When to stop doing it yourself, and what to hand over

The three signals

Doing this work yourself has real advantages: you know the clinical detail, you can write the unsuitability section truthfully, and you will not publish a claim you cannot support. Those advantages persist. What runs out is time.

Three signals, any one of which means the decision is due.

1. The build list has not moved in two quarters. Not slowed, stopped. The list from Module 07, Choosing the treatments to compete on is still there and nothing has been added to the site.
2. The monthly review is not happening. If the twenty minutes in Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore has been skipped three times, the work has already stopped and only the intention remains.
3. Something technical is broken and has been for a month. A known fault that nobody has time to fix is the clearest possible signal, because technical faults are the cheapest things to delegate.

Note what is not a signal: finding the work difficult, or being outranked, or somebody telephoning to say your site has errors. The first is normal, the second is a competitive matter, and the third is a sales call.

What to keep, always

The clinical voice stays with the clinic. So does the decision about what you will and will not claim, which is a professional matter as much as a marketing one and is governed by the standards in Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish. So does replying to reviews, because the temperament of those replies is the clinic's, and a supplier writing them is writing in a registered professional's name.

And the proposition stays, because it is a statement about how the clinic is run. Somebody outside the clinic can help you articulate it. Nobody outside the clinic can decide it.

What to hand over first

Technical maintenance, in the order of Part V. It is specifiable, it is verifiable, it does not require clinical knowledge, and it is the category most likely to be neglected by a busy owner. Speed work, structured data, redirect maps, indexing checks and the monthly technical read of Search Console are all cleanly delegable.

Reporting is second, provided the report is the six lines from Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore rather than a dashboard. Specify the sheet, receive it monthly, and read it yourself.

Content production is third and it is the difficult one, because a supplier writing treatment pages will produce something that reads like every other clinic's pages unless the clinical material comes from you. The workable arrangement is that the clinic supplies the substance and the supplier supplies the structure, the editing and the publishing. Handing over the substance is how sites end up describing treatments the clinic does not perform in a voice nobody in the building recognises.

What never to hand over

Four things, and each has been lost by clinics who did not think about it in advance.

• Ownership of the domain name. It should be registered to the clinic, in an account the clinic controls. A domain held by a former supplier is a hostage.
• Ownership of your accounts. Search Console, the Business Profile, analytics and the hosting account should be owned by the clinic, with suppliers added as users. Suppliers should be removed when they leave, which is only possible if you own the account.
• The right to approve claims. Nothing goes live making a clinical claim without a registered professional at the clinic approving it. This is not a preference; it is how the guidance in Module 05, The rules that constrain everything you publish works.
• Patient data. Enquiry records and anything from the forms in Module 30, Enquiry forms, phone and messaging stay under the clinic's control, with any processor arrangement documented.

Every one of these four is cheap to arrange in advance and expensive to recover afterwards. Arrange them before you need them.

Writing a specification

Work handed over without a specification comes back as something else. A usable specification for clinic search work has five parts: what is to be done, to what standard, by when, what evidence of completion looks like, and who at the clinic approves it.

The standard part is where this course pays for itself. "Rebuild the treatment pages to the ten-block structure, with the risk section written from our own consent material, with a price range and a named practitioner on each" is a specification. "Improve our SEO" is a budget with no object. Having done the modules, you can specify precisely, which is the difference between buying work and buying hours.

Staying accountable after handing over

Three habits keep a handover working. Read the six-line review yourself, every month, rather than receiving a summary of it. Approve claims personally, every time, without exception. And keep the change log from Module 31, What to measure, and what to ignore, so that when something moves you can tell whether it followed a change.

That is the end of the curriculum. You began by writing three sentences about what your clinic sells and you finish able to specify, approve and verify the work of somebody else. The intervening thirty modules were the part that makes the last one possible.

The appendix that follows is a review: the mistakes that recur most often across clinic marketing, each mapped back to the module that prevents it. It is worth reading last rather than first.