Estelle Digital · Reference
Methodology.
How each diagnostic scores your practice: what we measure, how we weight it, where the data comes from, and what we will not claim.
Why this page exists
The strongest trust signal a marketing tool can offer a healthcare practice is not a logo wall. It is the rubric.
Most marketing diagnostics are scored against generic web heuristics, then dressed up with healthcare iconography. Ours are scored against the way clinical organizations actually get read on the open web: as a network of provider, service, and location entities, evaluated by search engines and language models that increasingly look for structure, attribution, and clinical clarity.
We publish the methodology because we will be asked to defend it, and because the alternative is asking practice owners to trust a black-box score from an unknown vendor. That is a fair request from any 55-year-old dentist evaluating us between patients, and it is one we want to answer up front.
The methodology has limits. An automated audit cannot evaluate clinical quality, internal operations, case acceptance, or the experience a patient has at the front desk. It can tell you what a search engine, an answer engine, or a curious prospect will see when they look you up. That is a useful, narrow question, and it is the question these tools answer.
Until our paying-client outcomes are public and permissioned, this page is the trust signal. It will evolve as the rubric does, and the revision date below tracks that.
The rubric, by diagnostic
How each tool scores.
Healthcare SEO Grader
A category-aware audit of healthcare-specific search signals. The grader weighs entity clarity (provider, practice, services) above generic on-page heuristics, because a healthcare site is read by search engines as a network of medical entities, not a stack of marketing pages.
What we measure
- Service-page entity coverage and internal linking depth
- Provider schema, NAP consistency, and credential signals
- Topical authority versus the local competitive set
- Core Web Vitals on the templates that drive new-patient traffic
- Indexation hygiene (canonical, hreflang, robots, sitemaps)
What we don't
Off-page link quality and domain trust are summarized at a high level only; full backlink work is a paid engagement.
Run this diagnosticHIPAA Exposure Report
A read of public-facing privacy exposure. The checker inspects what a third party would see if they crawled your domain: tracking, intake forms, scripts, disclosures. It does not access protected health information and does not certify HIPAA compliance.
What we measure
- Third-party tracking and analytics on PHI-adjacent pages
- Intake-form transport, fields, and consent disclosures
- Cookie behavior on appointment, contact, and patient-portal flows
- Privacy-policy presence, scope, and last-revised hygiene
- TLS configuration and mixed-content warnings
What we don't
Internal HIPAA controls, BAAs, server-side handling, and PHI workflows. This is a public-surface read, not a compliance audit.
Run this diagnosticPatient Acquisition ROI Report
A practice-economics model that ties marketing spend to patient lifetime value. You provide a small number of inputs from your practice management system; the model returns a defensible cost-per-acquired-patient and break-even horizon under each acquisition channel.
What we measure
- Average revenue per new patient and visit cadence
- Channel-attributed cost per lead and lead-to-patient conversion
- Payback window under conservative and optimistic assumptions
- Sensitivity to changes in close rate and average ticket
What we don't
Operational capacity, provider productivity, and case acceptance — these gate revenue but sit downstream of marketing.
Run this diagnosticLocal Visibility Report
A measure of how visible the practice is in local intent searches. The analyzer tracks Google Business presence, citation consistency across the healthcare-relevant directory set, and map-pack standing within a defined service-area radius.
What we measure
- Google Business profile completeness and category fit
- Map-pack rank for high-intent service queries by ZIP
- Citation parity across the healthcare directory set
- Review velocity, recency, and response cadence
- Service-area coverage versus your stated catchment
What we don't
Reputation sentiment beyond review structure, and competitor pricing or offers.
Run this diagnosticMedical Schema Generator
A generator that produces validated JSON-LD for the medical entities that matter: organization, provider, services, and FAQ. Output is checked against schema.org constraints and Google's medical-content guidance before it is returned.
What we measure
- MedicalOrganization, Physician, and MedicalProcedure entities
- Cross-entity links (services offered, providers employed, locations)
- FAQ and HowTo for procedure-detail and consent pages
- AggregateRating only where structured review data exists
What we don't
Whether the generated schema will rank — schema is a clarity signal, not a ranking factor on its own.
Run this diagnosticAI Search Readiness Report
A read of how cleanly an AI search engine can resolve, cite, and quote your practice. The grader scores entity clarity, claim attribution, and machine-readable structure against the patterns large language models prefer when surfacing healthcare information.
What we measure
- Provider and procedure entity disambiguation
- Citable claim density and source attribution
- Structured data alignment with answer-engine prompts
- Conversational query coverage versus traditional keyword coverage
What we don't
Specific model behavior across providers — answer engines change weekly, so the grader scores readiness, not predicted outcomes.
Run this diagnostic
Figure 01 · Sample report
Practice A · Illustrative
Combined diagnostic — Practice A, Pacific Northwest.
A four-provider dental practice with mature local presence and a recent site rebuild. Six diagnostics run; eleven categories scored. Identifying details redacted; numbers are illustrative.
- Local visibility
- Map-pack & GBP
- 62 / 100
- Ranks 4–7 for the three highest-intent procedures in core service area.
- Local visibility
- Citation parity
- 71 / 100
- Healthcare directory set 78% complete; NAP consistent across 14 of 18.
- Site performance
- Core Web Vitals
- 81 / 100
- LCP within target on procedure templates; CLS marginal on provider pages.
- On-page SEO
- Entity coverage
- 58 / 100
- Service pages thin; provider entities not linked to procedures performed.
- On-page SEO
- Internal linking
- 64 / 100
- Hub pages exist but funnel traffic away from converting templates.
- HIPAA exposure
- Public-surface
- 44 / 100
- Third-party tracking present on intake form; consent banner does not gate analytics.
- HIPAA exposure
- Disclosures
- 73 / 100
- Privacy policy present and current; cookie policy missing.
- AI search readiness
- Entity clarity
- 39 / 100
- Provider entities not machine-resolvable; procedures not linked to providers.
- AI search readiness
- Citable claims
- 41 / 100
- Procedure pages narrative; few attributable claims with sources.
- Schema coverage
- Medical entities
- 52 / 100
- MedicalOrganization present; Physician and MedicalProcedure entities missing.
- Patient-economics
- Acquisition ROI
- 67 / 100
- Cost-per-acquired-patient defensible; payback within 3 visits at average ticket.
“The practice ranks for branded queries but not for the three procedures driving most revenue. The fix is content and entity work; paid spend without that scaffolding will overpay.”
Notes
The methodology evolves as the rubric is sharpened and as the healthcare search surface changes. Material changes are noted in the revision date.
Last revised: May 2026. Questions, corrections, or requests for the underlying weights: hello@estelledigitaldesigns.com.