What plastic surgery SEO means when the answer is a paragraph
Aesthetics has been one of the most competitive local search categories for a decade, and the money went into ranking pages for procedure plus city. An assistant does not rank pages. It writes a paragraph, names two to five practices, and the reader frequently never opens a results page.
So the work moves from position to legibility. Can a model say, with confidence, that you perform rhinoplasty, that you are certified by a named board, that a range exists and that recovery is a stated number of weeks. If it cannot, it says those things about a practice that made them easy to find.
This is ordinary aesthetic practice SEO, done for a different reader, plus structured data most sites in the category still do not have. The habit that has to change is holding every number back for the consultation. Price on request was fine when the goal was a click. An assistant cannot book a consultation, so a page with no range in it gives the answer nothing to quote, and it quotes a practice that published one.
The records AI checks before it names a surgeon
Board and society directories carry unusual weight here, because the underlying question is so often about credentials.
ASPS and ABPS finders
The society and board records. They are what an assistant checks when somebody asks for a board certified plastic surgeon. Confirm your entry shows the current practice, city and certification.
RealSelf
The biggest consumer source in aesthetics and heavily cited. Claim the profile, keep the procedure list current, and answer questions on the platform in your own voice.
Healthgrades
Cited across health answers. Credentials, procedures and practice details all need to match your site.
Castle Connolly
Only relevant if you hold a listing, and then only as another record to keep consistent. Never claim a recognition you do not hold.
Google Business Profile and Bing Places
Category, procedure list, hours, photos and the questions section. Bing matters because ChatGPT search runs on it.
Keep one text file with the practice name, address and phone exactly as it should appear, and paste from it every time.
The pages that answer what patients actually ask
Aesthetic search intent is unusually consistent: what does it cost, how long is recovery, am I a candidate, who is qualified, what does it look like. Build the page for each.
Procedure pages
One per procedure, with the answer in the first three sentences: who it suits, what it involves, where it is performed and under what anaesthesia.
Cost blocks
A range on every procedure page, what it includes, whether facility and anaesthesia are separate, and financing options.
Recovery pages
Day by day and week by week. Time off work, time to exercise, swelling and bruising timelines, what is normal and when to call the office.
Candidacy and risk sections
Who is not a good candidate, and what the recognised risks are. Being straight about this is what a careful patient is looking for, and it is what a model quotes as balanced.
Surgeon biographies
Training, fellowship, the certifying board named exactly, hospital privileges and memberships.
The structured data an aesthetic practice site should have
Markup will not buy a ranking. It removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is why an assistant skips a practice.
Physician or MedicalBusiness on the homepage and contact page, with name, address, phone, hours and area served.
MedicalProcedure or Service on each procedure page, so the page is machine-readable as a specific offering.
FAQPage on the cost, recovery and candidacy questions you already answer. Highest return markup on the site.
Person on each surgeon bio, with the board certification as a credential, plus BreadcrumbList and ImageObject alt text on gallery images labelled by procedure.
Validate the templates once. One broken block on a shared template quietly switches markup off across the whole site.
Reviews, compliance and what to measure
Reviews are read as text, so the words beat the average. Ask patients to name the procedure. Never confirm a patient relationship or discuss care in a public reply.
Keep outcome claims and superlatives off the site, and keep photo consent inside your own documented policy. Certification language should name the exact board and nothing looser.
Measure like a patient. Pick ten real questions, run them in a fresh logged-out session in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Mode, and record who is named. Repeat the same ten every 30 days. Keyword positions are a side view. The number that matters is how many of the ten name your practice.