Healthcare SEO
Healthcare is where the gap between generic and specialist SEO advice is most consequential.
YMYL - Your Money or Your Life - is Google's shorthand for content where poor quality causes real harm, and medical information sits squarely in it. The quality bar is higher, trust signals matter more, and core update reassessments hit harder when a health site isn't meeting the standard.
I work with private healthcare practices, health content organisations and medical charities. The brief always carries the same constraint: what does good SEO look like inside a clinical, regulatory and ethical framework that limits what you can say?
E-E-A-T is infrastructure, not box-ticking
In healthcare, Google needs evidence of expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trust before it ranks a page for anything health-related. Qualified authors credited on clinical content. Documented, visible medical review processes. The organisation's credentials established as an entity, not just a website. Sites that treat this as a checklist get reassessed in core updates and don't recover quickly.
Finding the gap nobody else has spotted
Health search behaviour moves faster than provider websites. Communities adopt new language before the clinical ecosystem catches up. AuDHD - the co-occurrence of autism and ADHD, increasingly claimed as a distinct identity by the community itself - is a live example where search demand grew well before providers had a page that addressed it.
I found this gap for a private ADHD psychiatry practice using entity-level analysis with Google's Natural Language API. In plain terms: the software reads the top-ranking pages in a market and identifies the concepts - the entities - Google associates with them, which shows you what the competition covers and, more usefully, what nobody covers. The analysis showed the whole market was still splitting this audience across separate service pages - a first-mover gap the practice has since closed with a dedicated commercial page. You can't find that by sorting keywords by volume. It comes from thinking about who is searching and what they've already decided about themselves.
Regulation shapes the copy
ASA guidance, CQC requirements and professional body standards determine what a provider can claim about outcomes and clinical efficacy. "Just write more about the condition" isn't a usable brief in private healthcare if it produces unqualified clinical claims or misleading patient expectations. The strategy has to be built inside those constraints from the start.
Local, and human
Someone searching for a private ADHD assessment or a physio clinic almost always wants something geographically accessible - Business Profile, local schema and location pages are underused levers in private practice. And a potential patient searching for anxiety treatment may be in a vulnerable state. Content that's technically optimised but clinically cold won't convert, and shouldn't.
The engagements
AuDHD Psychiatry - full SEO strategy, content roadmap, keyword research and the entity gap analysis above - a direct client. And via agencies: a technical audit for a royal college (Reload Digital), a technical audit for a national home care franchise (CTI Digital), backlink and technical work for a private medical procedures platform (Blueclaw), and SEO strategy for a national alcohol awareness charity (CTI Digital).
In healthcare, the algorithm is looking for reasons to trust you - and most sites give it none. Building those signals properly is slower than pushing out content. It's also the only approach that holds through a core update, and in this sector that's the whole game.