How is this different from a normal SEO agency?

Agencies bill hours. We bill outcomes — 20 to 100+ medically reviewed pages every month at one transparent monthly price.

Do you actually rebuild my website?

Yes. A practicing MD founder oversees a new, conversion-optimized site published to your own GitHub repo. You own the code and domain and can leave anytime.

Is the content medically accurate?

Yes. Every page is reviewed for medical accuracy before it publishes, with optional provider and treatment copy review.

How long until I see results?

New patient calls typically in 30–60 days, meaningful ranking lifts in 60–120 days, compounding from month four.

Dermatology

Dermatology local SEO: if you're not in the map pack, you're invisible to the patient searching right now

Almost every dermatology patient — the suspicious-mole worrier, the acne teen's parent, the Botox shopper — searches locally and clicks one of the three practices in Google's map pack. Winning that box is the whole game.

Dermatology is one of the most local specialties in medicine. Nobody drives ninety minutes for a skin check when there's a derm four minutes away, and nobody books Botox with a practice that doesn't show up when they search their own neighborhood. That means the battle for new dermatology patients is fought almost entirely in one place: the Google map pack — the three-listing box with a map that sits above every website result. Whoever owns those three slots for 'dermatologist near me,' 'skin cancer screening [city],' and 'Botox [city]' gets the call. Everyone below the fold splits the scraps. The frustrating part is that map-pack ranking has very little to do with how good a dermatologist you are and almost everything to do with three signals most practices never manage: a fully optimized Google Business Profile, a steady flow of recent reviews, and local service-area pages that tell Google exactly which cities and which services you serve. Your free Surge Report™ shows you exactly where your practice stands on all three — and what it's costing you.

~46%

Of Google searches have local intent — and 'near me' medical searches skew far higher

Google / industry local-search context

3 slots

The map pack shows only three practices; every derm below the fold competes for the leftovers

Google map-pack structure

$3,200+

Illustrative first-year value of one new cosmetic derm patient the map pack sends to a competitor

Surge benchmark

See your Surge Score™ in 60 seconds

What's your Dermatology practice losing every month?

Surge analyzes your homepage and shows you the exact monthly revenue your practice is leaving on the table.

Get my Surge Score

The map pack is where dermatology patients actually choose

When someone searches 'dermatologist near me' or 'skin check [city],' Google answers with the map pack before it shows a single website. Those three listings absorb the overwhelming majority of clicks and calls, and dermatology demand is unusually 'now' — a patient who spotted a changing mole this morning is not scrolling to page two. If your Google Business Profile isn't in that box for your core queries, your website's design and copy barely matter, because the deciding patient never scrolls far enough to see it. Local SEO for a derm practice is therefore less about your homepage and more about winning the three-slot box that sits above it.

Your Google Business Profile is doing half the work of your website

Most dermatology practices treat their Google Business Profile as a set-and-forget address listing. It's actually the highest-leverage marketing asset you own — and the one Google reads to decide map-pack ranking. The wins are concrete: choose the right primary and secondary categories (Dermatologist, plus Skin Care Clinic and Medical Spa if you run a cosmetic side), list every service by name so Botox, Mohs surgery, and acne treatment surface in the profile, keep hours and each provider's board certification current, and post real before-and-afters and skin-cancer-awareness updates instead of letting the profile go stale. A practice that manages its profile actively outranks a technically better dermatologist who ignores theirs.

Reviews are the ranking factor derm practices under-invest in the most

Review count, recency, and velocity are among the strongest map-pack signals, and dermatology has a hidden advantage most practices waste: enormous daily patient volume across skin checks, acne follow-ups, and cosmetic visits. A derm seeing thirty-plus patients a day sits on a goldmine of potential reviews and collects almost none of them, while the med spa down the street with a text-message review ask quietly climbs above them. The fix is a systematic, HIPAA-conscious request at the right moment — after the cosmetic result the patient loves, after the reassuring benign biopsy call — plus a habit of responding to every review. Volume and freshness are what move the ranking, and derm practices are uniquely positioned to generate both.

Local service-area pages: one map pack per city, per service

A single Business Profile ranks in the map pack roughly where it's physically located. To rank in the neighboring town or capture a specific service query, you need dedicated local service-area pages — a real page for 'Mohs surgery in [nearby city],' 'skin cancer screening in [suburb],' 'Botox in [region].' Each page carries local proof: the specific service, the providers who perform it, directions and parking, and genuinely local context, not a city name swapped into a template. This is where medical and cosmetic derm split cleanly: your medical service-area pages target insurance-driven volume searches, your cosmetic pages target cash-pay shoppers, and each earns its own foothold in a different local search. Your Surge Report™ maps exactly which city-and-service combinations you should own and aren't — drop your URL and see the gaps in about sixty seconds, or book a strategy call to have us build them.

Prefer to talk it through?

Book a strategy call with the team.

Twenty minutes. We'll walk through the specific opportunities in your market and what a Surge engagement would look like for your practice.

Frequently asked

How is local SEO different from regular SEO for a dermatology practice?

Regular SEO tries to rank your website in the standard blue-link results. Local SEO targets the map pack — the three-listing box above them — which is where the vast majority of 'dermatologist near me' and 'skin check [city]' patients actually click. It's driven by your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and local service-area pages rather than by your homepage alone. For a specialty as location-bound as dermatology, local SEO is usually the higher-return effort of the two.

How do I get more Google reviews without violating HIPAA?

You never reference a patient's specific condition or treatment in a review request or response — you simply invite the patient to share their experience and thank reviewers generically. The scalable move is a timed, templated ask (text or email) sent after positive touchpoints like a loved cosmetic result or a reassuring biopsy call. Dermatology's high daily volume makes this the single biggest untapped ranking lever most practices have, and it stays fully HIPAA-conscious when the messaging never discloses clinical detail.

How do I find out where my dermatology practice stands in local search right now?

Run the free Surge Report™. Drop your URL and it surfaces — specifically for your derm practice — where your Google Business Profile and reviews are losing the map pack, which city-and-service local pages you're missing, an illustrative dollar amount of missed monthly revenue calibrated to derm case values, and the top three plays to recover it. It takes about a minute and requires no sales call. If you want the plays built for you, book a strategy call from the report.

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