.
• HTTPS: Every page on your site should load over HTTPS (the padlock icon). Mixed-content warnings — where some page elements load over HTTP — erode trust signals and can flag as unsafe in some browsers.
• Broken links: Use a free crawler like Screaming Frog (up to 500 URLs free) or the browser extension Broken Link Checker to identify 404 errors, especially on service pages and blog posts.
• Core Web Vitals: In Google Search Console, review the Core Web Vitals report. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) above 4 seconds and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) above 0.25 are the most common issues in healthcare practice sites.

Document every finding with a screenshot and a URL. You're building a prioritized fix list, not a one-time checklist you discard.

Most optometry practices get the majority of their organic search traffic from local queries: "eye doctor near me," "optometrist in [city]," "dry eye specialist [neighborhood]." Local SEO is where the patient acquisition actually happens — and it's where a surprisingly large number of practices have significant, fixable gaps.

Google Business Profile audit

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is audited separately because it operates outside your website and has its own ranking factors. Open your profile and check each of the following:

• Primary category: "Optometrist" should be your primary category. Subcategories like "Eye Care Center" or "Contact Lenses Supplier" can supplement but not replace it.
• Business name: Your GBP name should match your legal practice name exactly. Keyword stuffing in the business name field (e.g., "Vision Care Eye Exams Optometrist") violates Google's guidelines and risks suspension.
• Hours accuracy: Incorrect hours are one of the most common review complaints for optometry practices. Verify holiday hours are updated.
• Photos: Profiles with recent, practice-specific photos consistently outperform those with stock imagery. Include exterior shots, the waiting area, exam equipment, and — with written consent — your team.
• Review volume and recency: Industry benchmarks suggest that Map Pack visibility correlates with both total review count and how recently reviews were received. A practice with 80 reviews but none in 6 months may be outranked by a competitor with 40 reviews and consistent monthly activity.
• Services listed: Add each service you offer as a separate GBP service entry. Many practices list only "Eye Exams" and miss map visibility for specialty searches like myopia management or orthokeratology.

Citation consistency

Search your practice name, address, and phone number (NAP) across directories: Yelp, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, WebMD, and your local chamber of commerce. Inconsistent NAP data — especially multiple phone numbers or address formats — creates conflicting signals that suppress local rankings. Document every variation you find.

Local landing pages (multi-location practices)

If you operate more than one location, each location needs its own dedicated page with a unique address, local phone number, and locally relevant content. A single "Locations" page listing multiple addresses is not a substitute.

Content is where most optometry practices leave the most patient acquisition opportunity on the table. The underlying problem is almost always the same: service pages that describe what the practice does rather than answering what the patient is searching for.

Service page coverage

Audit whether you have a dedicated, indexable page for each of the following services you offer:

• Comprehensive eye exams
• Contact lens fittings (and separately: specialty contacts, scleral lenses)
• Dry eye evaluation and treatment
• Myopia management / myopia control
• Pediatric eye care
• Glaucoma screening and management
• Diabetic eye exams
• Low vision services
• Emergency eye care
• Prescription eyewear and optical boutique (if applicable)

If a service exists on your site only as a bullet point on an "Our Services" overview page, it will not rank for condition or treatment searches. Each service needs its own URL, its own H1, and content that actually explains what the patient should expect.

Keyword relevance check

In Google Search Console, open the Performance report and filter by page. For each key service page, check which queries are generating impressions. If a page about dry eye treatment is generating impressions for branded searches (your practice name) but not for "dry eye specialist [city]" or "dry eye drops vs treatment," the page's content isn't matching the intent of prospective patients.

E-E-A-T signals

Google's quality evaluation guidelines place particular scrutiny on health-related content. For optometry pages, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals include: named authorship with credentials (O.D. designation), publication or review dates, references to clinical training or specializations, and factual accuracy. A service page with no attributed author and no credentials listed is a trust gap that affects both rankings and patient conversion.

Thin and duplicate content

Any page under approximately 300 words of unique, useful content is likely too thin to rank competitively. Use Screaming Frog or a similar crawler to flag short pages. Duplicate content — particularly if a web developer copied the same city-name-swapped text across multiple location pages — actively suppresses the rankings of all affected pages.

This section is educational content about commonly observed compliance considerations for optometry websites. It is not legal or healthcare regulatory advice. Verify your specific obligations with a qualified healthcare attorney and your state optometry board. Rules vary by state and change over time.

Most SEO guides for healthcare practices skip compliance entirely. This is a significant omission for optometry practices because non-compliant website elements — HIPAA-unsafe contact forms, prohibited testimonial formats, unsupported health claims — create liability that no amount of ranking improvement is worth.

HIPAA and patient-facing forms

Any online form that collects health information — appointment requests that ask about eye conditions, new patient intake forms, prescription refill requests — may trigger HIPAA obligations depending on how the data is stored and transmitted. Standard contact form plugins (many popular WordPress form builders) transmit data over email without encryption, which many healthcare attorneys advise against for forms collecting health data. Audit each form on your site and document how data is transmitted and stored. If you're unsure whether your tools require a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with the vendor, that question is worth raising with a healthcare attorney.

Advertising and testimonial rules

State optometry boards regulate advertising by licensed optometrists, and requirements vary. The California Board of Optometry and Texas Optometry Board, for example, each publish advertising guidelines that address specific claim types and testimonial use. The FTC also applies general health marketing requirements that affect before-and-after claims and endorsements. As a starting point: audit your website for any claims that a patient's specific condition will be cured or resolved, for testimonials that imply designed to outcomes, and for any use of the word "specialist" if your state board defines that term specifically. Verify current rules with your licensing authority, as these change.

Review solicitation compliance

Soliciting reviews is generally acceptable, but some state boards and the FTC have addressed specific practices — including offering incentives for reviews or selectively routing only satisfied patients to review platforms. Audit your review generation process alongside your website audit to ensure the approach aligns with current FTC guidance and your state board's rules.

Once you've worked through all four layers, you'll have a list of findings. The question is where to start. Not all SEO problems have equal impact on patient acquisition, and not all are equally within a practice team's capacity to fix without outside help.

Prioritization framework

Rank each finding by two dimensions: patient acquisition impact (how directly does fixing this affect how many patients find and contact you?) and effort to fix (can your team address this in a day, or does it require a developer?).

• Fix first (high impact, low effort): Google Business Profile category corrections, hours updates, missing service listings, broken contact links, incorrect NAP data in top directories.
• Fix next (high impact, higher effort): Missing service pages, thin content on key treatment pages, Core Web Vitals issues, HTTPS errors, non-HIPAA-safe forms.
• Schedule (moderate impact): Adding E-E-A-T signals to existing content, building out FAQ sections on service pages, expanding photo library in GBP, citation cleanup across secondary directories.
• Evaluate with a professional (complex or unclear impact): Indexing anomalies, significant ranking drops without obvious cause, compliance uncertainty, technical architecture issues.

When a self-audit hits its limits

The self-audit process is designed to be honest about its own scope. There are findings that a practice team can diagnose but not reliably fix — and there are problems that require tools, expertise, or time that most practices don't have internally. If you've completed this audit and found significant issues in more than one layer, or if you've fixed visible problems and still see no movement in Google Search Console after 60 to 90 days, that's the point at which an outside perspective typically pays for itself. A professional SEO audit for your optometry practice includes technical crawl analysis, local ranking diagnostics, and a prioritized roadmap — not a list of recommendations without accountability for results.