Practice Plus Group is one of England’s largest independent healthcare providers. They deliver private, insured and NHS services across orthopaedics, endoscopy, ophthalmology, urology, gynaecology, diagnostic imaging and general surgery. Their network includes six hospitals, three surgical centres, two musculoskeletal services and two Urgent Treatment Centres.
Healthcare is one of the most competitive and heavily regulated search landscapes in the UK. Patients, referrers and insurers increasingly start their journey online. The organisations that show up first, and most credibly, in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers win the referral.
The challenge
Practice Plus Group operated in a search environment that was shifting beneath them. Traditional SEO was delivering diminishing returns as Google’s AI Overviews began answering patient queries directly on the results page. Zero-click searches were rising. Competitors were investing heavily in content. And AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity were becoming a genuine source of healthcare discovery for patients and referrers alike.
The existing digital presence had gaps across several fronts. Content was not structured for AI extraction or citation. E-E-A-T signals were inconsistent. Local SEO lacked the depth needed to compete at individual hospital and clinic level. Technical foundations needed strengthening to support the scale and complexity of a multi-site healthcare provider.
The question was not whether to invest in search. It was whether to keep optimising for yesterday’s version of it, or build a strategy that worked across traditional search, AI discovery and answer engines simultaneously.
What we did
We designed and delivered an integrated Search and AI Discovery strategy that treated SEO, GEO and AEO as one connected system. Not three separate workstreams. One strategy, built to perform across every surface where patients, referrers and insurers are now making decisions.
Search & AI Discovery strategy
- SEO – Full organic search strategy covering keyword architecture, content gaps, competitive positioning and ongoing optimisation across all service lines and locations
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) – Structured content for AI citation and extraction. Answer-first formatting, entity coverage, source attribution and trust signals designed to make Practice Plus Group the source AI systems reference when patients ask about treatments, providers and care pathways
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) – FAQ schema, featured snippet targeting and structured data to ensure Practice Plus Group content surfaces in Google’s AI Overviews, People Also Ask and voice search results
Content strategy and production
- Topic clusters – Comprehensive content architecture mapped to patient intent across every specialty, treatment and care pathway
- Content production – Condition guides, treatment pages, patient information content, FAQ hubs and service landing pages. All structured for both human readers and AI extraction
- E-E-A-T framework – Clinical review processes, author attribution, medical credentials, publication dates and source referencing to build the trust signals that both Google and AI systems require for healthcare content
On-page and technical optimisation
- On-page SEO – Title architecture, heading hierarchy, internal linking structure, meta data and content optimisation across hundreds of service and location pages
- Technical SEO – Site architecture, crawl efficiency, page speed, schema markup, XML sitemaps, canonicalisation and mobile performance for a complex multi-site healthcare platform
- Structured data – MedicalOrganisation, MedicalClinic, Physician, FAQPage and MedicalCondition schema deployed across the site to strengthen how search engines and AI systems understand and reference the content
Local SEO
- Multi-location strategy – Individual optimisation for each hospital, surgical centre and treatment centre to capture location-specific patient queries
- Google Business Profile – Optimisation, consistency and ongoing management across all locations to support local visibility and map pack performance
- Local content – Location-specific landing pages, local treatment guides and regional patient information to support both organic search and AI-generated local recommendations
