# Aesthetic Clinic SEO

> The Aesthetic Clinic Search Curriculum. A free, sequenced curriculum in search marketing for UK aesthetic clinic owners and clinic marketers, published by Northbank Media. 32 modules in 8 parts. Every module states its prerequisites, its learning outcomes, the time it takes, and ends with an exercise the reader performs on their own clinic.

## What this publication does not do
- It does not rank, review, score or recommend clinics.
- It does not rank, review, score or recommend marketing agencies. There are no best-of lists, top-ten pages or award-style pages anywhere on this site.
- It does not publish invented statistics, benchmarks or conversion rates. Figures come from named primary sources or are not published.
- It carries exactly one outbound commercial link, on the appendix, disclosed on the page.

## Sourcing
Primary sources only: Google Search Central developer documentation, Schema.org, the UK Advertising Codes and the ASA, GMC guidance on cosmetic interventions, the CQC, the MHRA including the Blue Guide, the JCCP, web.dev, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and NICE. Every module lists the sources it used.

## Structure
- /syllabus: the full curriculum in sequence, with prerequisites and timings
- /figures: index of every numbered diagram, all drawn in SVG for this publication
- /glossary: terms as this curriculum uses them
- /about: what this is, who writes it, how it is funded
- /editorial-standards: sourcing, claims, links, corrections
- /workbook: the exercise workbook and template pack
- /sponsorship: published rate card, one sponsor per part

## Parts
- /foundations: Part I, Foundations. What a clinic sells, who decides, how patients move from a symptom to a booking, and the rules that constrain every word you publish.
- /positioning: Part II, Positioning. Deciding what the clinic competes on, which treatments carry the weight, and what shape the site needs to be before a single page is written.
- /treatment-pages: Part III, Treatment page architecture. The page type that carries most of a clinic's commercial search demand, taken apart section by section and rebuilt.
- /patient-questions: Part IV, Content that answers patients. Finding the questions patients actually ask, answering them in a form that can be read, quoted and trusted.
- /technical: Part V, Technical hygiene. Crawling, indexing, speed, URLs, internal structure and accessibility: the plumbing that decides whether the writing is ever seen.
- /local: Part VI, Local presence and reputation. The profile, the location pages, the consistency of your details across the web, and the reviews you are allowed to use.
- /conversion: Part VII, Conversion and measurement. Turning attention into a consultation, and counting the small number of things that tell you whether any of it worked.
- /handover: Part VIII, Handover. The module on knowing when the work has outgrown your own hours, and what a competent handover actually contains.

## Modules, in sequence
- /modules/01-what-an-aesthetic-clinic-actually-sells: Module 01, What an aesthetic clinic actually sells. An aesthetic clinic sells three things at once: a procedure, a judgement about whether that procedure is the right thing to do, and a relationship that covers the weeks afterwards. The price list describes only the first. Most clinic websites describe only the first as well, which is why they read as interchangeable and why patients compare them on price.
- /modules/02-who-decides-and-how-they-choose: Module 02, Who decides, and how they choose. Choosing an aesthetic clinic usually involves three roles rather than three people: the patient who wants the result and carries the fear, an influencer whose opinion is sought and often decides, and a payer who may or may not be the patient. A clinic website that speaks only to the first leaves the other two unpersuaded, and the other two are frequently the ones who say no.
- /modules/03-the-patient-journey-from-symptom-to-booking: Module 03, The patient journey, from symptom to booking. A patient typically moves through six stages: naming a symptom, learning what the category of fix is called, comparing options within it, looking for a provider, checking whether that provider is safe, and booking. Most clinic websites serve stages four to six and nothing else, which is why they depend on paid placement and word of mouth for the first three.
- /modules/04-how-search-works-in-the-detail-a-clinic-needs: Module 04, How search works, in the detail a clinic needs. A page reaches a patient only after passing five gates: it must be discovered, crawled, rendered, indexed and then selected for a particular query. Most clinic pages that are not found are stuck at the first four, which are technical and fixable, rather than the fifth, which is competitive and slow. Diagnosing which gate you are stuck at comes before any attempt to improve the writing.
- /modules/05-the-rules-that-constrain-everything-you-publish: Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish. UK aesthetic clinic marketing sits under five overlapping layers: advertising law and the CAP Code, the professional standards of the practitioner's own regulator, registration requirements where a regulated activity is carried on, medicines and device law including the prohibition on advertising prescription-only medicines to the public, and any voluntary register the clinic has joined. Nothing on a website overrides any of them.
- /modules/06-writing-the-clinics-proposition: Module 06, Writing the clinic's proposition. A usable clinic proposition has three parts: who it is for, what is different about how this clinic treats them, and why that difference is credible. It contains no adjectives, because adjectives are claims without evidence. The test is whether a competing clinic three streets away could put the same sentence on its own site. If it could, the sentence is decoration rather than positioning.
- /modules/07-choosing-the-treatments-to-compete-on: Module 07, Choosing the treatments to compete on. Choose the treatments to compete on by plotting demand against your clinic's demonstrable competence, then build only in the quadrant where both are high, plus a small number of low-demand pages where your competence is unusual. Building high-demand pages you cannot substantiate is the most common way a clinic wastes a year of effort, because it loses to clinics with better evidence and deserves to.
- /modules/08-reading-the-local-market-without-naming-names: Module 08, Reading the local market without naming names. Read your local market by studying what is already published and what is missing from it, not by ranking or reviewing the clinics that published it. Comparative claims about named competitors require substantiation you almost certainly cannot produce and invite complaints. The useful output of market reading is a list of questions nobody in your area has answered properly, which becomes your build list.
- /modules/09-information-architecture-the-site-plan: Module 09, Information architecture: the site plan. A clinic site needs four or five top-level sections at most: treatments, the concerns those treatments address, the clinic itself, answers to patient questions, and where relevant a small number of locations. Every page should sit under exactly one parent, be reachable within three clicks of the homepage, and exist because a specific reader at a specific stage needs it.
- /modules/10-the-anatomy-of-a-treatment-page: Module 10, The anatomy of a treatment page. A treatment page has ten blocks in a fixed order: the treatment named plainly, a direct answer, who it suits and who it does not, what happens step by step, risks, aftercare, price with its variables, who performs it, the questions patients ask, and one clear next step. Ordering matters more than wording, because a patient reads until their current question is answered and then stops.
- /modules/11-the-opening-120-words: Module 11, The opening 120 words. The opening block of a treatment page is about 120 words and six sentences: what it is, what it does and how long that lasts, who it suits and who it does not, who performs it and their registration, what it costs as a range, and the next step. Written this way it is complete on its own, which is what makes it useful to a reader in a hurry and quotable by an answer engine.
- /modules/12-price-and-what-you-may-say-about-it: Module 12, Price, and what you may say about it. Publish a price as a range with the variable that moves it named, for example from one figure to another depending on the number of areas treated. Silence sends the reader elsewhere to find a number. A single figure reads as a promise and rarely survives the consultation. Price on application reads as a filter on wealth. The range with a reason is the only construction that sets expectation and withstands scrutiny.
- /modules/13-risks-suitability-and-aftercare: Module 13, Risks, suitability and aftercare. Risk, suitability and aftercare should be written as information rather than reassurance: what can happen, how commonly in your own experience, what you do about it, who should not have the treatment at all, and what the following fortnight looks like in time order. Pages that soften these sections perform worse, because the reader has already read about the risks elsewhere and is checking whether you will mention them.
- /modules/14-structured-data-for-treatment-pages: Module 14, Structured data for treatment pages. Mark up a treatment page with MedicalWebPage describing the page, a MedicalProcedure describing the treatment, the clinic as the provider, a BreadcrumbList showing where the page sits, and FAQPage only for questions that genuinely appear on the page with their answers. Structured data describes what is present; marking up anything that is not visible on the page is a policy breach and, more practically, a lie told in a machine-readable format.
- /modules/15-finding-the-questions-patients-actually-ask: Module 15, Finding the questions patients actually ask. Find the questions patients ask from four free sources: your own consultations and enquiries, the queries Search Console reports you already receive, the question and suggestion features of the search engines themselves, and the six question families every treatment generates. Bought keyword lists give volume without context, and context is what decides whether a page is worth building.
- /modules/16-the-answer-page-pattern: Module 16, The answer page pattern. An answer page carries one question as its H1, answers it completely in the first two sentences, explains the reasoning, names the exceptions, states what to do next, links to related questions rather than repeating them, and says who wrote it and when it was last checked. One question per page is the rule that makes the pattern work, because a page answering three questions answers none of them findably.
- /modules/17-comparison-pages-done-responsibly: Module 17, Comparison pages, done responsibly. A comparison page states, for each option, what it does, how long it lasts, what recovery involves, who it suits, who it does not suit and what it costs, then declines to name a winner because the answer depends on the individual. Comparisons between treatments are legitimate and useful. Comparisons between named businesses are not, because a clinic cannot substantiate a claim about work it has not assessed.
- /modules/18-before-and-after-imagery-and-the-advertising-codes: Module 18, Before and after imagery and the advertising codes. Before and after images must be genuine, must be of the same patient under materially identical conditions, must not be edited in ways that exaggerate the result, and must carry the consent of the patient. The practical requirement is a written photographic standard covering lighting, distance, angle, expression and background, applied to every image, so that any pair could be defended on request.
- /modules/19-writing-so-answer-engines-can-quote-you: Module 19, Writing so answer engines can quote you. Text is quotable when a passage answers a question completely without needing its surroundings: a question as a heading, the answer in the first two sentences beneath it, one idea per paragraph, specific nouns rather than pronouns, and no preamble. This is not a technique for machines. It is ordinary clear writing, and the reason it works for answer engines is that they are looking for the same thing a hurried reader is.
- /modules/20-crawling-and-indexing-what-actually-blocks-you: Module 20, Crawling and indexing: what actually blocks you. The faults that stop a clinic page being indexed are, in order of frequency: the page is linked from nowhere, a robots directive blocks it, a script prevents the content from rendering, a stray noindex tag survives from a staging site, or a canonical tag points somewhere else. All five are visible in Search Console's page indexing report, and all five are cheaper to fix than any amount of writing.
- /modules/21-speed-and-core-web-vitals-for-a-clinic-site: Module 21, Speed and Core Web Vitals for a clinic site. Three metrics matter: Largest Contentful Paint, which should be at or under 2.5 seconds; Interaction to Next Paint, at or under 200 milliseconds; and Cumulative Layout Shift, at or under 0.1. For a clinic site the fixes that account for most of the improvement are image discipline, removing unnecessary third-party scripts, setting dimensions on media, and not loading fonts in a way that blocks rendering.
- /modules/22-urls-redirects-and-migrations: Module 22, URLs, redirects and migrations. When a URL must change, redirect the old address permanently and directly to the single most equivalent new page, never through a chain and never to the homepage. Before any migration, export a complete list of existing URLs and map each one to its destination. A migration without a full URL map is not a migration; it is a deletion with a new site attached.
- /modules/23-internal-linking-as-structure: Module 23, Internal linking as structure. Internal links should follow the structure: each treatment page links to the answer pages and concern pages that support it, each of those links back to the treatment page, and pages link sideways only where a reader would genuinely want to go next. A page nothing links to is a page you have decided does not matter. Link text should describe the destination in words a reader would use.
- /modules/24-accessibility-as-an-obligation-and-an-advantage: Module 24, Accessibility as an obligation and an advantage. Accessibility work on a clinic site comes down to a short list: sufficient colour contrast, text that can be resized, images with meaningful alternative text, forms with real labels, a page that works by keyboard, headings in a logical order, and video with captions. Every item on that list also improves how a search engine understands the page, and several of them improve enquiry rates directly.
- /modules/25-the-google-business-profile: Module 25, The Google Business Profile. A Google Business Profile ranks on three published factors: relevance, distance and prominence. A clinic can influence two of them. The work is a complete and accurate profile in the correct primary category, matching the details on the website exactly, kept current, with photographs of the actual premises, and with every review answered. Guideline breaches, particularly keyword-stuffed business names, put the whole listing at risk.
- /modules/26-location-pages-without-doorway-pages: Module 26, Location pages without doorway pages. Build a location page only where you have premises, and give it substance the patient can use: the address, how to get there, parking, which practitioners work there, which treatments are available there, and the opening hours for that site. Pages generated for towns you do not operate in are doorway pages, they are explicitly against search engine guidance, and they are also useless to the reader who lands on them.
- /modules/27-citations-and-the-consistency-problem: Module 27, Citations and the consistency problem. A citation is any mention of your clinic's name, address and phone number on another site. What matters is not how many exist but whether they agree. A suite number present in one and absent in another, or an old phone number left on a directory, makes your clinic look like two businesses to a machine trying to establish who you are. Fix the source first, then the copies, then stop.
- /modules/28-reviews-and-what-the-codes-allow: Module 28, Reviews and what the codes allow. Ask every patient once, in the same way, without incentive and without filtering by expected sentiment. Reply to every review, including the poor ones, briefly and without discussing anybody's treatment. Do not offer anything in exchange for a review, do not gate requests to happy patients only, and do not use a review as substantiation for an objective claim about a treatment.
- /modules/29-the-consultation-booking-path: Module 29, The consultation booking path. The booking path has six steps: the page is read, an enquiry is made, a reply is sent, a consultation is booked, it is attended, and treatment is agreed. Clinics lose most people between the first and the third, which is a response-time and enquiry-design problem rather than a search problem. Speed of reply is the single largest controllable factor in the whole path.
- /modules/30-enquiry-forms-phone-and-messaging: Module 30, Enquiry forms, phone and messaging. An enquiry form should ask for a name, one contact method, the treatment of interest and an open field. Nothing else. Do not ask for medical history, date of birth or full address online: it is unnecessary at enquiry stage, it reduces completion, and it creates a data protection obligation for information you did not need. Ask those at the clinic, where consent and context exist.
- /modules/31-what-to-measure-and-what-to-ignore: Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore. Measure six things monthly: consultations booked, enquiries received, calls from the Business Profile, entrances from search, treatment pages appearing in results, and reviews received. Record last month, this month, the direction and what you will do. Ignore average position, bounce rate and any measure that has not changed a decision in six months.
- /modules/32-when-to-stop-doing-it-yourself: Module 32, When to stop doing it yourself, and what to hand over. Hand over when the work is no longer being done rather than when it becomes difficult. Hand over technical maintenance, speed, structured data and reporting first, content production and photography next. Never hand over ownership of your domain and accounts, the right to approve clinical claims, the replies to reviews, or the proposition itself. Those four are what make the clinic yours.

## Appendix
- /avoid-these-common-mistakes-in-digital-marketing-for-aesthetic-clinics: Avoid these common mistakes in digital marketing for aesthetic clinics. The mistakes that recur most often in aesthetic clinic marketing are not exotic. They are: describing procedures rather than judgement, writing only for the patient and not the people advising them, hiding price, omitting risk, building a page for every nearby town, chasing volume you cannot substantiate, breaking advertising and medicines rules, and neglecting the operational steps after the enquiry arrives. Each has a module in this curriculum devoted to preventing it.

## Machine access
- Feed: https://www.aestheticclinicseo.co.uk/feed.xml
- Sitemap: https://www.aestheticclinicseo.co.uk/sitemap.xml
- Publisher: Northbank Media (https://www.aestheticclinicseo.co.uk/publisher)
- Attribution: cite the title and the article URL.

## Trademark
Product and company names mentioned here are the trademarks of their respective owners. Use of a name does not imply any affiliation or endorsement.