S N Digital Solns · Software development, digital marketing and PR
The S N Digital Solns team builds software and websites, generates demand and runs PR for clients across the United States, Canada, Australia, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and India.
Hiring a healthcare SEO agency is not the same decision as hiring one for a retail or software client. Google treats medical content as “Your Money or Your Life” content, and holds it to its strictest quality bar. An agency that does not already work this way will not learn it on your account, they will learn it at your expense.
These five questions take fifteen minutes and expose whether a healthcare SEO agency actually understands the difference.
1. Who reviews the medical claims before they go live?
Ask a healthcare SEO agency, directly, who checks a page’s medical accuracy before publishing. A good answer names a credentialed reviewer, a process, and a byline that shows up on the page. A weak answer talks about “quality content” without naming a person.
However the deeper issue is what happens when a reviewer disagrees with a draft written for keyword coverage. Therefore ask what gets cut first: the keyword density or the medically imprecise sentence. If they are not sure, you already know the answer.
2. How do they handle E-E-A-T on practitioner pages?
Google’s own quality guidelines single out medical topics for extra scrutiny on Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust. A healthcare SEO agency should be able to show you, on an existing client’s site, how a practitioner’s credentials, licensing body and specific experience are surfaced on-page, not just listed in a footer.
Ask what they do when a practice has several providers with different specialties. A healthcare SEO agency that proposes one generic “About Us” page for all of them is proposing weaker signals for every provider on it.
3. Do they understand what cannot be promised or implied?
Healthcare marketing sits under advertising rules that most SEO agencies never encounter: no implied guarantees of outcomes, careful language around before/after claims, and jurisdiction-specific restrictions on testimonials. Ask a healthcare SEO agency for an example of copy they rewrote because it overpromised a result.
If they cannot give you one, either they have never hit this wall, or they did and did not notice. Neither is reassuring.
4. How do they treat the local map pack?
For most clinics and practices, the three-pack on Google Maps sends more patients than the organic results below it. A healthcare SEO agency should be actively managing the Google Business Profile: correct specialties, insurance accepted, booking links, and a review response cadence, not just the website.
Ask how they handle a multi-location practice’s duplicate-content risk across location pages. A copy-paste template with the city name swapped in is the single most common mistake in this niche, and it is easy to spot once you know to look.
5. What happens to the content if you leave?
As with any agency relationship, confirm in writing that you own the content, the domain’s search console access, and any structured data markup when the contract ends, and that it transfers within a stated number of days.
Our own SEO and AEO service is built around exactly this kind of scrutiny, because a page that misleads an AI answer engine about a medical claim causes a different kind of damage than a page that simply ranks poorly. For general guidance on what may and may not be claimed in health marketing, the FTC’s health marketing guidance is the plain-language starting point in the US.
If you want a wider set of vetting questions, our companion piece, Healthcare SEO Agency: 7 Hard, Honest Questions, is worth reading alongside this one. And the same hire-smart scrutiny applies beyond SEO specifically: our guide on what makes a B2B marketing agency actually drive pipeline covers similar ground for marketing partners generally.
A fair first engagement with a healthcare SEO agency looks like a ninety-day scope, a named medical reviewer, and a break clause, not a twelve-month lock-in before the first page goes live.