Local SEO for hospitals in India: the complete playbook

Transcript

When a patient searches for a specialist near them, three surfaces decide whether they find your hospital.

This video covers all three, and the order to work on them.

First, the map pack and your Business Profile.

Google says local ranking depends on relevance, distance and prominence, and you cannot pay for a better position.

Second, organic results: your specialty, doctor, condition and unit pages.

Third, AI answers, which increasingly draw on both.

The instinct at most hospitals is to commission more blogs.

Start with an audit instead.

The usual problem is not missing content, but existing pages that Google cannot crawl, cannot trust, or cannot tie to a place.

Next, plan pages on a grid: specialty, by condition or procedure, by location.

Every cell with real demand and real clinical capability gets one primary page, so your own pages do not compete.

If a unit does not offer a procedure, it does not get a page for it, however attractive the keyword.

And think in entities: doctors, departments and units that Google can recognise and connect.

For most local searches, the profile is the storefront and the website is the back office.

One profile per physical hospital or clinic.

The real name on the signboard, with no keywords stuffed into it.

Departments get their own profiles only if they are distinct, public-facing entities, as Google's guidelines set out.

On the website, four page types do most of the local work.

Unit pages, with address, map, timings, access and the departments present there.

Specialty pages per unit, which is where searches like cardiologist in a city are won or lost.

Doctor profiles, with qualifications, registration, languages and OPD timings.

And condition and procedure pages that answer what patients ask before they call.

Prominence is the factor big hospitals assume they already have.

Google measures it through what the web says about you.

Reviews: volume, recency and response.

And no incentives for reviews, which Google's policy prohibits.

Consistent citations of your name, address and phone across directories.

And links earned through genuine news, research and community work.

The full guide, with sources and checklists, is on gauravphogat.com.

The link is in the description.