What a clinic SEO audit should tell you (and what to ignore)

What has changed about audits

Audits used to be a genuine skill, because finding the problems took work. Now any tool crawls a site in ninety seconds and produces a hundred findings, most of them automated, most of them trivial. The scarce thing is judgement: knowing which four of those hundred items matter for a clinic in your position, and in what order.

That is why a free audit is usually a sales document. It is not dishonest, it is just optimised to look alarming. Missing alt text on eleven images is flagged in red next to a genuinely broken booking link, and they carry the same weight on the page.

The five things a clinic audit must cover

1. Can people find you at all, and for what? Which searches currently bring visitors, which of your services have no page, and whether you appear in the map pack for your own town. This is the section that should be first and usually is not.
2. Your Google Business Profile, item by item. Primary category, secondary categories, services listed, hours, photos, review volume and recency, and whether the name matches your real business name. For most clinics this section contains the fastest wins on the whole list.
3. Does the site work on a phone? Load speed on mobile data, tap targets, whether the booking action is visible without scrolling, and whether prices exist anywhere. Google's guidance on people-first content is a better checklist here than any crawler's score.
4. Content gaps against real questions. Which questions patients ring and ask that your site does not answer. Each one is a page, and each page is a reason to be found.
5. The conversion path. What happens between someone deciding they want an appointment and you having their name. If that path has four steps and a phone number answered between patients, the audit's SEO findings are secondary.

Findings you can usually ignore

• Domain authority, trust flow and similar scores. These are third-party metrics invented by tool vendors. Google does not use them.
• Keyword density. Not a thing, and chasing it produces unreadable pages.
• Meta keywords tag. Ignored by search engines for roughly two decades.
• "Only 47 backlinks." A local clinic does not need many. It needs a handful of real ones: your professional body, a local sports club, the gym you rent from, a genuine local news mention.
• Every image missing alt text. Worth fixing for accessibility, which is a good reason on its own. It is not why you are not ranking.
• Long page load warnings on desktop, when almost all your visitors are on a phone.

What an audit should end with

A useful audit ends with a list of no more than ten items, ordered by impact, each with an owner and a rough effort. Something like: fix the profile categories (us, one hour), write pages for the four services with none (you plus us, three weeks), get the site loading under three seconds on mobile (us, one week), build a review request into discharge (you, one afternoon).

If you cannot tell from the document what happens first and who does it, it is a report rather than an audit.

Auditing the ads account too

If you are running Google Ads, the same discipline applies and the questions are shorter. Which searches actually triggered your ads, as opposed to which keywords you added. What proportion of spend went to searches you would never want. Whether conversion tracking is recording booked patients or only form loads. And what a booked patient cost last month. A PPC audit that does not answer those four is describing settings rather than results.

How this works at ClinicGrowth

Lewes, Uckfield and the Sussex market towns show a pattern that a crawler will never flag. The clinic that dominates the map pack in a town like that is frequently the one with the least impressive website. It has a complete profile, thirty recent reviews, correct hours and a phone somebody answers, and it beats a beautifully designed site belonging to a clinic whose listing has a 2021 photo and the wrong category.

ClinicGrowth's clinical content is written by practising HCPC-registered clinicians, which is why our audits give the content section the weight they do: the gap between a page that mentions a condition and a page that actually answers what a worried person typed at 11pm is the difference between being found and being chosen. An automated audit cannot see that gap at all, because both pages contain the same keyword. Reading what your competitors published, and what your own pages fail to say, is manual work and it is the part worth paying for.

If you would like that done for your clinic, the free clinic review is exactly this exercise, written up in plain English.

Questions we get asked

Ten prioritised items with owners beats a hundred colour-coded ones every time.

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