SEO for Doctors: What Google Needs to Verify About Your Practice

A health site earned nearly 36,000 clicks in 90 days. ¹

In the list of queries people typed, searches for the name of the doctor behind the site brought in 5 clicks. And some of those searches were not even for her. They were for people with similar names. ¹

She is an oncologist in Brazil, a client from my roster, and her site has real authority in her specialty. ¹ Her waiting room is full of people who arrived through the subject. Almost nobody there knows the name of the doctor who will see them.

Most of what gets published about SEO for doctors hands you a to-do list. A fast site, keywords, content, a Google profile, reviews. For this piece, I opened the top four guides written in Portuguese, the language of our home market. Three of the four already cite Brazil’s medical advertising rule. None of the four mentions the number that proves a doctor’s specialty there. ²

There is a question that comes before the list, and in health it carries more weight. Does the machine know who sees patients at your practice? This piece starts there. Then it covers the bar Google sets for health pages, and the line that medical advertising rules draw. It moves on to the doctor’s profile on Google. And it ends with the pages a practice should have.

Two records behind the same door

Picture the sign on the door of a medical office. The clinic’s name sits at the top. Below it comes the name of the doctor who sees patients, with credentials after it.

That sign holds two different things. The clinic can change doctors. The doctor can see patients at another clinic on Thursdays. Each one has its own name, address, specialty, and connections.

My book SEO de Entidade, published in Portuguese, gives this kind of thing a name. One specific thing, with its own identifier, properties, and declared relationships to other things. This is called an entity. ³ A practice almost always has two: the person who sees patients and the organization where that person practices.

The public vocabulary for data markup, schema.org, already has this design. It has a type for the physician as an individual, with a property called practicesAt. That property points to the hospitals and clinics where the physician practices. ⁴ The clinic sits in one record. The doctor sits in another. A relationship ties the two together.

In the book, the identifier shows up as a number that does not change when the name changes. ³ In Brazil, where we are based, a third party issues a number like that. It is the registration with the Regional Council of Medicine, the CRM, in the state where the doctor practices.

That number is public. The Federal Council of Medicine’s website has a physician lookup open to anyone. It searches by name, state, CRM number, city, specialty, and practice area. ⁵ Where you practice, the question is the same. Which body licensed you, and does it keep a record anyone can check?

Here is a reading of my own, and I flag it. Google does not document that it reads a license number, and I will not claim that it does. What I claim is simpler. An official source, one that does not depend on the doctor, confirms name, registration, and specialty. Everything the practice publishes needs to match it.

Remember the searches for the oncologist’s name that belonged to someone else? ¹ Separating a doctor from people with similar names is identity work. It has a section of its own, Entity SEO.

The bar Google sets for health pages

Picture a pharmacy counter. Nobody asks you for anything when you buy breath mints. For an antibiotic, the pharmacist asks for the prescription and checks who signed it. The counter is the same, and the requirement rises with the risk.

Google writes this logic into its public documentation. The page on helpful content says its systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T on certain topics. These are topics that could significantly impact people’s health, financial stability, or safety. ⁶ This is called YMYL. The acronym stands for Your Money or Your Life, and the name is Google’s own.

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. The same page says trust is the most important of the four. ⁶ It also says E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor. ⁶ What exists is a mix of factors that can identify these qualities, and none of them has a published weight. ⁷

The criteria behind this bar are written down in a public manual, the search quality rater guidelines. The version at the official address, dated September 11, 2025, runs 182 pages. ⁸ The raters do not move anyone’s ranking. Google writes that they have no control over how pages rank. It uses their ratings to learn whether its systems are working. ⁶

Reading the manual is useful for something else: finding out what Google considers good in health.

It puts topics that could harm the reader’s health into a category of their own. ⁸ It says certain advice on these topics must come from experts, and it lists cancer treatment among the examples. ⁸ It asks that medical advice be consistent with well-established expert consensus. ⁸

And it carries a rule that lands squarely on a practice’s website. Take a page on a sensitive topic that says little about who is responsible for the site, or who created the content. It should get a low rating. ⁸ A rater’s rating calibrates the test, as you just read. Even so, it shows you the target.

The documentation for site owners asks the same question from the inside. Is it self-evident to your visitors who wrote the content? Do pages carry a byline where one is expected? Does the byline lead to more information about the author? ⁶

The book looks at the same scene from the machine’s side. A lot of health writing goes out signed by “Editorial Team.” Other pieces carry the name of someone with a professional license and a public track record. For a system that treats an author as an identifiable thing, those two bylines carry different information. ⁷ What the machine does with that difference is the book’s reading, flagged as such.

The line medical rules require, and the machine reads too

First, a boundary. This piece is not legal advice. I read medical advertising rules the way someone who builds pages reads them. How they apply to your case is a question for whoever regulates your practice.

The rules on how doctors may advertise depend on where you practice. Check the ones that apply to you before you publish anything. I will use the rule from Brazil, where we are based, as the example. I read it in full, and the mechanism it reveals is what matters here.

In Brazil, the rule in force is CFM Resolution No. 2,336/2023, from the Federal Council of Medicine. It was published in the country’s Official Gazette on September 13, 2023, and took effect on March 11, 2024. ^{9 10} It replaced the 2011 rule. The resolution itself guarantees doctors the right to consult Codame, the medical advertising committee of their regional council. ⁹

Article 4 lists what every piece of medical advertising must carry. The doctor’s name and CRM number, with the word MÉDICO, Portuguese for physician. And the registered specialty, followed by the RQE number, the Specialist Qualification Registry. ⁹

Article 6 says where this goes online. On websites, blogs, and social networks, the information goes on the main page of the profile, for a person or a company. ⁹ And the resolution counts the doctor’s website among the doctor’s own social networks. ⁹ For clinics and hospitals, Article 5 asks for the establishment’s name with its CRM registration. It also asks for the name of the technical director, with that director’s registration. ⁹

Now look at this through the machine’s eyes. The council requires name, registration, and specialty on the main page. Google’s manual tells raters to distrust a health page that does not say who is responsible for it. In my reading, the ethics rule already does half of the identity work. The other half is making that same line match everywhere the doctor appears.

Specialty titles have rules of their own, and they shape the site’s architecture directly. A specialist is whoever holds an RQE. ⁹ With a specialty title, a doctor may advertise up to two specialties and the practice areas tied to them. ⁹ A postgraduate degree without an RQE may appear, followed by NÃO ESPECIALISTA (not a specialist) in capital letters. ⁹ A non-specialist may not advertise treating specific organs or diseases. ⁹ And a doctor may not let their name appear on “doctor of the year” or “best doctor” award lists. ⁹

For whoever builds the site, the consequence is about architecture. The specialty in a page’s title needs to be the same one on the doctor’s record. If in doubt, ask whoever regulates advertising where you practice before you publish. In Brazil, that is Codame.

Whatever your own rule requires, the complete line has a natural home. It is each doctor’s official page, at an address that never changes, with the name spelled as on the record. The rules for that page are in the article on the entity home.

The doctor’s profile on Google

The Google Business Profile guidelines have a section for professionals who serve their own clients. None of the four guides I opened for this piece mentions it. ²

Google calls them individual practitioners: public-facing professionals, typically with their own customer base. Doctors and dentists are on the list. ¹¹

Four rules in that section affect a practice. A practitioner’s profile may include a title or degree, such as Dr. or MD. A practitioner should not have several profiles, one for each specialization. When several practitioners work at one location, the clinic gets its own profile. Each doctor gets a separate one, with only their own name. And a doctor who is the only practitioner at a branded location shares one profile with the brand, in the format brand, colon, name. ¹¹

Notice that Google drew the sign on the door. The clinic on one side, the person on the other, each with its own record. Merging the two into one profile creates the confusion the machine has to untangle. So does opening three profiles for the same doctor.

What decides the order on the map is covered in the local SEO section. How your town comes to confirm your name is in the article on becoming the go-to name in your town.

The rater guidelines include a detail that helps anyone who practices far from downtown. People are willing to travel a little farther for certain places, such as a doctor’s office. And sometimes much farther, when the clinic is highly specialized. ⁸

The pages a practice should have

Go back to the oncologist from the start. A single page on her site brought in 9,015 clicks in 90 days, a quarter of the total. ¹ That page covers another area of medicine. The site’s biggest asset draws people who need a different specialist. In health, the book marks this as the worst possible place for your main asset. ¹

She and a dermatologist from the same roster share another gap. Both practice in cities stated on their own sites. Even so, local and commercial searches brought 5 clicks to one and 4 to the other, in 90 days. ¹

A practice’s territory has two halves. One answers people who want to understand the disease. The other answers people who have already decided to see a doctor. They want to know who, where, how much it costs, and how to book.

Brazil’s resolution lists that second half among what doctors may publish. A doctor may explain how to book an appointment, the office hours, and how the practice runs. They may describe the location, from parking to directions, and the health plans they accept. And they may state the consultation fee and the payment methods. ⁹ The previous rule banned advertising procedure prices and payment options. ¹⁰

In my reading, that list is almost the content plan for the missing half. Each item becomes a question someone asks before calling, and each question calls for a published answer.

Two kinds of page come out of it. The specialty page says what the doctor treats, with the specialty on record and the city where they practice. The procedure page explains a procedure they perform, who it is for, and what can go wrong.

For the procedure page, the Brazilian resolution reads almost like a script. Every result image must come with educational text. That text covers the indications, the factors that influence the outcome, and the complications described in the literature. ⁹ Before-and-after photos are allowed, as long as they come in a set. The set shows satisfactory outcomes, unsatisfactory outcomes, and complications. ⁹ The image cannot identify the patient or be edited. ⁹

Anyone in Brazil who learned that before-and-after photos are banned learned the 2011 rule. The old one prohibited showing the patient to advertise a technique or a treatment result. ¹⁰

Compare that with Google’s manual. Medical advice needs to be consistent with expert consensus. ⁸ The Brazilian council prohibits guaranteeing, promising, or implying good treatment outcomes. ⁹ The two yardsticks push the page toward the same place: what medicine supports, with the risk written next to it.

Patient testimonials have rules too. They must be sober, with no adjectives of superiority and no hint of a promised result. ⁹ Anything the doctor reposts counts as the doctor’s own publication. ⁹ The resolution does not mention Google reviews by name. In Brazil, questions about asking patients for reviews go to Codame. Where you practice, they go to your regulator.

Every one of these pages needs to say, in its own text, who performs the procedure. The book shows a sentence built to be excerpted from the page. It names the clinic, the procedure, the year, the city, and the surgeon in charge, with an active license. ¹² A passage like that stays standing when an AI system carries it into an answer.

On generic health questions, a practice competes with large institutions. A study from January 2026 put 100 health questions to ChatGPT and classified the 615 sources it cited. Over 75% were established institutions, such as Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Wikipedia, and the UK’s National Health Service. ¹³ It is a preprint, and it looked at only one engine.

The message for a practice is about territory. The question where you are the natural source carries your name, your specialty, and your city inside it.

The practice sheet

Take a sheet of paper and set aside an afternoon. The exercise starts in a place you do not control.

1. Open the public license record for each doctor at the practice. In Brazil, that is the CFM physician lookup, searched by name and state. Copy what the record shows, without fixing anything. ⁵
2. Open the site’s main page. Check that it shows, for each doctor, the name, license number, specialty, and whatever your advertising rule requires. In Brazil, that means the CRM with the word MÉDICO, the specialty, and the RQE. For the clinic, check the registration and the technical director. ⁹
3. Open the clinic’s Business Profile and each doctor’s, if there is one. Flag duplicate profiles, profiles by specialty, and profiles that mix clinic and person. ¹¹
4. List the specialty and procedure pages. Next to each one, write who signs it and whether that specialty is on the doctor’s record.
5. Circle every mismatch. A name spelled another way, a specialty that does not match the record, an old address, a page with no byline.

Each circle is identity work, and it comes before any new content. The rest of the site, from indexing to speed, follows the order of the SEO audit.

The question you ask from now on

From today on, when someone offers SEO for your practice, you will ask two questions before anyone mentions a blog. Does Google know who sees patients here? And does the line with name, license, and specialty read the same everywhere?

Whoever answers both well has already looked up your license record before the meeting.

A disclosure, which is a house rule. SEO Genome sells SEO consulting, and we have health clients on our roster. That is why we publish questions to judge any consulting firm, ours included. The practice sheet was made for you to fill in on your own. Nobody here promises a ranking.

Start today with the license lookup, the name of each doctor, and the sheet beside you.