. 5 min read. Chiropractor SEO Company team
Questions to Ask Before You Hire Anyone for Your Practice's Search Work
Ten questions to ask anyone you might hire for search work: contract terms, who owns the site and profile, link reports, guarantees and patient data.
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Before you hire anyone for your practice's search work, ask how long you are committed, who owns the website, domain and Google profile, whether you will see every link they build, what they guarantee, whether they need patient information, and who checks the content for health claims. The answers you want are short: a month-to-month or short term, you own everything, yes to every link, no ranking guarantees, no patient data, and the doctor approves every page before it goes live.
Here are those questions and four more, with what a straight answer sounds like. They apply to us as much as to anyone else you talk to.
1. How long is the contract, and what happens when I cancel?
Long terms are not automatically bad, but they move the risk onto you. Ask what you owe if you leave early, how much notice is required and what you keep. Read the cancellation clause before the scope of work, not after.
Our plans are month to month and can be canceled anytime. Whatever term you accept, know the exit before you sign.
2. Who owns the domain, the website and the Google Business Profile?
You should own all three. The domain should be registered in an account the practice controls, with the login held by the practice. If the provider builds or hosts the site, ask whether you get the files and content when you leave, or whether the site only runs on their platform. A site that only works on someone else's system is hard to walk away from, and a domain registered in a vendor's name is harder still.
For the Google Business Profile, the practice should hold the owner role in its own Google account and add any outside provider as a manager. A profile can have more than one user with different levels of access, so there is no reason to hand over ownership. When you part ways, you remove the manager.
3. Will you show me every link you build?
Ask for a monthly list of every live link: the full URL, the page on your site it points to and the anchor text. "We built 40 links this month" is not a report. With the URLs in hand, you or your office manager can open a few each month and confirm they exist.
4. What do you guarantee?
A ranking guarantee is a red flag. No one controls Google's results, and Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a top ranking. Results take months and depend on how strong the competition is in your area. A provider can commit to the work they will do and the reporting you will get. That is all anyone can honestly promise.
"New patient guarantees" and pay-per-patient arrangements deserve a separate look. Paying a marketer per new patient can raise questions under state rules on fee splitting and referral payments, and under federal inducement and referral rules where Medicare or other federal program patients are involved. These rules vary by state. Ask a healthcare attorney or compliance adviser before signing anything priced per patient.
5. Do you need any patient information?
For search work, the answer should be no. Rankings, links, listings and pages don't require names, conditions or visit details. Review requests don't either: a provider can write the request wording and the process, and your office sends the requests from its own systems.
HIPAA treats patient information as protected. If a provider asks for a patient list, ask why, and talk to your compliance adviser before sharing anything. The same applies to their reports, which should contain monthly totals and nothing that identifies a patient.
6. Who writes the content, and who checks it for health claims?
Ask who writes the pages and posts, whether they have written for health practices before, and what happens before anything goes live. The FTC expects health claims to be backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence, and state chiropractic boards have advertising rules that vary by state.
A good answer: drafts avoid outcome language, and nothing publishes until the doctor has read and approved it. An answer to be wary of: a library of ready-made condition articles that gets loaded onto every client's site. Your name and license sit behind every sentence on your website, whoever typed it.
7. How do you handle reviews?
Asking only happy patients for reviews (review gating) and offering anything in return for a review are both against Google's policies, and fake reviews are prohibited. The details are in Google's policy on prohibited and restricted content.
Replies matter as much as requests. A public reply that confirms someone is a patient can be a disclosure under HIPAA, and HHS, through its Office for Civil Rights, has taken enforcement action against healthcare providers over replies to online reviews. Ask to see the reply wording the provider uses, and read it as if you were the patient.
8. Do you work with other practices near me?
Ask directly, because the answer shapes what you can expect. Some providers take one practice per area; others don't. We may work with more than one practice in the same area, and one client's data is never shared with another. Whatever the policy, it should be stated clearly before you sign, and your data should stay yours.
9. What do you need from my office each month?
Search work needs some time from the practice: approving pages, sending photos, running the review request process, and telling the provider about new hours, doctors or services. Ask for a realistic estimate and decide who at your office owns it. If the answer is "nothing at all", the work probably isn't touching the things only your office knows.
10. Do you run ads too, and how do you compare ads with search?
Some providers sell both; some don't. We don't run Google Ads or Facebook ads. Ads can put a practice in front of searchers quickly, while search work builds over months, and a fair provider will say so even if they don't sell ads. Ask how they would judge whether search is worth it for your practice compared with what you already spend.
What the price should cover
Comparing quotes is easier with a common checklist: how many keywords are targeted, how many links of which kind are built each month, whether Business Profile, citation and review work is included, what the report shows, and what you keep if you leave.
For reference, our packages run from $125 to $575 a month: Single Office at $125, Established Office at $235, Competitive Market at $325 and Practice Group at $575. Every one includes Google Business Profile optimization, citation building and cleanup, and review-generation work, and the pricing page lists what each package covers line by line.
Before your next sales call
Print these ten questions and use them on every call, ours included. You can read how Chiropractor SEO Company works first, then ask us the same list and hold us to the answers.