Quick answer
HM builds WordPress sites starting at 500 pages and scaling to 10,000, per the ladder in Section 3.4. Conversion Optimization is the part of that work this page covers, and it sits in the Infrastructure pillar because you cannot rank a site that does not exist, and you cannot improve what you do not measure.
Key takeaways
- And it is not a platform lock-in: the client owns the domain, the hosting account, and the content, and can leave with all of it.
- The second belief, more consequential: that accessibility is optional, or handled by a widget.
- The rule that actually binds most healthcare clients is HHS Section 504, published May 9, 2024, covering recipients of HHS federal financial assistance.
- Conversion Optimization sits in the Infrastructure pillar, and you cannot rank a site that does not exist, and you cannot improve what you do not measure.
- That’s the exact E-E-A-T failure the category is full of, and the verified source library in Section 20.2 is how every statistic we publish clears the bar.
01 — OverviewWhat Conversion Optimization is, and what it is not
And it is not a platform lock-in: the client owns the domain, the hosting account, and the content, and can leave with all of it. When they ask for the wrong thing: if they want a five-page site because “nobody reads the rest,” we tell them patients don’t read a site, they search for one page inside it, and pages they never visit are pages they never search for. If they want it in four weeks, we say the compressed version is possible and name what gets cut — usually the content, which is the part that produces patients. If they want to keep their current host because it’s cheap, we run the Core Web Vitals numbers and let those decide. If they’ve been quoted $3,500 for a full practice site, we tell them Rosemont Media publishes $10,000–$40,000 for a custom elective-practice website and that the difference is real work, not margin. This pillar sits under our services index, which covers all twelve service lines.
Conversion Optimization is part of Website Development, one of the twelve service lines Healthcare Marketing runs, and it belongs to the Infrastructure pillar of the 4-Pillar Framework.
Who buys it, and what they already believe
The second belief, more consequential: that accessibility is optional, or handled by a widget. Overlay widgets do not produce conformance and have been the basis of demand letters themselves. Practices generally have no idea a specific federal deadline applies to them.
Explore the full guide
50 in-depth guidesThis page is the hub. The guides below apply Conversion Optimization to a specific specialty or a specific practice situation, because the work is not the same for a solo psychiatrist and a six-location orthopaedic group.
Start here — cornerstone guides
By specialty and situation
Behavioural health
Primary care
Medical
Diagnostic and acute
The complete index — all 50 guides in this pillar
02 — SearchThe queries this hub is built on
These are the queries that decide the build. Read the right-hand column as the work order: each one names a page that has to exist before the query can be won.
6 priority queries for Conversion Optimization. Keywords are intent-matched from the sitemap and are not volume-validated; confirm in a keyword tool before build.
Depth is a topical authority play that happens to produce volume
A twelve-page site can answer twelve questions, rank for twelve and be cited twelve times. A five-hundred-page site answers five hundred, and each new page strengthens the topical authority of every page already there. The entry tier is 500-plus pages, scaling to 10,000, and there is nothing below it. On top of the foundation, seven blogs a week produces more than 365 indexed pages a year.
WebFX analysed 130,070 healthcare queries in July 2025 and found that 51 percent trigger AI Overviews, roughly double the cross-industry rate, rising to 66.9 percent for informational queries. Google’s own documentation 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 matters most.
03 — What owners care aboutThe questions this work has to answer
The rule that actually binds most healthcare clients is HHS Section 504, published May 9, 2024, covering recipients of HHS federal financial assistance. The standard is WCAG 2.1 Level AA. An HHS interim final rule dated May 7, 2026 extended the deadlines to May 11, 2027 for recipients with 15 or more employees and May 10, 2028 for those with fewer. Any practice taking Medicaid, Medicare Advantage in the relevant posture, or HHS grant funding should assume it’s a recipient and get a determination from counsel. We build to WCAG 2.1 AA regardless, because it’s the right standard on both tracks.
The problem
The belief they arrive with is that a website is a design project. They talk about colors, photography, and how a competitor’s site “feels.” Design matters, because trust is judged in the first seconds, but the site’s job is to answer questions and produce appointments, and design is one of several inputs to that.
The solution
The site gets bigger, not smaller, so the risk is mishandled redirects rather than lost content. “Do I actually have to worry about accessibility?” Yes, and here is the correction most agencies get wrong. The 2024 DOJ web rule is Title II and covers state and local government only.
The resolution
Baseline: current organic performance by URL, Core Web Vitals, conversion actions, and an accessibility audit of the existing site so improvement is documented rather than asserted. Analyze — weeks 2–3. Competitive teardown of the practices actually ranking. Page-type templates defined: service, condition, procedure, provider, location, insurance, resource, FAQ.
Thirty minutes with Steven. A diagnosis of where Conversion Optimization is costing you, not a pitch.
Schedule a Meeting04 — The delivery standardWhat actually gets done, and when
On a replatform, the redirect map is finalized and staging-tested before the core goes live, never after. Control — from launch, ongoing. Daily monitoring on indexation, redirects, and Core Web Vitals for the first four weeks after the core goes live, then at each expansion milestone. Accessibility validation on every new template. Training for practice staff. Then ongoing maintenance: WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring, and security. | Deliverable | Owner | Timing | | — | — | — | | Signed-off sitemap and page inventory | Strategy | Week 1 | | Baseline accessibility audit | Web lead | Week 1 | | Design system and core templates | Design | Weeks 1–2 | | Redirect map tested in staging (replatform only) | SEO + web | Before core launch | | Launchable core live | Web lead | Weeks 2–3 | | Remaining page templates designed | Design | Weeks 3–5 | | Content drafted for clinical review | Content | Week 2 onward, continuous | | Schema layer implemented | Web lead | Weeks 3–6 | | Accessibility validation, WCAG 2.1 AA | Web lead | At core launch, then per template | | Entry-tier architecture complete, 500+ pages | Web + content | Roughly week 12; larger tiers run longer | | Post-launch daily monitoring | Web lead | 4 weeks from core launch | Ownership transfers at launch. Domain, hosting, WordPress admin, analytics properties, and content. If the relationship ends, the practice keeps the asset.
05 — The first 90 daysWhat the build sequence looks like
Marketing timelines in this category are usually vague because vagueness is safer. Here is the published sequence, and it is the same one every engagement runs.
Brand book, then a workable site
The Brand Intelligence Book and brand guide are delivered in week one, before anything is designed or written. A workable site goes live in weeks two to three. Content and Google Business Profile work start in week one in parallel.
Press and local targeting
The first press release goes out in week five. Local targeting begins in weeks five to six, at roughly 25 pages per city-and-service target for every $1,000 per month of spend.
Depth, and the first movement
Local SEO moves in 2 to 4 months and organic rankings in 3 to 4, so this is the window where the first measurable change usually appears. Inquiries follow at 6 to 12 months, and the strongest returns at 12 to 18.
06 — Hard stopsWhat we will not do here
Every recommendation has a cost, a timeline and a thing it makes harder. These are the limits on Conversion Optimization, stated before the contract rather than after the first report.
The rules that bite in website development. That’s the exact E-E-A-T failure the category is full of, and the verified source library in Section 20.2 is how every statistic we publish clears the bar. — HHS Section 504 recipient status, determined by the client’s counsel, and employee count for the deadline tier. — current hosting, domain registrar, and DNS access credentials. — every clinical page, named reviewer and review date, before publication.
07 — Where it sitsConversion Optimization in the 4-Pillar Framework
Conversion Optimization is one of three services inside Website Development, alongside website design and site migration. All three sit in the Infrastructure pillar, and you cannot rank a site that does not exist, and you cannot improve what you do not measure.
That sequence is not a preference. A practice that buys only this service will move slowly, because the twelve services have a dependency order and the 4-Pillar Framework encodes it. Nothing in Visibility gets sold before Infrastructure is in place or in flight, Authority starts in week one because it has the longest lead time, and Growth is only worth what the Infrastructure can convert.
08 — PricingWhat this costs, and why there is no band
Engagements start at $2,000 per month. That floor is published. There is no band above it, and the honest reason is that a band would be a fiction.
What a practice pays is set by how contested its market is, how large it is, and how much has to be built before anything can be amplified. Conversion Optimization is rarely bought alone, and where it is, we will say on the call whether it will do anything useful without the pillar beneath it. The number for a specific practice is given on that call rather than after three meetings.
No exclusivity, and the reason
We do not offer market exclusivity. An exclusivity promise is a promise to turn away a practice that needs the work. What we build instead is an asset a competitor cannot copy, because it is five hundred pages deep in the practice’s voice with its clinicians’ names on it.
The bottom line
Conversion Optimization is the infrastructure work that makes the rest of the programme legible to a patient and to a search engine. It is bought as part of a sequence, not as a tactic. The next step is thirty minutes to find out whether it is the thing actually holding you back.
Frequently asked questions
How long before Conversion Optimization produces new patients?
Rankings move in 3 to 4 months, inquiries grow in 6 to 12 months, and the strongest returns arrive in 12 to 18 months. Local search moves faster, typically in 2 to 4 months. Those are the timelines we publish and they do not improve when a prospect asks. Anything faster is either paid media, which has its own economics and stops when the spend stops, or a promise nobody can substantiate. The compounding is the point: page 300 makes page 12 rank better, which is why the curve is slow at first and then is not.
Can we buy Conversion Optimization on its own?
Sometimes, and we will tell you on the call whether it will do anything useful by itself. Conversion Optimization sits in the Infrastructure pillar, and you cannot rank a site that does not exist, and you cannot improve what you do not measure. The most common way marketing money is wasted in healthcare is buying an amplification service before the thing being amplified is worth pointing at. If that is your situation we will say so before the contract rather than after the first report, which costs us a sale and saves you a quarter.
What will you not do in Conversion Optimization?
That’s the exact E-E-A-T failure the category is full of, and the verified source library in Section 20.2 is how every statistic we publish clears the bar. — HHS Section 504 recipient status, determined by the client’s counsel, and employee count for the deadline tier. — current hosting, domain registrar, and DNS access credentials. — every clinical page, named reviewer and review date, before publication.
What does it cost?
Engagements start at $2,000 per month and we publish that floor. There is no band above it because a band would be misleading. Cost is driven by how contested the market is, how large the practice is, and how much has to be built before anything can be amplified. Local page production runs at roughly 25 pages per city-and-service target for every $1,000 per month of spend, which gives a concrete way to reason about what a given budget buys. The specific number comes on the first call, not after three meetings.
Who actually does the work?
Steven Lockhart is on strategy for every engagement and is the named principal you will reach. The firm is deliberately small and grows only at the rate that lets it hold the standards it publishes. Healthcare Marketing is healthcare-exclusive across thirty-two specialties, and the specialty register behind this work is researched per specialty rather than adapted from a general template.
What happens to the work if we leave?
It stays with the practice. The site, the content, the profiles, the analytics and the data. The site is the only asset in a marketing programme that the practice owns outright, that appreciates, and that cannot be removed by an algorithm change, a platform policy or a lapsed subscription. It is worth asking any agency this question directly and listening for whether the answer involves a proprietary platform, a template licence, or content that lives on infrastructure you do not control.
How we reviewed this page
Every statistic on this page carries its source at the point of use, and each source is listed below. Regulatory statements are cited to the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Health and Human Services, and Google’s own published policy rather than to secondary summaries. The delivery standard and the hard stops are drawn from Healthcare Marketing’s own service register for Website Development, which is revised on the same cadence as this page.
Written and reviewed by Steven Lockhart, founder of Healthcare Marketing, who brings 25-plus years of marketing experience, 15-plus of it healthcare-exclusive. Healthcare Marketing is a marketing agency and does not employ clinicians, so nothing on this page is presented as clinical review. It is reviewed quarterly, and within 14 days of any Google core update or advertising-platform policy change that contradicts it.
What’s new: September 2026 — first publication.
References
- developers.google.com — https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing
- census.gov — https://www.census.gov/acs/www/data/data-tables-and-tools/subject-tables/
- countyhealthrankings.org — https://www.countyhealthrankings.org/health-data/methodology-and-sources/methods
- Federal Trade Commission. Advertising and marketing business guidance. consumer.ftc.gov
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HIPAA for professionals: privacy. hhs.gov