10 Marketing Strategies for Doctors & Medical Professionals in 2026

By Corey Frankosky · Last Updated July 31, 2026

Growing a medical practice locally comes down to one thing: meeting patients where they are actually searching for you. That means understanding what a local search result looks like in 2026, then building the pieces that let you show up in it. Below are the ten strategies I would work on, in the order I would work on them, based on what I see across the medical practices I have worked with. Some of these are not glamorous. A few people will look at this list and say these are not marketing strategies, these are just things a practice should already be doing. That is true, and most practices still are not doing them.

Marketing Strategies For Doctors And Medical Practices

This video walks through the strategies below using a real local practice as the example, including what their website, Google Business Profile, and ads actually look like on the results page.

How Patients Actually Search For You Locally

Before any of the strategies below make sense, you need to know what a patient sees when they look for a practice like yours.

Most searches are either a near me search or a search with your city or a surrounding town attached. Somebody types "orthopedic care near me" and gets a results page built entirely around their location. Yours will look different from theirs, and both will look different from mine.

What sits at the top is ads. Three or four of them on most of these searches. And if you assume the organic listings come next, they do not. After the ads you usually get a sponsored result inside the map pack, then the map pack itself, and organic listings sit below all of it.

I looked up one practice while making the video that had an address, a phone number, and a name. No photo, no website, no reviews, and the profile was unclaimed. I cannot imagine many people call that number, and if they do, I assume it is a wrong number. That is the gap between having a presence and having a listing.

So the question every strategy below answers is the same one. When somebody in your market searches for what you do, are you anywhere on that page, and does what they see make them comfortable enough to call?

Question to Answer:

Search your main service plus "near me" right now. Where does your practice appear, and what does your listing look like next to the two above you?

1Build A Website With A Page For Every Service You Provide

I would not start with the ads. I would start with the website, because everything else you do points at it.

The first job of the site is making it easy to get in touch. Address and phone at the top. A call button. Online appointment requests. Patient portal, online bill pay, after hours number, and a refer a patient link if other practices send you cases. Put a call to action everywhere. A patient should never have to hunt for how to reach you.

The second job is the one most practices skip. Every single thing you do needs its own page. Hand, foot, knee, elbow, neck, pain management. Every dental procedure if you are a dentist. And not just the big categories, the individual services too, because patients search for those directly.

Here is the example that makes it concrete. Somebody searches "bone density scan near me." If you offer bone density scans but you do not have a page about bone density scans, you are not ranking for it. Google is not going to rank you for something you provide if you never put it out there. Same with X-rays, same with sports medicine, same with every service buried in a paragraph on your services page.

Practices come to me with five page websites. No individual specialty pages, no service pages, nothing built for the surrounding towns they draw from. Then they wonder why they are not showing up. Building this out helps your organic rankings, helps your map results, and gives your ads real landing pages to point at instead of a homepage.

My guide on web design best practices covers the build, and we do this for practices through medical website design services.

Question to Answer:

List every service your practice provides. How many of them have their own page?

2Give Every Doctor Their Own Page

Patients are choosing a person, not a building. That is the whole reason this matters.

Every doctor at your practice should have a page covering their specialties, which location they work out of, hospital and surgery center affiliations, their credentials, their background, and a way to book with them directly. The practice I used as an example in the video does this well, and one of their individual doctors has over 3,700 ratings and reviews attached to him. Whatever he is doing, it is working.

This applies just as much if you are a one doctor practice. Maybe more. If you are a solo orthopedic center or a one dentist practice, highlight that dentist. Make it obvious who the patient is going to see. Knowing who is taking care of them is what builds the trust that turns a website visit into a phone call.

These pages are also where video belongs, which I get to in strategy nine. A short clip of the doctor talking about a procedure, sitting on that doctor's page, does more for a nervous patient than another paragraph of credentials.

Question to Answer:

Does every provider at your practice have their own page with credentials and a way to book with them?

3Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile and your website together are the fastest way to build trust with somebody who has never heard of you.

Start with the basics filled in completely. Address, hours, phone, appointment link, the about section, photos. Then go through your service list and make sure every service you provide is actually listed there. Google reads your profile services and your reviews to work out what you do, so a practice that offers bone density scans and never lists it is leaving that connection on the table. If a service is not in the list, put it in the about section.

Then keep it active. Post once a week. It does not need to be complicated. A post about how you treat sports injuries in high school athletes, a note about a piece of equipment you added, a seasonal reminder. As you publish more of those, Google gets a clearer picture that your practice handles those specific things.

Reply to reviews, and I will cover the review side properly in strategy five.

The last piece is citations. Your name, address, and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear, including Yelp and the other major directories. One of my favorite tools for managing all of this is BrightLocal, which runs roughly $350 to $528 annually for a single business. I would just pay the annual price. It syncs your business data across Google, Bing, Facebook, and Apple, tracks your local rankings, and audits your citations. Apple Maps matters more every year, so being optimized there is worth the setup.

See my Google Business Profile best practices and my full local SEO guide for the detail, or our local SEO for doctors and medical professionals service.

Question to Answer:

Open your Google Business Profile. Is every service you provide listed, and when did you last post?

4Claim A Profile For Every Location And Every Doctor

This is the one almost nobody does, and it is one of the best ways to take up more space in local results.

If you have multiple locations, each one gets its own Google Business Profile. The practice in my example has five locations across the county, each with its own profile, each ranking on its own. When somebody searches orthopedic care near me, they might get the location closest to them, and somebody two towns over gets a different one. That is five chances at the map pack instead of one.

Then do the same for your doctors. Individual providers can have their own Google Business Profiles, and when a patient clicks through to more places, those doctor listings show up alongside the practice listings. Your practice ranks, and your doctors rank, and you end up occupying far more of the local results than a single listing ever could.

If you are a solo practice, this still applies. Set up a profile for your practice and a profile for you as a provider, and fill both out with the same care. If you are running multiple locations, we cover the account side of that in Google Ads for multi-location medical practices.

Question to Answer:

Does each of your locations have its own claimed profile, and do your individual providers have one?

5Get More Reviews And Reply To Every One

Two things matter here: your overall review score and your review velocity, meaning how many new reviews you are getting.

A practice with hundreds of five star reviews and a practice with an unclaimed profile and none are not competing for the same patient. Even getting to twenty or thirty solid reviews goes a long way toward somebody deciding they can trust you.

If you are starting from zero, start with patients who already know you. Patients coming through the door this week. Previous patients if you moved from another practice and they followed you. A simple ask works: "I am getting this off the ground, it would really help if you left a review on Google." Most people who had a good experience will do it.

A framing that works well is a public goal. "We are trying to get to 100 Google reviews, please help us get there." It gives people a reason to act now instead of later. Pair it with an invitation to contact you directly if something went wrong, so a frustrated patient calls the office instead of writing a one star review.

Then automate the ask. BrightLocal and similar tools run review generation campaigns over SMS and email, so a patient gets an automated follow-up after their visit. That is what turns reviews from an occasional push into a steady stream.

Reply to all of them. The reply is written for the next patient reading it, not for the person who left it.

Question to Answer:

How many new reviews did your practice get last month, and who is responsible for asking?

6Run Google Ads To Show Up Above The Map Pack

I know, I run Google Ads for a living. But the reason this sits at number six instead of number one is that ads pointed at a weak website and an empty profile will not do much for you. With the first five in place, ads work.

Here is the honest case for them. Ranking organically is getting harder and organic click-through rates keep dropping, partly because more of the page is ads and AI results now. Meanwhile patients are searching things like "who is the best orthopedic surgeon near me" and "what orthopedic doctor near me is rated the highest." Ads are how you make sure you are on that page while you build the organic side.

Based on the ads I see running for medical practices, there is real opportunity here. Plenty of markets have low cost clicks, low cost phone calls, and low cost new patients available, because the practices advertising are not doing it especially well.

I searched knee pain treatment near me in my own market and looked at all four ads. One was a hospital system based nearly two hours away, which almost certainly means their location targeting is set to presence or interest instead of presence only, or they cast far too wide a net. Nobody near me is driving two hours for knee pain. One was a national urgent care chain, which is not a terrible match but is not what somebody searching that term wants. One was a supplement product that has close to no chance of converting on that search. Only the fourth was a local orthopedic practice with a real knee landing page.

That is what the competition looks like in a lot of markets. So the basics get you most of the way:

• Target your actual market only. Set location targeting to presence, not presence or interest. Most patients are not driving more than 20 minutes for routine care.
• Separate campaigns by service line. Urgent care keywords, specialty keywords, and routine care keywords have completely different economics. Mixing them lets the cheapest clicks eat the budget.
• Send each ad group to its own page. This is why strategy one comes first. A knee ad goes to the knee page, not the homepage.
• Turn on your assets. Call assets and location assets specifically, since most of this traffic is on a phone and wants to call. See my guide to local ad extensions.
• Build a negative keyword list. Block symptom research queries with no booking intent and any specialty you do not offer.

Here is another video covering more of what I go over below.

If you are building the account yourself, my complete Google Ads guide walks the whole platform, and PPC advertising for doctors and medical professionals covers the paid side for this vertical specifically. Or look at Google Ads for doctors and medical professionals if you would rather hand it off.

Question to Answer:

Is your location targeting set to presence only, or is it still on the default that includes interest?

7Test Meta Ads Alongside Google Ads

Meta Ads is worth testing, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not do.

It is not where I would put most of your budget. Google reaches somebody who is searching for treatment right now. Meta reaches somebody who has not searched yet. Those are different jobs, and search is the one that produces appointments this week.

What Meta does well is audience targeting. If your data shows the patients who actually book are in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, dealing with a specific set of issues, you can build ad sets around that and reach those people while they are still thinking about it. Somebody managing knee pain sees your ad, thinks about going in to see what their options are, and now you are in the consideration set before they ever search.

Run it alongside Google, not instead of it. Start small, build creative around one condition or service rather than your practice in general, and judge it on booked appointments rather than clicks. My Meta Ads strategy for lead generation covers the build, and we handle it through Meta Ads management for doctors and medical professionals.

Question to Answer:

Do you know the age range and the main conditions of the patients who actually book with you?

8Answer The Questions Patients Actually Search

I am not going to tell you that you need to publish a blog article every week. But when patients have questions, and they always do, answering them on your site is how you get in front of them early.

The process is simple. Take a procedure you perform and look at what people search around it. For shoulder replacement you get: what is the recovery time, what can you never do after one, is total shoulder replacement a major surgery, how bad is the pain, what is the best age, what does it cost, how do I prepare. Every one of those is a page.

Write them plainly and answer the question. "Shoulder replacement recovery times." "Five things to avoid after shoulder replacement surgery." You do not need to overthink the format. You need the answer to exist on your site instead of on a competitor's.

The reason this works is timing. Someone in your area asking how they will know when they need a procedure is months away from booking it. If the page that answered them is yours, you are already the practice they think of. There is a seasonal angle too, since patients often plan elective procedures for the fall and winter so recovery lands before the weather turns.

Build these after your main service and specialty pages, then link them into those pages. See the local service page SEO checklist and local SEO ranking factors for how the structure fits together, or our SEO services for doctors and medical professionals.

Question to Answer:

Pick your most common procedure. How many of the questions patients ask about it are answered on your website?

9Create Video Content That Builds Trust

I am a big fan of video content, and the goal here is not what most people assume.

You are not trying to get ten thousand views. You are trying to get one or two views a day from people locally who are figuring out what your practice does and whether they can trust you. That is a completely different bar, and it makes the whole thing much more achievable.

What to make:

1. Condition and treatment explainers. Causes of hand pain. Prevention and treatment of golf related shoulder injuries. Pick the ones tied to your market. Golf injury treatment and pickleball injury treatment are real searches where I am, and yours will have their own.
2. Getting to know each doctor. A short video introducing a provider, what they specialize in, how they approach care. This goes straight onto their doctor page from strategy two.
3. What to expect. What a first appointment looks like, what happens before and after a procedure. These reduce the anxiety that stops people from calling.
4. Put them where they earn their keep. Embed each video on the matching page. The golf injury video sits on the golf injury treatment page. The doctor video sits on the doctor page.

Then post them everywhere. Google Business Profile, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube. I will be honest that an Instagram post on its own is not what moves the needle for a medical practice, but it does not hurt, and it costs you nothing once the video exists.

Question to Answer:

Could you record one short video this month introducing a provider or explaining a common condition?

10Track Phone Calls And Appointment Bookings

People ask me about AI and automation and what they should be doing next. My answer is usually more basic than they expect.

Do you answer the phone? Do you book the appointment while you have them on the line? Do you have booking software where somebody can schedule without calling? And is any of it tracked?

That last question is where most practices come up short. If you are not tracking appointment bookings in Google Analytics 4 and as conversions in your Google Ads account, you are guessing about what works. And if you are running ads without that tracking, you are optimizing toward clicks instead of patients.

Track calls specifically, since for most practices the phone is still the primary conversion. Track calls over 60 seconds rather than taps on your phone number, because a tap is an intent signal and a 12 second call is a wrong number.

My guides on Google Ads conversion tracking setup and phone call tracking with Google Tag Manager cover the setup step by step.

Once that is in place, the practice starts running itself in the way you want. Good website, good local presence, ads running, calls answered, appointments booked and tracked. Your job becomes serving the patients who come to you, and the growth comes from your online presence and word of mouth working together.

Question to Answer:

Are appointment bookings and phone calls tracked as conversions in your Google Ads account today?

Where To Start

You cannot do ten things at once, and you do not need to.

One thing worth naming. From a medical standpoint you are always limited on the audience side, because you can only serve patients within driving distance. That is a real ceiling, and it means the answer to slow growth is usually doing the fundamentals better rather than expanding your targeting. Look at whichever practice is dominating your market and work out what they have that you do not.