Medical practice blog: what to write and where the line with medical advice sits

A practice blog is one of the few marketing channels a practice fully owns. It answers the questions patients ask the front desk every day, it gives your service pages something to link to, and it shows a reader how your practice explains things before they ever call. It also sits in the most demanding category Google has for content, and every post is promotional material in the eyes of the FTC. Done carelessly, a blog can tell a stranger what to do about a symptom without anyone ever examining them, or make a claim about a service that the practice cannot support.

This guide covers how Google describes health content, where a practical line between information and advice sits, topic ideas that stay on the right side of it, when a post turns into an advertising claim, and a review workflow that catches problems before a post goes live. Before copying an agency fact sheet into a post, see our guide to using CDC and other government health materials.

Why Google holds health pages to a higher bar

Google’s guidance for site owners describes a set of qualities it calls E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. The same page says trust is the most important of these, that E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor, and that Google’s systems give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact people’s health, financial stability or safety. Google calls these “Your Money or Your Life” topics, or YMYL.

Most of what a medical, dental or wellness practice writes falls under the health and safety branch of YMYL. The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines define it as topics that could harm mental, physical or emotional health, or any form of safety. For informational pages on YMYL topics, both the guidelines and the helpful content page say the content should be accurate and consistent with well-established expert consensus.

Two details are worth knowing before you read too much into the guidelines. Google states that search quality raters have no control over how pages rank and that rater data is not used directly in its ranking algorithms. The guidelines describe what Google wants its systems to reward, which makes them a useful self-check, not a scoring sheet.

Information versus advice: a working line for a practice blog

The rater guidelines draw a distinction that maps well onto a practice blog. They give examples of YMYL topics where sharing personal experience is valuable, and topics where the information or advice is “best left to experts.” For sleep challenges during pregnancy, safe non-medical tips from people who have been through it are on one side, and which sleep medications are safe during pregnancy is on the other. For a serious disease, a respectful discussion of how people cope is on one side, and treatment options with their associated life expectancies are on the other.

A practice is the expert in that picture, so the question for a blog is different. It is not whether you are qualified to write about a condition, but whether a reader could take a post as a decision about their own care without being seen. The approach we use with practices is simple: a blog post explains, and a visit decides. That is a working rule for editorial decisions, not a legal standard.

• Usually fine with normal editing: how a first visit works, what to bring, how scheduling, billing and insurance work, what a procedure or test involves in general terms, what questions to ask at an appointment, and how to prepare for a visit.
• Needs a named clinician’s review before it goes live: explanations of conditions, symptoms and treatment options, anything that compares treatments, anything that mentions risks or recovery, and any post about when to seek care urgently.
• Keep off the blog: dosing, instructions to start or stop a medication, self-diagnosis checklists that end in a verdict, and promises about results. A reader should finish a post knowing what to ask, not what to take.

Every clinical post should end by pointing the reader to a real next step: book a visit, call the office, or, for an emergency, call 911. That keeps the post in the role of explaining and sends the decision to a clinician.

Topic ideas that stay on the right side of the line

The best practice blog topics come from your own phone and front desk, because those are the questions people actually have. A few that hold up well for most practices:

1. What to expect at a first visit. Who they will meet, how long it takes, what forms to fill in and what happens after. This is the post that most often turns a nervous reader into a booked appointment.
2. How to prepare for a specific appointment or procedure. Practical logistics your clinicians already give patients, written once and reviewed once.
3. Insurance, billing and payment, explained plainly. Which plans you take, what a referral is, how self-pay works. Keep any prices accurate and current; our guide to advertising cash prices covers the FTC rules on price claims.
4. Questions to ask at an appointment. A list a reader can bring to any clinician. It helps patients and positions your team as people who welcome questions.
5. A plain-language glossary of the terms your specialty uses. Clinician reviewed, with no claims about which option is best for whom.
6. Meet the team. Real people, real credentials, written with their approval. This doubles as the author information Google’s guidance asks for.
7. How your practice handles privacy, telehealth or after-hours calls. Operational posts that answer real questions without touching clinical advice.
8. Answers to the questions your front desk hears most. Ask your staff to keep a list for a month. Each repeated question is a post.

Illustration: a chiropractic practice could publish “What happens at your first chiropractic visit” with normal editing. A post titled “Is your back pain a herniated disc? Take our quiz” would need a clinician’s review at minimum, and a quiz that ends in a diagnosis does not belong on the blog at all.

When a blog post becomes an advertising claim

A practice blog is marketing, and the FTC treats it that way. The FTC staff Health Products Compliance Guidance defines advertising broadly, including statements in promotional materials, on the internet and in other digital content, and in social media, and says promotional information distributed through any of these means must comply with the same truth-in-advertising principles as traditional ads. The guidance is written for health-related products, so a practice selling services should read it as the FTC staff view of how health claims are judged, not a rule written for clinics. It also states it does not have the force or effect of law.

Three points from that guidance apply directly to blog writing:

• Net impression counts, not individual words. FTC law focuses on what reasonable consumers understand the material to communicate, looking at the whole piece, including the text, images and charts, not on the marketer’s intent.
• Soft words do not qualify a claim. The guidance says it is not enough to say a product “may” have the claimed benefit or “helps” achieve it, and that consumers are likely to read words such as “promising” or “preliminary” as positive attributes rather than as disclaimers.
• Health benefit claims need strong support. Claims about the health benefits or safety of health-related products require competent and reliable scientific evidence, which the guidance says will generally need to be randomized, controlled human clinical testing.

In practice, this means a post that explains a treatment in general terms reads very differently from a post that says your clinic’s version of it works. If a sentence describes an outcome a patient can expect from your service, treat it as an ad claim and ask whether you could support it. Our guide to integrative medicine marketing claims goes deeper on substantiation.

Bylines, reviewers and expert claims

Google’s helpful content page asks whether it is self-evident who authored the content, whether pages carry a byline where one might be expected, and whether bylines lead to more information about the author. It strongly encourages accurate authorship information. It also says fabricating creator profiles, such as AI-generated headshots, made-up names or false credentials used to make content look as if human experts wrote it, is a form of deception and a signal of a low-quality page.

The FTC Endorsement Guides reach the same place from the advertising side. Under 16 CFR 255.3, when an ad represents that the endorser is an expert, the endorser’s qualifications must in fact give them that expertise, and the endorsement must be supported by an actual exercise of it. A “medically reviewed by” line is that kind of representation.

• Only name a reviewer who actually reviewed the post, and keep a record of who reviewed which version and when.
• Match the reviewer to the topic. A dentist reviewing a dental post is a different claim from a dentist reviewing a post on sleep medicine.
• Link the byline to a real bio with the credentials the person actually holds.
• Update the review date only when someone reviews again. Changing the date without a review makes the line untrue.

If a post was paid for, co-written with a vendor, or recommends a product the practice earns money from, 16 CFR 255.5 applies: a connection that might materially affect the weight or credibility of an endorsement, and that the audience would not reasonably expect, must be disclosed clearly and conspicuously.

AI drafts and publishing at volume

Google’s position is that appropriate use of AI or automation is not against its guidelines, and its helpful content page suggests disclosing how automation was used where a reader might reasonably ask how content was created. Its spam policies define scaled content abuse as generating many pages for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings rather than helping users, and list using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users as one example. The helpful content page also describes automatically generated text without manual oversight or curation as little to no effort.

For a practice, the risk is not the tool. It is publishing clinical text that no clinician has read. A draft from any source, a person or a model, should go through the same review before it goes live, and a blog that publishes a few reviewed posts a month is in a better position than one that publishes many unreviewed ones.

Patient stories need authorization first

A post built around a patient’s story, photo or results is a different kind of content. If it identifies someone as your patient, it is protected health information, and using it to promote the practice generally needs the patient’s written authorization under HIPAA before you publish. Our guides to HIPAA marketing rules and patient testimonials and before-and-after photos cover the authorization and the FTC rules on testimonials.

A review workflow before every post

1. Approve the topic. Someone at the practice confirms the question is real and the post fits the practice’s services.
2. Draft with sources. Every clinical statement links to a primary source, such as a government health agency or a professional society, or is a clinician’s own explanation.
3. Clinician review. A named clinician checks accuracy and consistency with current expert consensus, and signs off on the version that will publish.
4. Marketing claim check. Read the post as an ad: any outcome promises, comparisons, prices or testimonials? Remove or support them.
5. Privacy check. No patient details, photos or stories without a signed authorization on file.
6. Publish with a byline and a review date. Link the byline to a real bio, and record who reviewed which version.
7. Schedule a recheck. Clinical posts go out of date. Put a review date on the calendar and update or retire posts that no longer match practice or guidance.

In our healthcare SEO work, blog posts follow that workflow: we draft from sources and the practice’s own answers, a clinician at the practice reviews clinical content, and the practice approves every post before it goes live. We do not give legal or medical advice. For other guides on marketing rules for practices, see our healthcare marketing rules guide.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
• Google Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines (PDF, September 11, 2025)
• Google Search: Spam policies for Google web search (scaled content abuse)
• Google Search Central blog: Google Search’s guidance about AI-generated content (February 8, 2023)
• FTC: Health Products Compliance Guidance (December 2022)
• 16 CFR 255.3: Expert endorsements
• 16 CFR 255.5: Disclosure of material connections

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