BUSINESS

RANKING #1 IS NOT ENOUGH ANYMORE

AI is changing how patients find aesthetic clinics. Discover why ranking first on Google is no longer enough to stay visible.

AI has greatly disrupted online search over the last couple of years, shifting away from using “Keywords” as the primary way to classify information and matching it to search enquiries towards AI summaries that now answer the question. It used to be that if your website designer inserted enough appropriate “Keywords” into your website’s content, your clinic would appear in one of the top three positions in the “organic” search results. While keywords are still important, they are not the whole story anymore. People are now asking AI tools like ChatGPT for a “recommendation”; even if they don’t, they are likely to be given one anyway. This is known as “generative search”.

Google is now creating and providing an AI summary for up to 60% of all searches, placing the old “organic list” below the sponsored ads. This is known as the “zero-click search” when the answer is provided in the AI summary, so there is no need to search further. Clinics that do not appear in the AI summary are effectively invisible to a growing percentage of search traffic.

Achieving search dominance for your local area is now about getting cited and given credit in the AI summary.

HOW DOES AI SEARCH WORK

The information presented in an AI search summary is a synthesis of information drawn from multiple trusted sources, consolidated and presented to the user. It will cite the source it used for each element of the answer with a link to that source and identify that source in a panel to the right or underneath the search summary. This is the new number one position.

For medical enquiries in particular, Google will not use information from a website until it has proven that it’s trustworthy and safe.

PROVING THE INFORMATION ON YOUR WEBSITE IS TRUSTWORTHY AND RELEVANT

Google now evaluates your website against many different criteria, cross-matching and checking the data with other sources. Ensuring that it can read your website and extract the information it needs to make a positive conclusion is the foundation on which this trust is built.

To ensure Google understands exactly what each page in your website is about, specialised code called Schema Markup and JSON is added to help search engines and AI systems understand the explicit meaning of your website and the page content rather than just reading the words.

Each page is assessed on the depth, accuracy and genuine usefulness to the reader. This means your treatment pages need to provide detailed and useful information to each visitor.

Rather than an assortment of webpages, you need to follow a logical structure that ties each of them together with internal linking and pages dedicated to specific topics rather than one page with many things on it.

Finally, you need to define your core entity. This has three broad categories: business details (name, address, phone number), the practitioners’ details (name, qualifications and experience, etc.) and finally all the services offered.

This is boring stuff! As a consequence, these elements tend to be forgotten or ignored. Writing about that new machine you bought or adding an ultra HD image of a model to make your website look sexy tends to take the lion’s share of the focus, but here’s the thing: Google now checks all this information with every other source on the internet to verify if it’s correct. If your address is different from your Google business profile, the seed of doubt has been sown. Every piece of information on your website needs to be accurate and consistent wherever you use it, or Google will begin to doubt you!

E-E-A-T – EXPERIENCE, EXPERTISE, AUTHORITY AND TRUST

E-E-A-T is Google’s evaluation framework and stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

For healthcare and medical content, Google applies a heightened standard recognising that inaccurate or misleading health information carries real-world risk. For aesthetic clinics, meeting this standard means demonstrating genuine practitioner expertise supported by the practitioner’s qualifications and experience, reviews from Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, or Doctify, media mentions and ensuring that all treatment pages provide clear, concise information where all claims are supported by evidence.

THE NEW REALITY

The fact is that AI makes it even harder to get noticed in a crowded marketplace.

Getting cited in an AI search summary will really elevate your clinic’s profile way beyond your competition, but to achieve it you need to be sure that the information you provided about you and your clinic online is comprehensive, accurate and, where possible, original. The information in your digital footprint needs to be consistent.

As has always been the case, paying attention to detail will earn trust and ultimately lead to being recommended.

LISA KELLY

Lisa Kelly is the founder of Websites For Clinics by Salon Solutions, industry experts helping aesthetic clinics, doctors, dentists and nurses attract new clients and generate new bookings to grow their clinic business.