Every referred patient does roughly the same thing before their appointment, and almost no doctor thinks about it from the other side. They open a search engine and type your name. Not because they're checking your qualifications, most trust the referral for that already, but because they want to know what they're walking into. A specialist they've never met, a procedure they don't fully understand, a room they've never been in. Googling you is how they manage that uncertainty before they have to sit in your waiting room and manage it in person, and it happens well before you've said a word to them.
We think about this constantly because it's the whole premise of what we build. But most practices have never looked at their own name the way a nervous patient does, two minutes before a phone call they've been putting off, or the night before an appointment they're already dreading. What comes up in that search does real work quietly, and it's mostly work nobody at the practice signed up to manage.
This is general information about advertising compliance, not legal advice. AHPRA's guidelines are the authority, and the details can change, so always check the current guidance for your profession before you publish.
What a patient is actually looking for
It isn't your surgical outcomes. AHPRA doesn't let you publish those as a trust signal, and patients searching your name aren't expecting to find them either, whatever the review sites and forums might promise. What they're actually trying to answer is smaller and more human. Is this person going to take me seriously? What's the practice actually like? Am I going to be treated as a person and not a file number?
A referral is a small act of trust with someone else's name on it, usually a GP who has already vouched for you once. The patient isn't re-deciding whether you're competent, that decision was largely made for them. They're trying to lower the temperature on an appointment they're anxious about, and the internet is where they go to do that. If your digital presence answers the practical, unglamorous questions, what to bring, whether they need a referral, how long they'll be there, roughly what the day looks like, a meaningful amount of that anxiety is gone before they arrive. If it doesn't, they carry the uncertainty into the room with them, and the first few minutes of the appointment often go to managing it instead of the reason they came.
This is worth sitting with because it changes what "digital presence" is actually for. It isn't there to persuade someone to become your patient, the referral usually did that. It's there to make the appointment easier to walk into, for a person who has already decided to come and is just trying to feel less unsettled about it.
Where they actually look, and what they find
In Australia, that search rarely stops at Google. A patient checking you out will often land on your Google Business Profile, then on Healthengine or RateMDs if either turns up, then on the practice website if it's easy to find. Each of those surfaces answers a slightly different question, and most practices only actively manage one of them, usually the website, while the other two sit exactly as they were left when the profile was first claimed.
A Google Business Profile with no recent posts. This is the first thing many patients see, and a static profile reads as a quiet practice, whether or not that's true. Hours that are technically correct but a profile that hasn't been touched in a year sends a different signal than one that's clearly maintained.
A Healthengine or RateMDs listing nobody's looked at. These sit outside most practices' attention entirely, yet they carry reviews, response history, and completeness scores a patient can see without ever visiting the practice's own site.
A website bio with a headshot from a decade ago. Patients notice this more than practices expect. It doesn't undermine your clinical standing, nobody assumes your skills expired, but it does read as a practice that isn't paying attention to the things it controls, which quietly seeds doubt about the things it doesn't.
None of these gaps are dramatic on their own. Together, they're the difference between a patient who arrives having already answered their own questions, and one who arrives still carrying them.
The gap between having a website and having a presence
Plenty of practices have a website. Fewer have anything on it that looks like it was touched this year. A bio with an old headshot, a services list that hasn't caught up with what the practice actually offers now, a Google Business Profile with no posts since it was first set up, these are all a version of the same signal: nobody's home. Evidence from doctors who've actually measured it suggests this isn't a hypothetical concern. Patients notice, and a share of them quietly go elsewhere rather than book with a practice that reads as inactive, without ever telling anyone why.
The fix isn't dramatic. It's closer to basic upkeep than a rebrand. A bio that reflects who's currently practising, a services page that matches what you currently do, a Google Business Profile that's posted to occasionally rather than abandoned. None of it requires becoming a content creator. It requires the digital version of your practice looking as current as the physical one.
| What the patient is trying to find | What most digital presences actually show |
|---|---|
| Is this practice active and paying attention | A profile untouched since it was first set up |
| What actually happens at the appointment | A services list with no procedural detail |
| Whether this person seems approachable | A headshot and a qualifications list, nothing more |
| What other patients thought of the service, not the outcome | Either no reviews visible, or none ever responded to |
What builds trust online without becoming a testimonial
Here's the part that catches doctors off guard: the instinct to build trust online usually reaches straight for reviews, and reviews are the one lever AHPRA has deliberately taken off the table for anything clinical. Section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law prohibits using testimonials, meaning positive statements about the clinical aspects of care, in your advertising. That includes your website, and it includes social media, wherever you or your practice controls the account.
So what's actually left, and does it work. More than most doctors assume. A comment about a patient's clinical outcome is off-limits. A post explaining what a condition is, what a first consultation actually involves, or what to expect from a common procedure in general procedural terms, is not. The distinction the National Law draws is between a claim about results and an explanation of care, and the second one is entirely open to you. Patients researching a specialist aren't only looking for proof it worked for someone else. A meaningful share of them are looking for evidence that you can explain things clearly, because that's a proxy for how the actual appointment will feel. A practice that consistently publishes plain explanations of what it does is, in a real sense, telling its own side of the story, without ever touching a testimonial.
The same logic applies to what a practice shares about itself rather than its patients: a new team member, an accreditation, a change in hours, a note on what a particular clinic day involves. None of it claims an outcome. All of it signals a practice that's active and being run by someone paying attention, which is precisely what a searching patient is trying to establish.
It also works for the practices that never think of themselves as needing a "brand". A specialist who posts nothing but the occasional plain explanation of a common procedure isn't marketing in the way that word usually implies. They're doing, in public and in writing, the same thing they'd do across the desk on the day: explaining, plainly, what's about to happen and why.
FAQs are a form of care, not a form of marketing
The most underused piece of a doctor's digital presence is the plain FAQ, and it's underused because it gets filed under marketing when it should be filed under patient care. The questions worth answering are the ones a patient is quietly worried about and too embarrassed, or too rushed, to ask reception. Do I need a referral, and how long is it valid? What should I bring? Roughly how long will I be there? What happens immediately afterwards? Is there parking? None of these touch a clinical outcome. All of them are the difference between a patient who arrives calm and prepared and one who arrives anxious because nobody told them what to expect.
This matters more than it looks like it should. A patient who has already found the answer to "what happens at a first appointment" has already rehearsed the visit in their head before they walk in. That's not a marketing outcome. It's a genuinely kinder start to an appointment, and it happens to also be exactly the kind of content AHPRA has no objection to, because none of it is a claim about clinical results. It's logistics, written down once, so the same worried question doesn't have to be asked and answered from scratch by every new patient.
Front-desk teams already know which questions get asked on repeat. That list, more than any keyword tool, is the actual brief for what belongs on the page.
You don't need to be everywhere
We'd rather say this plainly than let you assume otherwise: not every practice needs an active social media presence, and a doctor with no time to spare is not doing anything wrong by staying off it. What actually matters is that whatever does exist, your website, your Google Business Profile, a bio if the practice publishes one, looks current and answers the practical questions a worried patient is trying to find answers to. A single well-maintained page beats three abandoned accounts, and an abandoned account is arguably worse than no account at all, since it reads as neglect rather than absence.
If social media isn't realistic for your practice right now, the honest move is to put that effort into the website and the Google Business Profile instead, not to spread thin across a platform nobody's going to update. The patient searching your name doesn't care how many platforms you're on. They care whether what they found answered the question they actually had.
The bottom line
A patient searching your name before the appointment isn't trying to re-litigate the referral. They're trying to lower the uncertainty of walking into a room with a stranger, and what they find either helps with that or leaves them to carry it in with them. None of the effective options touch a testimonial: a current bio, an active Google Business Profile, a plain FAQ answering the logistics patients actually worry about, and, where it suits the practice, social content that explains rather than claims.
This is also why we run social media management and reviews and reputation as genuinely separate services from the website build. One is about what you say. The other is about what's already being said on your Google Business Profile, which is where most patients form a first impression before you've ever met them. If you'd rather not work out where the AHPRA line sits yourself, that's exactly what our AHPRA-compliant content service is for.
Either way, the patient is going to search your name. The only real decision left is what they find when they do.