Health content is held to a higher bar, and what you may say about a treatment changes at every border. YMYL scrutiny, medical review, regulated claims and per-market search — four things that make healthcare SEO a different job from SEO in any other category.
Search for “healthcare SEO” and most of what you find is written for clinics and practices: map listings, reviews, “doctor near me”. That is a local-search job, and a single clinic is a smaller engagement. This page is about the other job: a brand or organisation that sells, publishes or provides care across several countries, where the questions are who holds the results page for the queries that matter, and what you are allowed to put on it.
In my check of eight treatment queries in the United States, Germany and Spain, hospitals, universities, medical societies, patient groups, public bodies and insurers held 72% of the US top-10 organic slots, 62% in Germany and 53% in Spain. Manufacturer-run sites held 2%, 13% and 7%. The opening is by market and by layer of the search, not by keyword. The full breakdown is here.
In the EU, advertising prescription-only medicines to the public is prohibited, while statements about health or diseases that make no reference, even indirect, to medicinal products fall outside the definition of advertising. The United States regulates instead of prohibiting. The visible result: manufacturers hold 13% of German results through disease-information sites and 2% of American ones. SEO has to follow the regulatory status of each product in each market, and your regulatory team decides what is compliant. The law and the data are in this note.
A health page needs a named author, a named reviewer and a review date, and the review queue sets how fast you can publish. A content calendar that ignores it ships late or ships unreviewed. Plan around the queue, and make the credit machine-readable so engines can see it. More on claims, review and E-E-A-T.
In the United States, Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic was a source in every AI Overview I checked. In a robots.txt check of 94 healthcare sites, none of the 43 readable pharma and medtech files blocked an AI crawler, but Pfizer, Bayer and Teva refused my request outright: a firewall can sit in front of a permissive file. Brands that stay reachable have an opening that many health publishers have closed.
For each product or service in each market: its regulatory status, who the audience is (patient, professional or both) and what can be published, agreed with your regulatory team before any keyword work.
For your priority conditions or categories in each market, who holds the top ten and which sources the AI answers cite. The same method as my published research, run on your queries.
Which page types carry search where: product pages, disease information, professional content. One URL per market, and hreflang only between pages that are genuinely equivalent.
Authors, medical reviewers and review dates, with the markup that lets an engine read them, planned around the review calendar rather than against it.
robots.txt, the firewall and gating: what crawlers and AI engines can actually fetch, and what sits behind a login by design.
Per-market segmentation in Search Console and analytics, plus AI-visibility tracking, so you can tell in month three whether it is working rather than in month twelve.
In my day job I look after 21 web properties across nine countries — consumer health portals, professional platforms and brand sites, from 37 URLs to 3,100 — with technical audits running weekly on all of them. Not theory: nine markets, in healthcare, where YMYL scrutiny, medical review workflows and regulated claims make every content decision slower and every technical mistake more expensive.
I hold a full-time role at ALK-Abelló. To keep that relationship clean I do not take clients active in allergy immunotherapy, competitors of ALK-Abelló, or agencies and vendors serving ALK-Abelló. It is written into my terms, and consulting happens outside working hours with client data and tooling kept entirely separate.
Prices are not published: each engagement is quoted for its scope and agreed before anything starts. The terms are on the services page.