The same five problems, over and over again
We've reviewed dozens of specialist websites over the past year. Orthopaedic surgeons, cardiologists, dermatologists, psychiatrists: across every specialty and every major city in Australia. And the same five structural problems appear on almost every single one.
What surprises us most is how many doctors blame their marketing. They assume the issue is their Google Ads budget, their social media presence, or the fact that they haven't blogged in six months. Sometimes those things matter. But far more often, the real issue is the website itself.
The marketing isn't broken. The foundation is.
Your website has a structural problem, not a marketing problem
Here's an analogy we use with doctors all the time. Imagine you've bought a house with structural cracks in the foundation. You can repaint the walls, upgrade the kitchen, and landscape the garden. It looks great. But the cracks keep spreading.
A structurally broken website works the same way. You can pour money into SEO, run paid ads, even hire a content writer. But if the underlying website doesn't meet the technical and structural standards that search engines now require, you're getting diminishing returns on every dollar you spend.
The frustrating part is that these structural problems are invisible to most people. Your site looks fine. Your patients can navigate it. But Google's algorithms, and the AI systems that increasingly answer patient queries, are seeing something very different when they crawl your pages.
Let's walk through the five signs we see most often.
Sign 1: It fails Core Web Vitals
Google has been explicit about this. Core Web Vitals are a confirmed ranking signal. These are three specific performance metrics that measure your website's real-world user experience:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly your main content loads. Google's threshold is under 2.5 seconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the page jumps around as it loads. The threshold is under 0.1.
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks. The threshold is under 200 milliseconds.
In our experience, the majority of medical practice websites fail at least one of these benchmarks. The culprit is usually a combination of oversized images, bloated themes, excessive plugins, and hosting that wasn't designed for performance.
This matters more than most doctors realise. When two websites have similar content and authority, Google uses page experience signals (including Core Web Vitals) to decide which one ranks higher. If your site is slow and your competitor's site is fast, you're consistently losing ground.
Google's Page Experience documentation lays this out clearly. It's not a secret. But most medical website providers don't measure these metrics, let alone optimise for them.
Sign 2: No medical schema markup
This one is technical, but the concept is simple. Schema markup is structured data: invisible code on your pages that tells search engines exactly what your practice does, where it's located, who the doctors are, and what conditions you treat.
Google uses this structured data to understand your website at a much deeper level than it can from reading text alone. And the Schema.org vocabulary includes types built specifically for healthcare: MedicalOrganization, Physician, MedicalCondition, MedicalProcedure.
Most medical websites have zero structured data. Or they have the bare minimum: a generic LocalBusiness snippet that doesn't mention anything medical at all.
Without schema markup, Google is guessing about your practice. It's reading paragraphs of text and trying to infer your specialty, your qualifications, your service area. With schema markup, you're telling it directly. The difference in how search engines understand and surface your practice can be significant.
For a deeper dive, see our guide on Schema Markup for Doctors: The Hidden Ranking Factor.
Sign 3: Built on a static template that hasn't been updated
Here's something that's easy to overlook. A website that was built well three years ago is no longer a well-built website.
Search algorithms aren't static. Google makes thousands of changes to its ranking systems every year. New signals get added. Old techniques lose effectiveness. The standards for what constitutes a high-quality website are constantly shifting.
A website that isn't continuously maintained doesn't decline gradually. It falls behind incrementally, and then suddenly. One day your rankings are fine. Then a core algorithm update rolls out and you drop from page one to page three. It feels sudden, but the decay has been happening for months or years.
This is the fundamental limitation of the traditional agency model: build a website, hand it over, and move on to the next client. That approach made sense when the web was more static. It doesn't work when search is evolving this rapidly.
The alternative is a platform approach, where your website is part of a system that's continuously improved, updated to meet new standards, and maintained as an ongoing service rather than a one-off project. That model keeps your site current without requiring you to think about it.
Sign 4: No E-E-A-T signals
Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines classify healthcare as YMYL: Your Money or Your Life. This means Google's quality evaluation framework holds medical websites (along with financial and legal content) to a higher standard than most other categories. The reasoning is straightforward: inaccurate health information can cause real harm.
The standard Google applies is called E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. For medical websites, this translates to very specific requirements:
- Doctor bios with verifiable credentials, not just a name and photo, but qualifications, training history, hospital affiliations, and links to medical registrations
- Authorship on content, Google wants to know which qualified professional wrote or reviewed the health information on your site
- Links to medical registrations, AHPRA registration numbers, college memberships, verifiable professional standing
- MedicalOrganization schema, structured data that formally connects your practice to recognisable medical entities
Most medical websites are missing the majority of these signals. They might have a doctor bio, but it's a short paragraph without linked credentials. They might have content pages, but no authorship attribution. They might have a contact page, but no structured data connecting the practice to the broader medical ecosystem.
A generic agency may not even know what E-E-A-T stands for, let alone how to implement it for a medical practice. Implementing E-E-A-T properly for healthcare requires understanding AHPRA, the relevant medical colleges, clinical workflows, and how credentialing works in the Australian medical system. A team with medical industry knowledge can build these signals into the site architecture from the start, rather than trying to bolt them on later.
Sign 5: Not structured for AI search
This is the newest problem, and potentially the most consequential. Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI systems are now directly answering patient queries. When someone asks "Who is a good orthopaedic surgeon in Melbourne?" or "What's the recovery time for ACL reconstruction?", they're increasingly getting an AI-generated answer, not just a list of blue links.
In a small sample of surgeons appearing in Google's AI Overview that we reviewed, every one had a well-structured personal website — the surgeons relying solely on hospital directory profiles or group practice pages were absent. It's not a scientific study, but the pattern is worth noticing. You can read more in Surgeons Who Dominate Google AI Overview.
Separately, Google's AI patent filings point to where this technology is heading. While patents describe potential approaches rather than confirmed products, the direction is clear: the systems that select which sources to cite in AI-generated answers favour structured data, content depth, authority signals, and clear entity definitions. These are exactly the things most medical websites lack.
Websites built years ago simply weren't designed for AI citation. They were designed for human readers browsing a list of search results. That's no longer how a growing number of patients find their doctors. Infrastructure designed for AI-era discoverability looks fundamentally different from a traditional brochure site, and the gap widens with every algorithm update.
Why generic agencies can't fix this
We want to be fair here. Many web agencies do good work. They build attractive websites, they run competent Google Ads campaigns, and they understand the basics of SEO.
But the structural problems we've described aren't basic SEO problems. They require specialised knowledge at the intersection of healthcare, technical SEO, and emerging AI search systems. And most generic agencies are applying the same playbook they use for restaurants, retailers, and real estate agents.
Here's what we typically see:
- They optimise on top of a broken foundation. They'll write blog posts and build backlinks for a site that fails Core Web Vitals and has no structured data. It's like polishing a car with a seized engine.
- They don't understand YMYL requirements. Google holds medical websites to a different standard. If your agency doesn't know what YMYL means, your site isn't being built to the standard Google expects.
- They're unaware of AHPRA compliance requirements. Medical advertising in Australia has specific regulations. Content that violates AHPRA guidelines can result in regulatory action, and that's a risk most agencies don't even know exists.
- They've never mentioned E-E-A-T, medical schema, or AI search visibility. If these topics haven't come up in the last six months of working with your agency, that's a red flag.
Consider the economics. Patient acquisition costs in healthcare continue to climb, with some specialties spending hundreds of dollars per lead through paid channels. Every dollar spent marketing a structurally weak website is a dollar that's working harder than it needs to, or not working at all.
What a solid foundation actually looks like
Rather than just pointing out problems, here's what a modern medical website foundation should include. This isn't a sales pitch. It's a checklist you can use to evaluate any provider, including your current one.
- Passes Core Web Vitals on every page, not just the homepage, but every service page, every condition page, every doctor bio. Consistent performance across the entire site.
- Comprehensive medical schema markup: MedicalOrganization, Physician, MedicalCondition, and MedicalProcedure schemas that give search engines a complete, structured picture of your practice.
- E-E-A-T signals built into the site architecture, not bolted on as an afterthought. Doctor credentials, authorship, registration links, and trust signals woven into every template.
- Content structured for both human readers and AI systems: clear heading hierarchies, well-defined entities, FAQ sections with proper markup, and content depth that demonstrates genuine expertise.
- AHPRA compliance built into every template and content workflow, so that compliance isn't something you have to check manually after every update.
- Continuously maintained, not launched and left. Regular updates to meet evolving search standards, algorithm changes, and new AI citation requirements.
These aren't aspirational goals. They're the baseline requirements described in Google's Page Experience documentation and Search Quality Rater Guidelines. The challenge is that meeting them requires both technical expertise and medical domain knowledge: a combination that's genuinely rare.
What to do next
If any of this resonated, you have three practical options.
Option 1: Audit your current site yourself
You can check three things right now, without any technical knowledge:
- Run a Core Web Vitals check. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your website URL, and look at the Core Web Vitals Assessment. If it says "failed" on mobile, your site has a performance problem that's actively hurting your rankings.
- Search your own name. Open Google and search your name + your specialty + your city. Where do you appear? Are you on page one? Does your own website show up, or just directory listings and hospital profiles?
- Check for structured data. On any page of your website, right-click and select "View Page Source." Press Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on Mac) and search for "schema" or "application/ld+json." If nothing appears, your website has no structured data at all.
Option 2: Ask your current provider these questions
If you're working with a web agency or SEO provider, these four questions will quickly tell you whether they understand the structural requirements for medical websites:
- "What are our Core Web Vitals scores, and how do you plan to improve them?"
- "Do we have MedicalOrganization and Physician schema markup on our site?"
- "How are you ensuring our content meets Google's E-E-A-T requirements for YMYL healthcare content?"
- "What's your approach to AI search visibility? Are we structured to appear in AI Overviews?"
If they can't answer these confidently, or if they don't know what you're asking, that tells you something important about the foundation your marketing is built on.
Option 3: Talk to a team that specialises in medical websites
If you'd like to understand where your practice stands and what it would take to fix the foundation, we can help. We work exclusively with specialist doctors in Australia, and we understand the intersection of medical credibility, search infrastructure, and AHPRA compliance that makes healthcare websites different from everything else.
No pressure, no hard sell. Just a clear-eyed assessment of where your site stands today.
Further reading: If you're interested in the broader digital strategy picture, our guide on Local SEO for Doctors: The Safest Bet in Healthcare Marketing covers the foundational search strategy that complements everything discussed in this article.