A Dermatology Website SEO Checklist You Can Actually Use

Run This Dermatology Website SEO Checklist Before You Spend More on Ads

We see the same problem on most dermatology websites we audit. The practice offers 30 or 40 services, and the website puts all of them in one bulleted list on a single services page. Google can’t rank a bullet point. So the practice across town with a dedicated Mohs surgery page gets the patient, even if your surgeon has twice the experience.

This dermatology website SEO checklist is for practice owners, administrators, and marketing leads who want to know where their site stands without paying for a 60-page audit nobody will read. Run it before a redesign, when organic traffic has been flat for a few months, or before you hire an SEO agency so you know what you’d be paying them to fix.

What is a dermatology website SEO checklist? A dermatology website SEO checklist is a list of pass/fail checks covering technical site health, condition and procedure pages, provider credentials, local search visibility, and conversion tracking. It shows a dermatology practice which specific gaps keep its site from ranking for searches like “skin cancer screening near me” and from turning those visitors into booked appointments.

Every item below has three parts: the action, why it matters, and how to check it yourself. Most checks take under ten minutes with free tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights. Count every box you can honestly check. You’ll need the number to score yourself.

Can Google Crawl, Load, and Trust Your Site?

Technical SEO is the boring part. It’s also where one wrong setting can quietly cancel out everything else you do. We once watched a practice spend months on new content while a leftover “noindex” tag from the developer’s staging site kept half of it out of Google entirely. Nobody noticed because nobody looked.

• [ ] Your site is verified in Google Search Console, and your important pages show as indexed. A page that isn’t indexed can’t rank for anything. Verify: open Search Console, go to Indexing, then Pages, and confirm your homepage, location pages, and top service pages appear under “Indexed.”
• [ ] No important page is blocked by a noindex tag or robots.txt. Redesigns and platform migrations leave these behind all the time. Verify: paste your top ten URLs into the URL Inspection tool in Search Console and confirm each says “URL is on Google.”
• [ ] Your mobile pages pass Core Web Vitals. Most people searching for a dermatologist are on a phone, and a slow page loses them before your headline loads. Verify: run your homepage and two service pages through PageSpeed Insights and check LCP, INP, and CLS. Before-and-after galleries with uncompressed photos are the usual culprit on dermatology sites.
• [ ] The whole site runs on HTTPS, and every version of your domain redirects to one. Split versions divide your ranking signals. Verify: type the http, https, www, and non-www versions of your domain into a browser. All four should land on the same address.
• [ ] Your XML sitemap is submitted and lists only live pages you want ranked. A sitemap full of redirects and deleted pages tells Google your site is messy. Verify: check the Sitemaps report in Search Console for errors and a page count that roughly matches your real page count.
• [ ] Old URLs from past redesigns redirect to their closest match. Those old URLs often carry years of links and rankings. Verify: review the “Not found (404)” list in Search Console, or crawl the site with the free version of Screaming Frog (it handles up to 500 URLs).

Side note: practices that acquired another dermatology practice and folded its website into theirs lose rankings here more than anywhere else. If that’s you, check this section twice.

Does Every Condition and Procedure Have Its Own Page?

This is where dermatology websites lose the most ground, and it’s the section I’d fix first if the technical basics pass. A patient searching “psoriasis dermatologist” and a patient searching “laser hair removal” want different things. They have different insurance questions and different timelines, and one line on a shared services page serves neither of them.

I’ll take a mild stance here. I would rather see a dermatology site with 25 thorough condition and procedure pages and no blog at all than a site with 200 blog posts and one thin services page. Blog posts about “5 summer skincare tips” compete with national health publishers and lose. Service pages compete with the four other dermatologists in your zip code, and you can win that.

• [ ] Every high-value condition and procedure has its own URL. Think acne, eczema, psoriasis, rosacea, hair loss, skin cancer screening, Mohs surgery, laser treatments, and injectables. Verify: write down your 15 highest-revenue services and confirm each one has a dedicated page.
• [ ] Each page answers what a patient needs before booking. A page that only explains what eczema is competes with the Mayo Clinic. A page that explains how your practice evaluates and treats it, who sees those patients, whether insurance applies, and how to book competes locally. Verify: read the page as a patient would. Can you tell whether your insurance is accepted and how to schedule within 30 seconds?
• [ ] Title tags and H1 headings include the service and the city. “Mohs Surgery in Tampa | Practice Name” tells Google and the patient exactly what the page covers. Verify: search site:yourdomain.com in Google and read the blue titles. “Services” and “Page 2” are failing titles.
• [ ] Medical and cosmetic dermatology are separated in your navigation. Patients looking for a mole check and patients looking for filler shouldn’t have to dig through each other’s menus. Verify: can a new visitor reach any cosmetic service in two clicks without passing through medical pages, and vice versa?
• [ ] Clinical content shows a named provider reviewer and a review date. Google’s quality rater guidelines treat health information as “Your Money or Your Life” content and hold it to a higher standard. Verify: each condition page displays something like “Reviewed by Dr. [Name], board-certified dermatologist” with a date from the last 12 to 18 months.
• [ ] No two pages target the same search term. When your blog post and your service page both chase “acne treatment,” they split the signal and neither ranks well. Verify: in the Search Console Performance report, filter by a query and click Pages. More than one URL showing for your main service terms is a warning sign.

We’ve written separately about content marketing for dermatology practices, but the short version is this: build the service pages first, then write blog content that links back to them.

Would a Skeptical Patient Believe Your Providers Are Qualified?

Patients comparing dermatologists read provider bios closely. So does Google, in its own way. Health searches reward sites that show clear evidence of who wrote or reviewed the content and why they’re qualified.

• [ ] Every provider has an individual bio page with real credentials. Include board certification (the American Board of Dermatology for physicians, or the relevant certifying body for PAs and NPs), training, and clinical focus areas. Verify: Google “Dr. [Name] dermatologist [city].” Your bio page should appear on page one. If only Healthgrades and Zocdoc show up, the page is too thin.
• [ ] Structured data describes your practice and providers. Schema markup such as MedicalClinic and Physician helps Google connect providers, locations, and specialties. Verify: run a service page and a provider page through the Schema Markup Validator and confirm there are no errors.
• [ ] Before-and-after galleries have documented consent, results disclaimers, and a compliance review. Many states regulate how medical practices can advertise results, and your state medical board rules apply to your website. Have your own legal or compliance counsel review the gallery and the copy around it. Verify: search your site for words like “guaranteed,” “permanent,” and “painless,” and confirm you can produce a signed consent form for every photo.
• [ ] Review responses never confirm that the reviewer is a patient. HHS’s Office for Civil Rights has fined practices for disclosing patient information in replies to online reviews. Verify: read your last 20 responses. “Thanks for visiting us for your laser treatment” fails. “Thank you for the feedback, please call our office manager” passes.

How Does Your Practice Show Up in Local Search?

For most dermatology practices, the Google map pack decides more new patient visits than any other part of search. Three listings appear, and those three get most of the calls. Everything in this section feeds whether you’re one of them.

• [ ] Each location has its own verified Google Business Profile with “Dermatologist” as the primary category. The primary category carries the most weight in local ranking. Verify: open each profile and check the category. Add relevant secondary categories (like skin care clinic for cosmetic services) only where they’re accurate.
• [ ] You’ve made a deliberate decision about individual provider profiles. Google allows separate profiles for individual practitioners. They can capture searches for a doctor’s name, but they can also compete with your practice profile for the same searches. Neither choice is wrong. Having no plan is the mistake. Verify: search each provider’s name and see which profiles appear and whether they’re claimed.
• [ ] Name, address, and phone number match exactly everywhere. Mismatched listings on Healthgrades, Zocdoc, Vitals, WebMD, and Yelp confuse Google about which information is correct. Verify: search your practice name plus “dermatology” and spot-check the first ten directory listings against your website.
• [ ] Each location has its own page on your website. Include the address, hours, parking details, an embedded map, the providers who practice there, and the services offered at that location. Verify: each Google Business Profile links to its matching location page instead of your homepage.
• [ ] You have a system for asking every patient for a review. A burst of reviews once a year does less than a steady flow every month. Verify: count your new Google reviews from the last 90 days and compare that number to the top three practices in your map pack.

Are Website Visitors Turning Into Booked Appointments?

Ranking without tracking is guesswork. You can’t tell which pages bring in patients, so you can’t tell your agency (or yourself) where to spend next month’s effort.

• [ ] Booking is one tap away from every service page on mobile. Every extra step loses people. Verify: on your phone, open a service page and count the taps to a booking form or a click-to-call phone number. More than two means you have work to do.
• [ ] Calls, form submissions, and booking clicks are tracked as key events in GA4. This is how you connect organic traffic to actual appointment requests. Verify: open the key events report in GA4 and confirm each event recorded data in the last 30 days.
• [ ] Your tracking setup has been reviewed with HIPAA in mind. HHS has issued guidance on tracking technologies on healthcare websites, and a federal court vacated part of it in 2024. The risk around pixels on booking and condition pages still hasn’t gone away. Have counsel review which third-party tags fire where, and use form and booking vendors that will sign a business associate agreement. Verify: load your booking page with Google Tag Assistant running and list every tag that fires.
• [ ] Someone owns website leads and responds within one business day. SEO can bring a patient to your form. A form request that sits for four days hands them to the next dermatologist on their list. Verify: submit a test request on a Tuesday morning and time the response.

How to Score Your Dermatology Website SEO Checklist

Add up your checked boxes. Then look at where the misses cluster, because a score of 18 with five technical misses is a different problem than a score of 18 with five content misses.

21 to 25: Your foundation is solid. Your gains now come from depth: more thorough service pages, stronger review momentum, and content that supports your highest-margin procedures.

14 to 20: You’re ranking below what your practice deserves. Fix the gaps in the order the table suggests, technical first, and expect it to take a few months before Search Console shows the movement.

Under 14: Don’t start with content or ads. Start with indexing, Google Business Profile categories, and conversion tracking. Content published on a site Google can’t crawl properly won’t pay off.

Say you run a four-location dermatology group that scores 17. Technical passes, local is decent, but you missed four of the six content items. That’s the most common pattern we see, and it’s fixable. The practice has done the setup work but never built out the pages patients search for. The fix is a content plan for 15 to 20 service pages, written with your providers and reviewed by them.

Be honest about the uncomfortable part, too. Some of these fixes are quick (a category change takes two minutes). Others, like rewriting 20 service pages with provider review, take real hours from people who already have full clinic schedules. Plan for that before you commit to a timeline.

This week, open Google Search Console and run the six technical checks. They take under an hour and tell you whether everything else on this list can work. If you’d rather have someone go through all 25 items with you, book a free strategy call with PatientProcure. We’ll show you where your dermatology website loses patients before they book and which fixes to make first.