Independent practices lose patients to systems with bigger budgets, not better care. We build the site, the content, and the search presence that even the odds. Five hundred pages. Seven posts a week. Everything you build, you own.
These four are Healthcare Marketing’s own reported engagement averages, not third-party research, and individual results vary by market, specialty and starting position. Every external statistic on this page carries its source beside it.
A practice owner rarely arrives with a marketing problem. They arrive with a schedule that has holes in it, a feeling they cannot name, and a suspicion that something larger is going on.
A group that opened eight minutes away appears above you for the condition you have treated for fifteen years. Your site was built in 2018 by a company that no longer answers email. Patients are searching. They are finding someone else.
You are competing against a marketing department, not a physician. That is an unfair fight, and it is also not your fault. What makes it worse is the private sense that you should have handled this two years ago.
When the market routes someone to the wrong provider, that is a failure with clinical consequences. Visibility is access. In healthcare those are the same thing, which is why we treat this as more than a growth exercise.
Point an audience at a practice whose site, content and message are not yet right, and what gets amplified is the part that was wrong. Steven inverted the order after watching it happen from inside a medical laboratory.
Your patients search at night, on a phone, in their own words. A twelve-page site can answer twelve questions. They have a hundred.
A 500-page site built to be found and to convert. Seven posts a week written to be cited. A local presence that holds the map while the content compounds.
Roughly 865 pages of owned, sourced content by the end of year one, and a cost per patient that falls while paid media gets more expensive.
The share of American physicians in private practice fell from 60.1 percent in 2012 to 42.2 percent in 2024. Over the same period the share in hospital-owned practices rose from 23.4 percent to 34.5 percent. When the AMA asked why, the top three answers were not about medicine.
Source: American Medical Association, Physician Practice Benchmark Survey, 2024 wave, published 2025. Figures are shares of physicians, not counts of practices. Endpoints shown; the AMA fields this series biennially.
Read it as a barbell. Long-tail informational content is the most exposed surface. Your own name in your own city is the safest one.
Source: WebFX analysis of 130,070 United States healthcare queries, July 2025. The study measures AI Overview prevalence, not click-through impact. No credible measurement of the click effect on health queries exists, and we do not publish one.
Steven Lockhart ran a medical laboratory processing more than four million dollars a month. Blood work, pharmacogenomics, toxicology, wound care, cardiology. The work put him in front of a great many physicians, and it is where he noticed the thing that became this business.
There was no single doctor who triggered it, and that is the point. Nearly every physician he met said a version of the same sentence: growing the practice is hard, and scaling it is harder. Most had already tried marketing. Most had been disappointed by it. What he could see and they could not was why.
Twelve services, four pillars, one dependency order. Read it top to bottom. Skipping a step is the most common way marketing money is wasted in healthcare.
The assets you own and the systems that measure them. You cannot rank a site that does not exist, and you cannot improve what you do not measure. Paid media pointed at a twelve-page template site buys traffic for a destination that cannot receive it.
The accumulated evidence that this practice knows what it is talking about. Google gives more weight to health content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T signals, and says trust is the most important of the four. Authority takes longest to build and compounds hardest.
Occupying the surfaces where a patient is actually deciding. Organic ranking, Map Pack presence, citation consistency, paid search where the economics support it, and increasingly being the source an AI answer cites. Visibility multiplies whatever it points at.
Converting visibility into booked patients, and keeping them. Reviews, email nurture and reactivation, conversion work, and the quarterly strategy that decides what happens next. The first three pillars fill the funnel. This one is the funnel, and it never finishes.
The engagement is governed by Six Sigma’s five phases, renamed for an owner audience as the Growth Scaling Method. It is why we talk about baselines and control limits where the category talks about campaigns.
The working view: how the same twelve services move a patient from not knowing you exist to sitting in your waiting room. Every standard below is one we hold ourselves to.
Five words, and the only position in this category a prospect can verify without a sales call. Open our blog and count the posts. Then open any agency you are comparing us to and count theirs.
Psychiatry, psychology and addiction treatment are listed first because they are the deepest competence here, not because of the alphabet. Our founder conceived and built a telepsychiatry practice of his own starting in 2019, before the category existed.
No specialty matches that search. Call (949) 628-6500 and ask, or see the full list.
Your brand book carries a section written for your specialty: how those patients search, who you are actually competing with, and the compliance rules that bite in your field. See all 32 specialties.
Results copy without a baseline is decoration. A four-hundred-percent lift means nothing until you know whether it started at two hundred visitors or twenty thousand. Here is the one client result we are cleared to publish, with the starting point and the clock attached.
Reported anonymized by specialty, because no client is named in a public asset without written permission on file. Individual results vary, and this is one practice in one market rather than a prediction of your outcome.
Open our blog, sort by date, count the missed weeks. Then ask any agency you are comparing us to what they would charge you for daily content.
Our own site carries state pages for all fifty states, more than 150 city pages, thirty-two specialty pages and a glossary of over 200 terms.
Every statistic on this page names its source in the same block of copy. Scroll back and look. Then look at how the rest of this category publishes health statistics.
Every engagement opens with a Brand Intelligence Book, delivered in week one, before anything is designed or written. It is the moment a client understands what they bought, and nothing downstream starts until it exists.
per month
It is the only service price published anywhere in this competitive set.
What a practice pays is set by how contested its market is and how much has to be built before anything can be amplified. A published range would misprice one of those two situations, so we publish the floor and give you the real figure on the call.
A full program with a 500-page build, daily content, local, PR, social, reputation and reporting sits well above the floor and is a ten-thousand-a-month scope by every published benchmark in this category. If that is not your number, we will tell you the sequence that works at your budget and what it costs you in time. What we would not do is spread a small retainer thinly across all twelve services.
Benchmark source: Healthcare Success published agency pricing guidance, 2026. Healthcare Marketing publishes its own starting figure and nothing above it. Your specific number is given on the discovery call, not after three meetings.
Engagements start at two thousand a month. A full program with a five-hundred-page build, daily content, local, PR, social, reputation and reporting is a ten-thousand-a-month scope by every published benchmark in this category. Where a specific practice lands between those depends on how contested its market is and how much has to be built first. We will tell you the number on the first call, and we will tell you what works if that number is too high.
Rankings start moving at three to four months. Patient inquiries follow at six to twelve. The strongest returns land between twelve and eighteen months. Local search moves faster, usually two to four months. Anyone promising faster is promising a different outcome.
No. Nobody can, and the firms that say they can are the reason you are asking the question.
Because a ten-page site can answer ten questions. Your patients have a hundred. Every page you publish that answers one of them makes every other page on your site more credible to a search engine, and gives an AI answer one more reason to cite you instead of a directory.
Steven is on strategy for every account, and he is the named principal you will actually reach. The firm is deliberately small and grows only at the rate that lets it hold the standards it publishes. You will not be handed to an account coordinator you have never met.
You take everything. The site, the content, the profiles, the analytics, the data. We do not hold anything hostage and nothing is locked to a subscription.
Ask us something harder, or call (949) 628-6500 and ask it out loud.
Tell us the specialty and the market. We will tell you what is actually in your way, and we will tell you if the answer is that you do not need us yet. You should leave the call able to repeat the plan back to a partner, in order, from memory.
Healthcare Marketing is a digital marketing agency and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Content on this site is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for diagnosis or treatment by a licensed clinician. If you are experiencing a medical emergency, call 911.
Performance figures shown on this page describe past engagements and are not a prediction of your outcome. Marketing results depend on market conditions, competitive density, specialty, budget, starting position, and factors inside your practice such as intake capacity. We do not guarantee rankings, inquiry volume, or revenue.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in emotional distress, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24 hours a day in the United States. In an emergency, call 911. This website is a marketing site and cannot provide clinical help.
Our work is built to HIPAA, the FTC Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR Part 255, the FTC Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials at 16 CFR Part 465, and AMA Code of Medical Ethics Opinion 9.6.1. We do not buy, write, incentivize, or gate reviews, and we do not run marketing against a patient list without written authorization.
All photography on this page depicts staff, models, or arranged scenes. No identifiable patients appear anywhere on this site, and no image is derived from protected health information.
This page is built to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. If any part of it is difficult to use with your assistive technology, call (949) 628-6500 or email marketing@healthmarketinggroup.com and we will fix it and give you the content another way.
Steven takes the call. You should leave it able to repeat the plan back to a partner, in order, from memory, and knowing at least one thing about your own market that you did not know before.
Mon–Fri, 8 AM to 6 PM Pacific. Weekends by appointment. Healthcare Marketing is a digital marketing agency and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
The assets the practice owns and the systems that measure them. Everything downstream fails without it, which is why nothing in Visibility gets sold before this is in place or in flight.
Why it is first: a practice that starts with paid media on a twelve-page template site is buying traffic for a destination that cannot receive it. It is the most common way marketing money is wasted in healthcare.
The accumulated proof that this practice knows what it is talking about, legible to a patient and to a machine at the same time.
Google states that for topics affecting health its systems give more weight to content aligned with strong E-E-A-T signals, and that of the four components, trust is the most important. Source: Google Search Central.
Organic ranking, Map Pack presence, profile completeness, citation consistency, paid search where the economics support it, and increasingly being the source an AI answer cites.
Half of health-related queries now return an AI Overview, rising to 66.9 percent for informational intent and falling to 25.7 percent for brand-plus-location. Source: WebFX analysis of 130,070 United States healthcare queries, July 2025.
Converting visibility into booked patients and keeping them. The first three pillars fill the top. This one never finishes.
The FTC Rule on Consumer Reviews and Testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, took effect 21 October 2024 and carries civil penalty authority. Review practices here are built to it.
Founder and CEO of Healthcare Marketing and Founder of Psychiatry Telemed. Background in public markets, having taken 12 companies public via reverse mergers, and previously led a digital marketing company with 8,000+ clients. Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, author of The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing and, with David Mitroff, Ph.D., of the forthcoming Growth Scaling Your Business.
He is the only named individual in any Healthcare Marketing asset. No roster, no headshot grid. The firm is small on purpose and grows only at the rate that lets it hold the standards it publishes.
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