SEO consultant, agency or in-house: who should own this for a clinic

Four ways of owning it, priced honestly

Every clinic already uses one of these, including the ones who think they have not chosen.

• You, in the evenings. Cash cost near zero, real cost a few hours a month of your least productive time. It works when the list is short and finite: complete the profile, write the service pages, collect reviews. It fails at the point where the work becomes continuous, because clinic work always wins.
• A part-time employee or your receptionist, with training. Genuinely underrated for clinics with reception cover. Somebody in the building can take the photos, chase the reviews, keep the hours updated and answer the profile questions, which is most of the ongoing work. It needs someone to set the system up and a few hours a month of oversight.
• A freelance consultant. Typically the lowest professional monthly cost, and you get the person you assessed. The exposure is single-person risk and limited range, since one person is rarely strong at web development, copywriting and paid ads at once.
• An agency. Costs more monthly and covers more ground, with cover for absence and a process that survives a change of staff. The exposure is being a small account: the person you met sells, and somebody more junior delivers.

Sizing it to your clinic

A rough guide that holds up across most of the clinics we meet.

• Solo practitioner, one room, diary comfortable. Do it yourself, once, properly. A finished profile, a page per service and a review habit will carry you a long way. Buy a one-off piece of help rather than a retainer.
• Solo practitioner, growing, wants a second location or an associate. This is where a consultant earns their fee, because the work is now continuous and the decisions are consequential.
• Two to five clinicians, with reception. Usually a hybrid: an internal owner for the daily items, and outside help for the website, the content and the technical work. This is the most cost-effective structure and the least often chosen.
• Multi-site. An agency, because the work now includes location pages, multiple profiles, consistency across sites and reporting that separates them. Doing this on evenings is how multi-site clinics end up invisible in their newest location.

The question that matters more than the provider

Whoever does the work, one thing decides how much of it you keep: whether the assets are yours. Your domain, your website files, your hosting, your Google Business Profile, your analytics, your ads account. All on accounts registered to your clinic's email, with you as owner and your provider granted access.

This sounds like paperwork and it is the single most expensive thing clinics get wrong. A clinic that leaves a provider owning its domain and profile does not have a marketing problem when the relationship ends, it has a business continuity problem. Ask the ownership question first, of everyone, and be unmoved by reassurance without administrative access to back it up. Our piece on choosing an agency covers the rest of the questions worth asking.

What to keep in-house whatever you decide

• Asking for reviews. Nobody outside the building can do this, and it is the highest-value recurring task there is.
• Photographs. Real ones, of your room and your people, taken on a phone. Better than anything an agency can source.
• The list of questions patients actually ask. Write them down for a month. That list is your content plan, and it is more useful than any keyword research.
• Answering enquiries quickly. The best marketing in the world dies at an unanswered phone.

Signs you have chosen wrong

• You cannot say what was done last month.
• The report leads with impressions and ends without a recommendation.
• You are paying a monthly fee and no new page has been published in a quarter.
• Your own logins do not work, or you do not have them.
• The work is technically fine and nobody has ever asked you a clinical question.

How this works at ClinicGrowth

Hastings and St Leonards is a useful market to think about here, because it contains both extremes within a couple of miles: established practices with long-standing local reputations and almost no online presence, and newer clinics competing hard on search. The right answer for those two is completely different. The established practice frequently needs one finite piece of work and then nothing. The newer clinic needs someone owning it continuously for a year.

ClinicGrowth builds on accounts the clinic owns, because the ownership question is the one that determines whether any of this is an investment or a rental. It also shapes how we scope: a clinic that needs a short, finite job is better served being told that than being sold twelve months, and a clinic that needs continuous ownership is poorly served by a one-off audit it will never implement. The honest version of this conversation usually starts by working out which of the four models above you are actually in.

If you would rather see the work than read about it, our case studies are real builds you can visit.

Questions we get asked

Decide who owns it, put the accounts in your own name, and the choice of provider becomes a much smaller decision.

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