How we actually do the work

Phase 1: The audit

Before we recommend anything, we run a structured audit covering four areas:

Technical health. Page speed (Core Web Vitals specifically, not just a general speed score), mobile usability, crawl errors, broken internal links, and whether the current robots.txt and sitemap are actually configured correctly, a surprisingly common gap even on established sites.

On-page and schema. Whether MedicalClinic, Physician, and FAQPage schema exist and validate correctly, whether heading structure is genuinely hierarchical (not just visually styled to look that way), and whether existing content has a clear, single topic per page.

Off-page and consistency. We check your practice's name, address, and phone number across your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory listing we can find, since inconsistency here is one of the most common and most fixable problems we see.

AI visibility baseline. We ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the actual questions a patient would ask, and document whether your practice is mentioned, whether the facts stated are accurate, and who gets cited instead if you're not. This becomes the baseline we measure against going forward.

Phase 2: Foundation

Technical and structural fixes come before any visibility work, since content published on a broken foundation doesn't perform regardless of quality. This phase typically includes fixing crawl and speed issues, implementing or correcting schema markup, resolving NAP inconsistencies across listings, and, where needed, structural website changes.

We don't skip this phase to get to "visible" work faster. Skipping it is the most common reason we see when taking over an account from a previous agency that produced content without first fixing what the content was sitting on.

Phase 3: Optimization

With the foundation in place, work shifts to the specific services in scope for your package, local SEO, AEO, GEO, content, GMB, paid ads, or some combination. This phase is where a specialty-specific and market-specific strategy actually gets built and executed, not a generic template applied uniformly.

Work here is sequenced by expected impact and speed: GMB and local SEO fixes typically show movement first, within four to eight weeks; AEO and broader SEO gains build over sixty to ninety days; GEO citation work is tested monthly and tends to build more gradually, since it depends on AI models' own update cycles rather than a schedule we control.

Phase 4: Reporting

Monthly reports cover four things specifically: keyword rankings against your actual target list (not a vanity metric dump), Google Business Profile performance (calls, views, direction requests), AI citation status against the same baseline questions from the audit, and inquiry or booking volume where that data is available to us.

We report what happened, including when something underperformed. A report that only shows wins isn't a report, it's marketing, and we don't think that serves either side of the relationship well.

What we check before publishing any content

Every piece of content goes through the same checks before it goes live: medical accuracy against current clinical guidance, compliance against the specific advertising rules of your market (these differ significantly, see our country pages for specifics), and a structural check that heading hierarchy, schema, and internal linking are all correctly in place, not just the prose itself.

Tools and signals we actually track

Beyond standard rank tracking, we monitor Google Search Console data directly (not a third-party approximation), Core Web Vitals through PageSpeed Insights and field data where available, structured data validity through Google's Rich Results testing, and AI citation through direct, repeated querying of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini against a fixed set of realistic patient questions, since there's no equivalent to Search Console for AI citation yet.

Who's behind this methodology

This process reflects Shrawan Swami's approach across 14+ years in SEO, refined first through Ehyperlink's link-building work since 2018 and now applied specifically to the compliance and trust requirements of healthcare marketing through DoctorsOnAI.