Marketing for Doctors and Medical Practices

Key Takeaways

• Your marketing has four jobs. Get found, get chosen, get booked and keep patients coming back. When new bookings stall, one of those four is usually where it breaks.
• Local search captures most patient demand. A complete Google Business Profile and clear pages for each service and suburb reach patients at the moment they are ready to book, usually at the lowest cost per appointment.
• The right mix changes by practice type. General practices compete on efficiency and local visibility, while most specialists win their patients through GP referrals rather than patient-facing ads.
• Compliance belongs in the plan from the start. AHPRA rules govern your claims and how you use testimonials, so build them in early and avoid reworked content and delays.

Patients now choose a doctor the way they choose any other service. They search on their phone, read a few reviews, glance at two or three websites, and book the practice that feels easiest to trust. They might even use an LLM (Large Language Model) to help them with their research.

The challenge with most medical practices is that they still market by habit. They rely heavily on their location, their existing patients, and word of mouth, then wonder why bookings dip in some weeks.

The gap isn't solved by marketing alone. It's solved by marketing that's planned strategically, measured consistently and built around how patients actually choose a doctor. Done well, it brings the right patients to your practice at a cost you can afford, and it keeps them coming back. 

Why marketing a medical practice is different to other businesses

Marketing a medical practice is not the same as marketing a retail brand, because the way patients decide and the rules you operate under both work differently. Four things in particular set it apart.

• Trust carries the decision. Patients hand over sensitive information and, in effect, their health, so they judge your credibility very quickly. That means every credibility signal you can show (from qualifications through to reviews) earns its place and does real work for you.
• Intent is local and immediate. Most patients want a provider near them, and often they want an appointment within the same week (or the same day). Because that intent is so local and so time-sensitive, strong local visibility does far more for you than broad brand awareness ever will.
• The advertising is regulated. If you advertise a regulated health service, AHPRA rules govern what you can claim and how you may use testimonials, which shapes your messaging before you write a word of it. Planning around those rules from the outset saves you from rewriting compliant copy later.
• Referrals sit inside the funnel. For many specialists, the patient does not arrive directly but is sent by a GP, which makes that referral relationship a marketing channel in its own right. Neglecting it means leaving your most reliable source of patients unmanaged.

You do not need to master the regulation to read this guide. What you do need to know is that compliance is built into good healthcare marketing from the start. For more information regarding the AHPRA's advertising guidelines, read out article - “What AHPRA-regulated practices need”

The four jobs your practice marketing has to do

When you strip marketing back to what it must actually achieve for a practice, it resolves into four connected jobs. Your marketing has to help patients find you, then persuade them to choose you, then make it easy for them to book, and finally bring them back again over time. 

Every tactic in this guide maps to one of those four jobs, and when a practice is underperforming, the problem can almost always be traced to whichever one of the four has broken down.

Get found by patients searching nearby

Most patient journeys begin with a search that combines a service and a place, such as someone typing "GP near me" or "physio Ashgrove" into their phone, tablet or computer.

 Your first job is simply to be present at that moment, because a patient who cannot find you has effectively never had the chance to choose you.

Google Business Profile is the first thing to get right

Your Business Profile feeds the local map results and surfaces the reviews that patients read before they decide to call, which makes it the highest-leverage asset you own. Claim the listing or set up a new one and complete every field properly. 

Keep your name, address, phone number and opening hours identical everywhere they appear online, since inconsistent details confuse both patients and Google. Make sure to add real photos of the practice and keep the services list current, always. 

Local service pages capture "service plus suburb" searches

A single thin services page cannot realistically rank for everything you do, because search engines reward pages that focus tightly on one topic. The version of this that works is a genuinely distinct page for each major service you offer, plus a location page only where you have a real presence to write about, such as a clinic with its own practitioners, opening hours and catchment. Spinning up a near-identical page for every surrounding suburb works against you, because those pages repeat each other and pull down the assessed quality of the whole site.

“Doorway pages are an outdated tactic. Search engines penalise thin, duplicated pages built only to capture traffic across a list of suburbs, because they breach core quality guidelines and leave the patient on a page that never answers their question. Semantic search now reads intent well enough that one strong service page will usually outrank a dozen shallow ones.” 

Google Ads puts you at the top when you need speed

Search ads reach patients who have booking intent right now, which is why they are the fastest way to appear at the top of the results. They earn their place for new practices and for competitive service lines where organic ranking would otherwise take many months to build. 

Keep your budget tied to booking-intent terms so you pay for patients rather than for idle curiosity, and bear in mind that targeting based on health conditions carries platform restrictions you will need to work within. 

Our Google Ads team runs these campaigns for clinics across Australia and understands the policies to abide by.

AI assistants are becoming part of discovery

A growing number of patients now ask assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot for provider suggestions and health information before they ever open a search engine. These tools tend to cite a small set of trusted sources rather than listing ten separate links, so the shortlist forms earlier and with fewer names on it. 

If your practice is absent from those answers, you can lose the patient before that shortlist ever reaches you. Earning a mention is called Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, and it is won through accurate, well-structured content that these systems can read and trust. 

Our AEO Audit shows how often the major AI assistants mention and cite your practice today. Alternative, read about how you can stay visible when Search stops sending clicks.

Get chosen once patients compare you

Getting found puts you on the list, and getting chosen is what turns that visibility into an actual booking. At this stage a patient is comparing a handful of providers side by side and settling on whichever one reassures them most. Reviews and the other credibility signals you present usually decide that comparison, so they reward deliberate effort.

Reviews and reputation

Reviews are the single strongest influence on which local provider a patient ultimately picks, because they work as social proof at the exact moment of decision. They also help you twice over, since they lift your ranking in the map results and, at the same time, make more patients click through to you. For that reason, a steady flow of recent and genuine reviews is something worth building deliberately rather than leaving to chance.

Healthcare adds a constraint here. Under the National Law, you cannot use testimonials that comment on clinical care in your own advertising. That rule catches reviews you choose to republish on your site. Reviews left by patients on platforms you do not control, such as Google, sit in a different space, and you are generally not responsible for unsolicited ones. 

The safe approach looks like this.

• Invite every patient to leave an honest review on Google after their visit, using a simple link or QR code at reception.
• Do not steer patients toward comments about clinical outcomes or specific treatments.
• Do not embed or curate clinical testimonials on your own website.
• Respond to reviews politely and without discussing any patient's clinical details.

When in doubt, always keep the focus on the non-clinical experience and check the current AHPRA guidance. 

Credibility signals that reassure patients

Beyond reviews, patients look for concrete proof that they can trust you with their health, so it pays to give them clear and consistent signals.

• Named practitioners with real credentials. List qualifications and registration details accurately and use genuine photographs of your team, because patients want to see who will actually treat them. Anonymous medical content struggles to earn either patient trust or search rankings.
• Service pages that answer real questions. Explain what a service involves and what a patient can realistically expect, so the page answers the questions they would otherwise ask on the phone. Pages written this way build trust and help you rank at the same time.
• A secure and up-to-date website. A fast site that runs on a secure connection (HTTPS) and shows current information reassures patients who are about to hand over personal data. A neglected or insecure site does the opposite and undermines every other signal you have built.
• Consistent information across the web. The details on your website and your Google Business Profile should match exactly, because even small inconsistencies tell Google and patients that something is off. Matching information marks you out as one reliable practice rather than a set of loose ends. This also includes any local directories or aggregator sites.

Health content sits in what Google calls the "your money or your life" category, which means health pages are held to a higher trust bar. Named authors with verifiable credentials help you surface in search and in AI answers.

Get booked without losing the enquiry

This is the job where most practices lose the most money, even though on the surface it looks like the simplest of the four. You spend time and money to get found and then to get chosen, the patient finally reaches out, and the enquiry then stalls at the front desk for want of a quick, organised response. 

Here are a few ways you can avoid that:

1. Make booking effortless. Offer online booking that works properly on a phone and connects to your practice management system, so the appointment lands in your diary without any manual step. A patient who can book at nine in the evening without having to call is a patient you are far more likely to keep. Make the booking action visible on every page so nobody has to hunt for it.
2. Answer fast, every time. Speed of response is a genuine competitive advantage, because patients read a slow reply as a sign of how the care itself will feel. If someone calls and reaches a message bank, or emails and waits two days for an answer, they will usually just book the next practice on their list instead. Track missed calls and enquiry response times with the same seriousness you give to revenue, since they lead directly to it.
3. Treat the phone as a marketing channel. A large share of healthcare bookings still happen by phone, which makes reception a part of your marketing even if you never planned it that way. Train the front desk to convert an enquiry into a booking rather than simply answer the question and hang up, because that shift alone can lift your conversion noticeably. Use call tracking to see which marketing actually generated each call, so you can tell what is working and fund more of it.
4. Reduce every step between worry and appointment. Clear fees where you are able to show them, along with an obvious next action on every page, both lift your booking rate in practice. Each obstacle you take away is another patient who books with you instead of leaving to look elsewhere.

Booking data belongs in a system you own. A customer relationship management system, or CRM, such as HubSpot links a first enquiry through to an attended appointment, so you can see which marketing produces real patients rather than clicks.

Keep patients coming back

New patients cost the most to win. Existing patients cost far less and often refers others. Retention marketing is where a practice compounds its growth over time, and it is the job most practices ignore.

• Recall and reminders. Prompt patients for their next check-up or follow-up. Recall marketing brings existing patients back on schedule and steadies your appointment book.
• Email and SMS. Consent-based email and SMS keep your practice visible to past patients with seasonal health prompts and useful updates. Collect consent properly and respect health privacy obligations.
• Reactivation. Contact patients who have lapsed with a simple, useful reminder to return. This is often the cheapest new revenue available to a practice.
• A first visit worth repeating. Marketing brings a patient once. The experience decides if they return and who they tell. Short waits and clear, timely communication do more for retention than any campaign.

Marketing by practice type

The four jobs stay the same across healthcare. The emphasis shifts by practice type. A busy bulk-billing GP clinic and a self-referred cosmetic practice need very different mixes. Use this as a starting point, then tailor it to your own economics.

A few patterns worth noting: 

• General practice runs on efficiency. In general practice the volume is high and the margins are thin, so the whole game is keeping a low and stable cost per booking. Get the Business Profile and local pages right first, and then lean on recall to keep chronic-care patients returning on schedule. Paid ads tend to suit new clinics and quieter locations far more than they suit an established practice that is already busy.
• Allied health depends on local visibility and reviews. In allied health, terms like "physio near me" are heavily contested, which means a strong review profile and effortless online booking are often what decide who the patient actually picks. Retention matters a great deal here as well, because many patients return repeatedly across a single course of treatment.
• Cosmetic and elective practices face the tightest rules. Patients research cosmetic and elective services for themselves and compare their options carefully, which rewards genuine depth of content and credible imagery. The trade-off is that claims are controlled far more tightly here, under both AHPRA and the Therapeutic Goods Administration, or TGA. In practice that means no guaranteed outcomes and no before-and-after images used loosely to imply them.

Specialist practices deserve their own section, because their most valuable channel is other clinicians.

Referral marketing for specialists

For most specialists, patients arrive through a referral from a GP or an allied health provider. That makes your referrers your most important audience. Marketing to them is different work to marketing to patients, and it is often neglected.

• Make it easy to refer to you. Build a dedicated referrer page that sets out your referral criteria clearly and gives GPs an easy, secure way to send a referral through. When you reduce the administrative effort involved in referring to you, the volume of referrals you receive tends to rise. 
• Keep referrers informed and confident. GPs refer to specialists they trust and, just as importantly, to specialists they actually hear back from. Prompt and clear communication after each referral protects the relationship and earns you the next referral in turn. Your marketing supports this by publishing clear turnaround times and keeping practitioner information easy to find.
• Build practitioner authority. Referrers and patients alike weigh up a specialist's professional standing before they commit. Accurate credentials and considered clinical content both feed the confidence that sits behind a referral, so they are worth investing in properly. Keep any clinical claims you make firmly evidence-based.
• Do not abandon patient-facing marketing. Patients increasingly research a named specialist online after a GP suggests one, and some search directly for a procedure without a referral in hand. A findable and reassuring website turns that research into a confirmed booking and reduces the number of patients who slip across to a competitor.

Our work with clinic networks such as SmartClinics and GP groups like Better Medical shows how patient-facing and referrer-facing marketing reinforce each other.

Where a practice should spend first

Budget is the question every practice owner asks. There is no single right number, because spend should follow what a patient is worth to you and what you can afford to acquire one. 

For sequencing the spend, most practices benefit from the same order of priority.

1. Fix the foundations you already have. Sort your Google Business Profile, your website basics and your enquiry handling before buying more traffic. These lift the return on everything that follows.
2. Win the local search you are closest to ranking for. Local SEO and service pages capture demand at the point of decision, usually at the lowest cost per booking.
3. Add paid search where you need speed or reach. Google Ads fills gaps that organic ranking cannot reach yet, and suits new practices and locations.
4. Build retention so growth compounds. Recall reminders and email and SMS campaigns turn one-off patients into returning ones and lower your average cost of acquiring a patient.
5. Invest in content and authority to compound results over time. Useful, accurate content earns rankings and AI citations that build over time.

Done in this order, each dollar works harder than the last. If you want a read on where your gaps sit, our digital marketing maturity assessment is a sensible first step.

Common marketing mistakes practice owners and doctors make

Most underperformance comes from a small set of avoidable habits. These are the ones we see most often in practices.

• Doing it in spare minutes. Marketing squeezed between patients rarely gets the consistency it needs. Sporadic effort produces sporadic results.
• Ignoring enquiries. Spending to generate calls, then letting them hit a message bank, wastes the entire acquisition cost. Response handling is marketing.
• Neglecting reviews. Practices that never ask for reviews cede the comparison to competitors who do. A quiet review profile costs bookings every week.
• Setting and forgetting. A website built once and left untouched slips down the rankings and falls out of date. Marketing needs maintenance.
• Discounting instead of differentiating. Price offers attract price-sensitive patients and can breach the inducement rules if terms are unclear. Trust and convenience win better patients.
• Treating compliance as an afterthought. Late AHPRA or TGA issues mean reworked content and delays. Build the rules in from the start.

Working with a healthcare marketing agency

You can run much of this in-house, and many practices do. An agency earns its place when the work outgrows your team, or when you want faster, measurable growth without the compliance risk.

Look for a partner with genuine healthcare experience. The rules and the referral dynamics differ from other industries, and a generalist can create risk without realising it. Ask how they handle AHPRA compliance and how they measure results against booked patients rather than clicks.

BFJ Digital works with healthcare providers across Australia, across local SEO, paid search, content, retention marketing and visibility in AI answers. You can see the wider picture on our healthcare marketing page.

When you are ready to grow your patient numbers with a plan built for a regulated industry, get in touch.

Frequently asked questions

How is marketing for doctors different from other industries?

Patients decide largely on trust and usually search locally for an appointment soon. Advertising is regulated by AHPRA, which limits the claims and testimonials you can use. And for specialists, referrals from other clinicians form a channel of their own. Good healthcare marketing plans for all of that from the start.

What is the most effective marketing channel for a medical practice?

For most practices, local search is the highest-return channel. A complete Google Business Profile and clear local service pages capture patients at the moment they are ready to book, usually at the lowest cost per appointment. Reviews and easy online booking then decide who the patient chooses.

Can a medical practice use patient reviews in its marketing?

You cannot use testimonials that comment on clinical care in your own advertising, including reviews you republish on your website. Reviews that patients leave on platforms you do not control, such as Google, sit in a different space, and you are generally not responsible for unsolicited ones. Keep the focus off clinical outcomes and check the current AHPRA guidance. This is general information and not legal advice.

How much should a medical practice spend on marketing?

There is no fixed percentage worth quoting. Set spend against what a new patient is worth over their relationship with you and what you can afford to acquire one. Fix your foundations first and win local search, then scale the channels that produce booked patients. Our healthcare marketing strategy guide covers the economics in detail.

How do specialists market to GPs for referrals?

Make referring easy with a dedicated referrer page and secure forms for patient information. Communicate promptly after each referral so GPs stay confident. Build practitioner authority with accurate credentials and considered clinical content. Referrer marketing and patient-facing marketing work best together.

How do we get our practice mentioned in AI search results?

Publish accurate, well-structured content with named authors and verifiable credentials, and keep your practice information consistent across the web. Those signals help AI assistants cite you when patients ask for options. An AEO Audit measures your current presence and share of voice in AI answers.

**Disclaimer: This article is general information about marketing for doctors and medical practices in Australia. It is not legal advice. AHPRA advertising guidelines, TGA rules and Australian privacy law change over time, so confirm the current requirements with AHPRA and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, and seek your own advice where you need certainty.