Most pharmacy and clinic websites lose bookings for boring reasons. Not because the design is ugly, but because the page a patient lands on does not answer the one question they came with. Here is the 20 minute check I run on a healthcare site before touching anything else.

1. Can a patient tell what you do in five seconds? (2 minutes)

Open the homepage on your phone. Without scrolling, can you see the main services, the town and a way to book or call? If the first screen is a stock photo and a slogan, the patient is already back on Google.

What to fix: put the three services people actually search for above the fold, with the town name and a phone number that is a real tel: link.

2. Does every service have its own page? (3 minutes)

Search your own site for the services you sell. Travel vaccinations, ear wax removal, blood pressure checks, Invisalign, Botox, whatever applies. Each one needs its own URL with a clear title. One long "Our services" page with 15 headings will not rank for any of them.

Quick test: type site:yourdomain.co.uk ear wax into Google. If nothing comes back, Google cannot see a page for it either.

3. Price and booking on the page (2 minutes)

Patients compare three or four providers in a few minutes and pick the one that shows a price and a way to book. If your service page says "contact us for details", you are the one being skipped. Put the price, or a from price, and a booking button on the page itself.

4. Google Business Profile matches the website (4 minutes)

Open your Google Business Profile and check:

  • Business name is the real trading name, no keywords stuffed in
  • Address and phone match the website character for character
  • Opening hours match, including bank holidays
  • Primary category is the right one (Pharmacy, Dental clinic, Medical clinic), not something vague
  • Services are listed and link to the matching service pages

Mismatches here are the most common reason a local business sits at position 8 on the map instead of position 2.

5. Technical basics (5 minutes)

You do not need a crawler for the first pass. Check these by hand:

  • https://yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt exists and does not block the whole site
  • https://yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml exists and lists the service pages
  • Every page has a unique title under about 60 characters and a meta description that reads like a sentence
  • The site loads in under three seconds on mobile data. Run it through PageSpeed Insights and look at Largest Contentful Paint
  • No duplicate versions: http, https, www and non-www all redirect to one canonical version

For developers, a quick way to check titles across the site:

curl -sL https://yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml \ | grep -oE "<loc>[^<]+" | sed "s/<loc>//" \ | while read u do title=$(curl -sL "$u" | grep -oE "<title>[^<]+" | sed "s/<title>//") echo "$u | $title" done

If three pages share the same title, you have found this week's job.

6. Schema that matches the visible page (2 minutes)

View source and search for application/ld+json. A pharmacy or clinic should have LocalBusiness (or the more specific Pharmacy, Dentist, MedicalClinic) with the same name, address, phone and opening hours as the page shows. If the schema says one thing and the page says another, it does more harm than good. If there is no schema at all, that is a cheap win.

7. Links from sites patients trust (2 minutes)

Search Google for your business name in quotes. The results should include your Google profile, the NHS or regulator listing, a couple of local directories and your social profiles. If it is only your own site, there is nothing telling Google the business is real and local. Start with the regulator (GPhC, GDC, CQC or HIS), the NHS service finder, and two or three well known local directories. Keep the name, address and phone identical on every one.

What usually comes out of this

Most sites fail three or four of these. The fixes are not glamorous: separate service pages, prices on the page, a tidy Google profile and matching schema. That is also the work that moves a healthcare business from page two to the map pack, because the patient's question gets answered before they have to ring.

I do this work for pharmacies, dental practices and private clinics at GM SEO Services. If you run a healthcare site and want the three things holding it back, send me the URL.