Med spa SEO: what to fix first, and what to ask before you hire help

What is different about SEO for a med spa

The basics are the same as for any local business. You want to show up in the map results and in the regular results under them, for the treatments you sell and the towns your clients come from. Our IV therapy SEO guide was written for IV businesses, but the groundwork it covers, from your Business Profile to Search Console, works the same way for a med spa. Reviews feed the map results too, and the Google reviews guide covers how to ask for them.

Three things are different. Clients can search for a provider by name, so the people on your team matter in search as much as the spa does. Your treatment pages are health content, and Google holds health content to a higher standard. And your strongest proof is visual, so your photos need to do work in search too.

On the second point, Google is direct. Its guidance on helpful content says it gives even more weight to trustworthy, expert content on topics that affect health, which it calls Your Money or Your Life topics. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. For a med spa, that comes down to showing clearly who does the treatments and who stands behind each page.

A Business Profile for the spa, and one for each provider who sees clients

A single Business Profile for the whole spa is the usual starting point. Google's rules allow more than that for practices with public-facing providers. Its guidelines define an individual practitioner as "a public-facing professional, typically with their own customer base". The examples Google gives are doctors, dentists and lawyers. Nurse injectors and nurse practitioners are not named either way, so go by the definition: does this provider have clients who book them by name, and can those clients reach them at your location during your hours?

When several providers see clients at one location, Google wants the spa to have its own profile, separate from each practitioner. In practice that means:

• One profile for the spa, named exactly as your sign reads, with the spa's categories and services.
• One profile for each provider who has their own clients and can be booked directly, named with only their name and credential.
• No profiles for front desk or support staff. Google's guidelines rule those out.
• One profile per provider, even if they offer many treatments. A second profile for a provider's specialty breaks the same guidelines.

Talk this through with each provider before you set it up. A provider's profile carries their name and their reviews, so agree in writing who manages it and what happens to it if they leave. If you are a solo injector, one profile for the spa is usually enough.

Treatment pages that show who is behind them

Google suggests asking who created a page, how and why. On the who, it says: "We strongly encourage adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it." A person reading about lip filler or a chemical peel expects to know who will be holding the syringe or the brush.

So give each treatment page a short reviewed-by line near the top or bottom that names the provider who reviewed it, their license type and the date they last checked it. Link that name to a bio page for the provider. A good bio page has:

• A real photo, taken at your spa.
• Their license type and where they trained, in their own words.
• The treatments they perform at your spa, each linked to its page.
• A booking button for that provider.

Keep the claims on these pages to what your medical director has approved. The FTC says claims about the health benefits or safety of health products require substantiation in the form of competent and reliable scientific evidence. A supplier brochure is not that. Describe what the visit involves, who it suits and what it costs, and leave out promised results. The med spa marketing guide covers what else each treatment page needs.

Before and after photos Google can read

Before and after photos let a visitor judge your work for themselves, and they are often uploaded with the camera's file name, like IMG and a string of characters. Google's image guidance says it works out what a photo shows from the page around it, including the caption, and that file names should be short but descriptive.

Before you upload a photo:

1. Confirm you have the client's signed, written permission for that photo and that use.
2. Rename the file for the treatment and the view, such as lip-filler-before-after-side-view.jpg. Never put a client's name in a file name, a caption or alt text.
3. Write alt text that says what the photo shows, in one plain sentence.
4. Put the photo on the page for that treatment, next to the text about it, rather than only in a gallery.
5. Write a caption that names the treatment and the provider.

Sample alt text: Side view of upper lip before and after lip filler, performed at our spa.

Keep alt text honest and short. Stuffing it with keywords is something Google's image guidance warns can make a site look like spam.

Tell Google what kind of business you are

Structured data is a short block of code on your site that states your business type, name, address, phone and hours in a form Google reads directly. Google's guidance for local businesses says to use the most specific LocalBusiness sub-type possible. Ask whoever builds your site to add it to your homepage and your contact page, and to check that every detail matches your Business Profile word for word. If your site and your profile disagree about your hours or your phone number, a client may call when you are closed or reach an old line, so fix the one that is wrong.

What to ask a med spa SEO company before you sign

Start with what Google itself says on the subject: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." Anyone who promises a map position or a page one ranking by a date is promising something they do not control.

Google publishes a list of questions to ask an SEO. Two matter most for a med spa: "What's your experience in my industry?" and "Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?" Add these of your own:

• Who writes the treatment pages, and will a provider on my team approve each one before it goes live?
• How do you handle before and after photos, and will you check that each one has signed permission?
• Will you build pages for towns we do not serve? The answer should be no.
• Which reports will I see each month, and what will they tell me about bookings?

Keep control of your accounts. For an audit, Google says to only grant read access to Search Console (at this stage, don't grant them write access). On your Business Profile, add the company as a manager and keep yourself as owner. Google notes that a Business Profile can have multiple owners but only one primary owner, and that should be you.

If you are comparing quotes, you can see what our SEO plan includes and hold every proposal to the same list.

Where to start this month

1. Open your Business Profile, confirm you are the primary owner and fix any hours, categories or services that are out of date.
2. List the providers who see their own clients and decide with each one whether they get a profile.
3. Pick the treatment you most want to grow and add a reviewed-by line and a provider bio link to its page.
4. Rename and caption the before and after photos on that page.
5. Connect Google Search Console if you have not, and note today's date so you can judge the changes later.

Then move on to the next treatment. SEO for a med spa is slow, steady work, and each page you fix keeps working after the day you fix it.

Sources

• Google Business Profile Help: Guidelines for representing your business on Google
• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
• Google Search Central: Google image SEO best practices
• Google Search Central: Local business structured data
• Google Search Central: Do you need an SEO?
• Google Business Profile Help: Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
• Google Business Profile Help: Manage your Business Profile owners and managers
• FTC: Health Products Compliance Guidance

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