Choosing the treatments to compete on
You cannot build a good page for everything you offer. Choosing badly wastes a year, so this module gives you a rule for choosing.
PrerequisitesModule 03 · The patient journeyModule 06 · The proposition
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.
What you will be able to do
By the end of this module you will be able to:
- Plot your treatment list against demand and demonstrable competence.
- Decide which pages to build first, which to build later, and which never to build.
- Recognise the trap of building for volume you cannot defend.
- Produce a ranked build list of no more than twelve pages for the next two quarters.
Why not just build everything
Because you cannot maintain everything. A treatment page is not a one-off cost. It has to be kept accurate as techniques change, kept compliant as guidance changes, and kept better than the competing pages that appear after it. A clinic with sixty thin treatment pages has sixty liabilities and very little else.
There is a search consequence too. A site made mostly of pages that add nothing to what is already indexed teaches a search engine that pages from this site are usually not worth showing. That is not a penalty; it is an inference, and it is a reasonable one.
The two axes
The first axis is demand: how many people are looking for this, in language you can identify. Module 15, Finding the questions patients actually ask deals with how to find that out without buying anything. The second axis is competence you can demonstrate: not whether you can perform the treatment, but whether you could write two thousand words about it that a specialist would not wince at, and support them with your own experience.
Most treatment selection is done on the first axis alone, which is why so many clinic sites carry an identical set of pages about the same six treatments, all of them written from the same manufacturer literature, none of them adding anything.
The four quadrants
High demand, real competence
Build these first, build them properly, and accept that each one takes days rather than hours. These pages are the commercial core of the site and they justify the effort. Part III of this course is entirely about how to build them.
High demand, weak claim
The tempting quadrant. These are the treatments everybody searches for and that your clinic performs occasionally, or has just started offering, or refers out. A page here competes against clinics who do it every day, and it loses. Worse, it dilutes what your site is understood to be about.
The right move is usually a short, truthful page that says what you do and do not offer, and links to the pages where your competence is real. That is not defeatism. It is the same triage a clinician does with a patient.
Low demand, real competence
The quadrant clinics ignore and should not. Covered in the next section.
Low demand, weak claim
Do not build. There is no version of this page that is worth the maintenance.
Evidence of competence, defined
"We are good at this" is not evidence. The following are, and each of them produces material you can put on a page.
- You perform the treatment frequently enough that you have your own observations about who it suits and who it does not, and you can state them.
- You can describe the failure modes: what goes wrong, how often you have seen it, what you do about it.
- You have a defensible position on a point where practitioners disagree, and can explain it.
- You hold specific training in it, dated and nameable.
- You can produce your own photography, taken under consistent conditions, within the constraints Module 18, Before and after imagery and the advertising codes sets out.
If you can tick three of those five, you have enough to write a page that is not a paraphrase of the manufacturer's brochure. If you can tick none, the page will be a paraphrase, and paraphrases do not rank because there is nothing in them that was not already indexed.
Quiet wins
The low-demand, high-competence quadrant is where small clinics do best, and it is systematically neglected because the search volume looks unexciting.
Three properties make these pages worth building. They are cheap to rank for, because few serious pages exist. They attract patients who have already narrowed their thinking a long way, so enquiry rates from them tend to be better than from broad pages. And they establish, both for readers and for answer engines, that this clinic has depth rather than a menu.
Sequencing the build
Twelve pages over two quarters is a realistic target for a clinic doing this alongside clinical work. Attempting forty produces forty thin pages and a demoralised owner.
Sequence them so that the first three are in the high-demand, high-competence quadrant, the next three are quiet wins, and the remainder alternate. Building three good pages and then three quick ones keeps momentum, and the quiet wins tend to show results first, which sustains the effort through the period when the competitive pages are still settling.
Module 09, Information architecture: the site plan turns this list into a site structure. Do not skip that step: a good list of pages with no structure becomes a flat site where nothing supports anything else.
Plot your treatment list
Seventy five minutes. You need your full treatment list, and you need to be prepared to be unflattering about your own clinic.
- List every treatment you offer, one per line. Include the ones you rarely do.
- Against each, score demonstrable competence out of five using the five tests in section four. Be strict: a score of five means you could write two thousand words a specialist would accept.
- Against each, mark demand as high, medium or low. You do not need numbers yet; Module 15 refines this.
- Plot them onto the four quadrants from Figure 7.1.
- Write your build list: three from the strong quadrant, three quiet wins, then six more, in order. Put a date beside each.
This list drives Part III and Part IV of the course. Pin it somewhere you will see it, because the temptation to add to it monthly is the main reason clinics never finish.
Questions readers ask about this module
What if the treatment I am best at has almost no search demand?
Then it is a quiet win, and it belongs on the site with a well-made page even though it will never be a volume driver. It also probably tells you something about your proposition, since a clinic's genuine strength and its stated position ought to be related.
Should I build a page for a treatment I am about to start offering?
Build it when you can satisfy three of the five competence tests, which usually means after some months of doing it. A page published in advance of the competence is a page you will have to rewrite, and it will spend that whole period failing to rank anyway.
How do I judge demand without paid tools?
Search Console shows you what you already receive. The engine's own suggestion and related-question features show you the shape of demand around a term. Module 15 sets out a method using only free sources, which is sufficient for the level of precision this decision requires.
Is it a problem to have a page saying we do not offer something?
Not if it is genuinely useful to the reader and links to what you do offer. It is a problem if it exists solely to capture the search term, which is a thin-page pattern and will be treated as one.
Sources and primary references
Disclosure. This module contains no commercial links of any kind. This course is published by Northbank Media, is free to read, and is funded by the workbook pack and by clearly labelled series sponsorship. We do not rank, review or recommend agencies or clinics.
Module 07 of 32