The Medical Practice Website Checklist

I run the same checklist against every medical, dental, or dermatology site before we call it done, and it hasn't changed shape much in six years — it just gets stricter. Some of it comes straight out of Google's publicly published search quality rater guidelines, the document raters use to judge whether a page deserves to rank on a topic that can affect someone's health. The rest comes from having sat inside a hospital system's marketing team and watched which pages actually earned a patient's trust and which ones just looked busy. This is the checklist, page type by page type, in the order I actually run it.

Homepage: trust signals before anything else

A practice homepage has one job before it has any other job: convince a stranger, in the first few seconds, that this is a real, licensed, currently operating clinical practice. That means a real address that matches the practice's licensing record, a phone number someone actually answers, hours that are current, and a clear statement of what the practice treats and who treats it. It also means avoiding the single most common homepage mistake I see: leading with marketing language about "compassionate, cutting-edge care" instead of leading with what the practice is, where it is, and who's in it. A quality rater — and a patient — should be able to answer "who runs this place and can I verify that" from the homepage alone, without clicking anywhere else.

• Practice name, address, and phone number that match the Google Business Profile exactly.
• A visible statement of specialties or services, not just a tagline.
• A named link to the provider roster and an about page with real credentials.
• Current hours, insurance acceptance, and new-patient status stated plainly.

Provider bio pages: credentials, affiliations, a named reviewer

Every provider gets an individual page, not a shared roster paragraph. Each one needs a full name, the specific credential (MD, DO, DDS, DNP, PA-C — whatever applies, written out, not just initials assumed to be self-explanatory), board certification if applicable, hospital or academic affiliations, and years in practice. I also want a short, factual description of clinical focus — not "passionate about patient care," but the actual conditions or procedures the provider handles most. This is the page a quality rater checks first to establish whether the site has real expertise behind it, and it's the page a prospective patient checks to decide whether to book.

Alongside every provider bio, I want a named reviewer policy stated somewhere on the site — who reviews clinical content before it publishes, how often, and what their qualification is to do so. It doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to be true, specific, and checkable.

Service and treatment pages: accuracy over volume

One condition or procedure per page, always. I've inherited more than one site where a single page tried to cover six unrelated conditions to save on page count, and it reads as thin and unfocused to both a search engine and a patient trying to find something specific. A good service page states what the condition or procedure is, in plain language; what the practice actually does about it, described accurately rather than aspirationally; and who at the practice performs or oversees it, with a byline: reviewed by, name, credential, and a last-reviewed date. Medical guidance changes, and a page with no reviewed-by date reads as unmaintained the moment the guidance it's based on shifts.

I would rather a practice publish twelve accurate, reviewed service pages than forty generic ones assembled to cover every possible search term. Volume is not the goal here; a page that can't be sourced to a real clinical protocol or a named reviewer's sign-off doesn't go up, regardless of how much keyword opportunity it represents.

Location pages: one per office, and they have to be true

A multi-location practice needs a separately maintained page for every physical office — not a single "locations" page with an address list, and not a templated page with the city name swapped out. Each location page needs its own NAP (name, address, phone) that matches that office's Google Business Profile exactly, a list of the providers who actually see patients at that address, and the unglamorous practicalities that matter to someone trying to get there: parking availability, building or suite-level directions, and which insurance plans that specific office accepts if it differs across locations. A patient with an urgent need should never land on a location page describing a provider or service that isn't actually available at that address — that's a trust failure before it's a ranking one.

Accessibility and mobile: not optional, not an afterthought

Healthcare sites get searched by people in a hurry, in pain, or using assistive technology, more often than most other business categories. That makes accessibility a baseline requirement, not a nice-to-have: sufficient color contrast, alt text on every clinical image, forms that work with a screen reader, and tap targets sized for someone using a phone one-handed in a waiting room. On mobile specifically, I check that the phone number is tappable, the address opens directly into maps, and the booking or contact path is reachable within one scroll of landing on any page — a patient trying to reach a practice about something urgent should never have to hunt.

What not to publish

The checklist has a second half that's just as important: a short list of things I actively remove or refuse to publish.

• Unverifiable outcome claims — "highest success rate in the region" or similar, with no source. If we can't point to where a number comes from, it doesn't go on the page.
• Stock-photo "our team" pages showing models in scrubs who aren't the practice's actual providers. It reads as deceptive the moment a patient meets the real staff, and it reads as a trust gap to anyone evaluating the page.
• Scraped or lightly rewritten condition content pulled from other health sites without a clinician actually reviewing it against the practice's own protocols.
• Anonymous "our caring team" bylines on clinical content — every claim needs a named, credentialed person standing behind it.

Insurance and billing pages: plain and current

Insurance and billing information is easy to treat as an afterthought, and it shouldn't be — it's one of the first things a prospective patient checks before booking, and an out-of-date accepted-plans list is one of the fastest ways to erode trust before a visit even happens. I want a single, current page listing accepted insurance plans, with a clear note on how to confirm coverage for anything not listed, and plain language on what happens for self-pay or uninsured patients. This page should be reviewed on the same cadence as provider bios, since plan networks change at least annually and a stale list creates real friction — a patient who shows up assuming coverage that lapsed is a worse outcome for everyone than the page taking five extra minutes to keep current.

Running the checklist end to end

In practice, I go through a site in this order every time: homepage trust signals, then every provider bio, then every service page, then every location page, then a mobile pass, then the removal list. It takes longer than a generic SEO audit because the standard is higher, and it should be — this is content that can affect a real health decision, not a page about weekend specials. For the fuller picture of why Google treats this content differently in the first place, our post on YMYL and E-E-A-T walks through the framework this checklist is built to satisfy.

If you want the whole build handled this way from the first page forward, that's the engagement we run under our healthcare practice SEO service — reviewer identification first, content second, always in that order.