Healthcare
SEO for orthopaedic clinics
An orthopaedic clinic ran through our August 2026 benchmark, and its SERPs made one thing plain: private clinics do not win condition terms.
Search for a knee or shoulder condition and the first screen belongs to institutions.
Hospital groups, medical encyclopaedias and international clinic networks rank for condition terms, and a private clinic does not push them off. What a clinic can win is the procedure-plus-place search, the surgeon's name, and the specific questions a patient asks the week before deciding.
The orthopaedic clinic in our August 2026 benchmark graded B on the technical audit with 18 checks passed, 5 warnings and 6 fails over 100 pages, and its competitor discovery made the institution problem visible: the raw list mixed real local clinics with hospital groups and overseas reference sites that no clinic actually competes with for patients.
That is the reading we carried out of the benchmark's healthcare runs: the SERP you are actually in is narrower than the condition SERP, and the plan has to spend its pages on searches a private clinic can hold.
Intent and difficulty before anything is written
Every candidate keyword carries volume, difficulty and intent from live search data, so a condition term owned by hospitals is visibly expensive before you spend a page on it, and the procedure-plus-place terms show up as the winnable ones they are.
Help centre: Intent and difficultyA map from procedures to pages
The keyword map assigns each winnable search a page: the procedure pages, the surgeon profiles, the recovery questions. Where a page is missing it names the one to build, so the plan arrives as a build list.
A competitor list you approve
Discovery returns who ranks for your terms, evidence attached, and the competitors tab lets you strike the hospitals and encyclopaedias before the list drives tracking or content. In this niche that correction step is not optional, and the product expects you to use it.
Patient-question articles, scored before you see them
The writer drafts against the questions ranking pages already answer, flags anything it could not verify, and scores each draft with the engine that grades your site. Clinical review stays with your surgeons; the drafting and scoring stop being their evening job.
Start with the free tools
Each one runs without an account, on your own site or keywords, before anything is signed up for.
- Keyword checker
- Check search volume, difficulty and intent for any keyword.
- People Also Ask finder
- Pull the questions Google surfaces for a query.
- On-page meta checker
- Inspect a page's title, meta, headings, canonical and status.
- SEO competitor analysis
- Compare a domain against its organic rivals.
Questions people in this niche ask
The ones that decide whether this fits, answered with the verdict first.
- Should we try to rank for condition terms at all?
- Rarely as a target, sometimes as supporting content. A condition page can feed internal links to the procedure page that converts, but aiming the plan at terms hospitals own burns months. The difficulty data makes that call visible per keyword.
- Our surgeons have no time to write. How does content work?
- They review instead of write. Drafts arrive scored, with unverifiable claims flagged, and nothing publishes without approval. A review pass over a finished draft is a different evening than writing one.
- What showed up in the benchmark for a clinic like ours?
- One orthopaedic clinic through the full pipeline in our August 2026 benchmark: a B-grade audit over 100 pages, 14 recommended keywords, and a discovery list that needed the institutions struck from it. That last part is why the competitor list is editable.
- Does the surgeon's own name matter for search?
- Yes, and it is the easiest ranking you will get. Patients search the name they were referred to; a proper profile page with credentials and procedures owns that search almost immediately.
What we will not do
We will not aim your plan at condition head terms a hospital owns and call the impressions progress.
Healthcare
See it on your own site
A free audit grades your site A+ to F, then the keyword map says which pages your niche is missing. No card required.