SEO or PPC: Which Is Better for My Private Healthcare Clinic?

It was great to sit down with Katie Bell – Business Coach for Clinic Owners – on Thrive’s “Treat Your Business” podcast to talk all things marketing, AI and how Klatch helps clinics grow sustainably. Our conversation centred on one idea: if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Too many clinics still judge marketing by clicks and traffic; we showed why the only metric that matters is cost-per-new-patient. By linking call-tracking, web forms and your practice-management software, we give owners a clear line of sight from the first Google search to lifetime revenue. That transparency lets you double down on campaigns that work, cut the fluff and make every pound work harder. We also tackled the hot topics shaping 2025: why location and an search friendly clinic name (think “ Chiswick Physio ”) are still growth cheat-codes, and how reviews remain Google’s trust signal of choice, worried about generative AI search? Don’t be. Stick to fast, technically sound sites, patient-centred content and genuine brand building, and you’ll rank just fine in the new landscape. Data-driven decisions, incremental optimisation and an unwavering focus on patient experience compound month after month—turning good clinics into great businesses.

Quick Article Stats UK & Worldwide Search Engine Market Share August 2025 (Including ChatGPT)

Join us on Friday, July 4th, 2025, for the first-ever Clinic Growth Mastermind — an exclusive, one-day event for forward-thinking clinic owners ready to scale. Set in the beautiful Brighton Beach House (SoHo House), this intimate event brings together ambitious clinic leaders to exchange hard-earned lessons, tackle real business challenges, and leave with proven marketing strategies you can implement immediately. You'll dive into expert-led sessions on: - What’s Working in 2025: Top-Performing Clinics & Their Tactics - Building a Magnetic Clinic Brand That Converts - Referral Engines & Reputation Growth on Autopilot - Leveraging AI to Save Time, Scale Faster - Optimising the Entire Patient Journey for Profit Plus, participate in live mastermind discussions focused on your clinic’s biggest challenges, shared in advance to ensure maximum value. Real conversations. Actionable insights. Beach views. Tickets: £149pp — includes all food and drinks for the day. Spaces are limited — book your spot now and join us for a day that could redefine your clinic's growth.

The Impact of AI on Google and SEO: Are Local Search Dynamics Shifting? In recent weeks, there’s been significant buzz about how emerging AI-driven search engines, like SearchGPT, could impact Google and SEO. Gary Vaynerchuk even compared today’s evolution in search engines to the disruption that web crawlers caused to traditional yellow pages—a big shift in how people find information.  What?!

In the fast-paced world of private healthcare, clinics often struggle with marketing agencies that fail to deliver tangible, measurable results. The relationship between marketing agencies and private healthcare clinics is frequently strained due to two significant issues: 1. Inaccurate Attribution of New Patients: Nearly 40% of new patient enquiries come from phone calls. Many marketing agencies lack the necessary tools to track these accurately, leading to incomplete and unreliable reporting. 2. Narrow Focus on Specific Marketing Channels: Many agencies excel in only one or two areas, such as Google Ads or social media funnels. While this can drive growth in those areas, it often leads to overlooked opportunities, such as website optimisation, which can severely hamper the clinic's overall growth success. Clinics are also often locked into 12-month contracts, wasting valuable time on a revenue growth that needs to be fully aligned with their growth objectives. This causes stagnation, with only the marketing agency benefiting in the short term. Clinic owners are frustrated and hindered in their long-term growth.

It's all very well launching marketing campaigns that will bring in new customers, but if you don't know the cost to aqcuire a patient, how do you know what is working? And if you need to know what is working, how do you know where to spend for future growth? Put simply, you don't. Understanding your patient acquisition cost (PAC) is the most critical metric for clinics and their marketing agencies to increase their clinic's bottom line. It's common in healthcare marketing : ag encies invest in marketing campaigns without the necessary systems to accurately attribute their success. For instance, adding a chat widget to a site without clearly understanding which chats lead to conversions or labelling all calls from Google ads as 'leads'. This lack of precision can lead to misguided spending and missed opportunities. Identifying the leads that successfully convert into patients is the key to understanding what's truly effective in your marketing strategy. Without this knowledge, your spending may not be directed to the most beneficial areas, leading to wasted resources and a missed chance for sustainable growth. What is patient acquisition cost? PAC stands for Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC), which represents the amount spent on acquiring a new patient for your healthcare practice. You or your marketing agency must be well-informed about these figures to ensure sustainable clinic growth. It serves as the primary metric for evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing spend. The goal is to minimize this cost relative to your customer's lifetime value (CLV). It also serves as the foundation for your clinic's growth, as understanding exactly how much it costs to acquire a patient enables you to plan your clinic's growth effectively. How do you determine patient acquisition cost? It is essential to define the elements that contribute to deciding on PAC. Cost per lead (CPL): The cost to acquire a lead. Patient Conversion Rate (PCR): Your lead-to-sale conversion rate Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC): The cost to acquire a new patient To determine your patient acquisition cost, you use this simple formula: Cost Per Lead / Conversion Rate = Patient Acquisition Cost Clinics that partner with Klatch often experience a cost per lead (CPL) of about £25, resulting in a patient acquisition cost of £35.71 with a 70% lead-to-sale conversion rate. This informs you that if you spend £700 on marketing next month, you'll bring in an average of 20 new patients. If your customer lifetime value is £500, this will result in £10,000 of new business. Future planning and marketing spending becomes much simpler when you know your true PAC and can adjust your marketing spending based on your growth goals. Why is getting an actual patient acquisition cost so difficult for clinics? This all begins with setting up the correct lead attribution. You can only obtain a valid CPL if you track new leads effectively across all routes, including calls, forms and emails. With a valid CPL, it's possible to determine your clinic's PAC. This is the primary reason we have set up our unique lead tracking software : to enable clinics and their marketing agencies to obtain a valid CPL by tracking calls, forms, emails, chat widgets, etc. Once this is in place, you can determine your valid PAC. How can understanding your actual PAC fuel growth? When you understand precisely how much revenue you generate from your marketing spend, your marketing actions become much more accountable. It becomes more of a 'put this much money in' to 'get this much money out' scenario. It's a very nice scenario for a clinic owner and much less arbitrary than most current approaches. On top of that, you can start to decipher channel performance MoM and plan accordingly. Let's say your Google Ads PAC increases 20% to £42 MoM. As a marketing agency or clinic owner, this is extremely powerful as you know exactly where your previous month's inefficiencies lie and can plan accordingly. This ensures that lead figures are much more stable and sustainable over time. At Klatch, we use PAC as our clinic's north star metric, which enables us to understand marketing performance and truly build sustainable clinic growth.

Many clinics come to Klatch because they need to acquire more patients. Acquisition is often called the first stage of a customer's journey, followed by activation, retention, referral, and revenue. These stages are proposed here as subsequent stages of a simplified marketing funnel, sometimes referred to as the AAARR framework in marketing. One of the most immediate and impactful ways to grow your clinic's revenue is to acquire new patients. Building out your clinic's growth process has three phases: High-level strategy Quarterly planning In-quarter execution Stage 1: High-Level Strategy When starting with Klatch, the first and crucial phase is defining your growth model, mapping your customer journey, and identifying your growth channels. By mapping growth metrics to the customer journey and adapting channels and tactics accordingly, clinics can create effective marketing strategies to fuel growth. Klatch's expertise in all growth channels makes us uniquely positioned to leverage our knowledge and focus in the right places to grow your clinic. When looking at acquisition for clinic growth, which is usually the biggest opportunity to grow revenue for clinics, we're focusing on the channels and tactics you use to introduce patients to your service and make them convert: SEO PPC Social Media Website optimisation (CRO)

Chiswick-Physio was founded in 2008 by Nathan Carter, an established and well-respected musculoskeletal physiotherapist with long-standing ties to the local community. Nathan has been based in the Chiswick area since 2002 and has helped countless individuals progress through their recovery back to full health. Chiswick-Physio required an optimised website as they had outgrown their existing website built with Squarespace. Klatch was tasked with managing the website migration progress to ensure an effective foundation for future growth. Below, we run through the steps we performed for their website migration, contributing to 55 new leads from organic search alone in the first full month of their website going live.

In the last ten years, healthcare marketing has undergone several significant changes that have altered its fundamental principles. According to the Journal of Medicine and Life , the dynamic evolution of life has inevitably impacted the healthcare system, making healthcare marketing an essential component of health brands. It is crucial for healthcare companies to adopt effective marketing strategies to ensure continued growth and patient success. Klatch employed an integrated digital marketing strategy that helped a healthcare client expand from one to three practices, resulting in a remarkable 366% growth in a span of just 24 months. In this article, we will outline the exact steps and processes that were taken to achieve this astounding growth. Table of Contents What is an integrated healthcare marketing strategy? What is SEO? What is PPC? What is CRO? Leverage the entirety of the search engine results page (SERP) Lower the barrier to enquiry Showcase authority, credibility and proof Create a problem-focused content strategy Make sure your pages load fast Implement effective tracking across all enquiry routes Tracking marketing return on investment Tracking organic search performance What is an integrated healthcare marketing strategy? An integrated healthcare marketing strategy optimises a healthcare clinic's online presence to get more visibility and leads from search engine users. According to Google Health Vice President David Feinberg , about 7% of Google's daily searches are health-related. With over 70,000 search queries every minute, this translates into over 1 billion daily. Effective digital marketing can help various healthcare providers across the healthcare industry. This includes healthcare professionals from doctors to chiropractors, e-commerce websites, medical software, and pharmacies. But getting more traffic is only half the story. You'll need to ensure that your website performance and conversions are optimised. That's where leveraging SEO, PPC, and CRO comes into play. What is SEO? SEO is about improving your website to rank higher on search engines like Google, making it easier for people to find your site. What is PPC? PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is an online advertising model where advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked, driving traffic to their website. What is CRO? CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimisations, is improving your website to increase the percentage of visitors who take desired actions, such as submitting a lead or booking a consultation. Leveraging these three pillars of acquisition, SEO, PPC, and CRO can help your site generate cost-effective leads quickly and sustainably, limit costs and drive leads to increase patient numbers. Leverage the entirety of the search engine results page (SERP) Search engine ads: Google Ads and Bing Ads Leveraging search engine ads enables you to tap into high-intent searches immediately. Here are some keyword examples are below: Dentist near me (301,000 searches a month, London, UK). Physical therapy near me (1,300 monthly searches, Los Angeles, California). Sciatica Treatment (27,100 searches a month in Bristol, UK). The increased high-intent traffic also enables you to start looking into CRO improvements through tools like Hotjar. Ensure an effective and holistic local SEO approach Local SEO focuses on a business's online presence to attract more customers from local searches. There are two primary ways to attract high-intent traffic through local searches: Location relevant queries Google My Business profile You can dominate search results and drive traffic by leveraging SEO and Google Ads effectively. Below, you can see how Klatch has utilised all search real estate for their client's benefit. Google Ads Google My Business Location #1 Google My Business Location #2 Organic position #1