I am currently building a new website for a 37-year-old general surgeon with an impressive academic background and years of training and clinical experience within the highly structured and demanding UK surgical system.
As I usually do at the beginning of a medical website project, I sent him a long list of conditions, procedures and areas of surgical expertise that we could potentially include.
His response raised a very good question:
Should we keep all of them, or would it be better to create a much more focused website around the areas in which he wants to build his reputation?
The answer, in my view, is: both.
And understanding why has become even more important now that AI is beginning to influence the very first stage of the patient journey. Increasingly, people are turning to AI models before they search for a doctor, using them to describe symptoms, explore possible causes and understand what condition they might have and which specialist they should eventually see.
First, become synonymous with something
I have always believed in a fairly simple positioning principle:
Before you try to become everything, become known for one thing.
A strong brand owns a category in people’s minds.
A familiar Greek example is Germanos. The business originally started with batteries and became strongly associated with that category before expanding into a much broader technology and telecommunications retail brand.
The same principle works in medical branding.
If a surgeon wants to become one of the names patients immediately associate with colorectal surgery, pancreatic surgery, shoulder surgery or foot and ankle surgery, this direction needs to be unmistakable.
It should be visible in the homepage.
In the hierarchy of the navigation.
In the doctor’s biography.
In the cases and procedures that receive the greatest depth.
In the articles we publish.
In the visual identity.
And eventually, in the way Google and people understand what this doctor represents.
A medical website where every condition, procedure and specialty appears to have exactly the same importance usually communicates no particular expertise at all.
Focus creates positioning.
But this is where an important distinction needs to be made.
Positioning is not the same thing as limiting your content
A focused brand does not necessarily require a narrow website.
This is especially true in medicine.
A doctor may want colorectal surgery to be the central pillar of his professional positioning while still treating hernias, gallbladder disease, appendicitis and a number of other general surgical conditions.
If these are genuine areas of his clinical practice, there is often little strategic value in pretending that they do not exist.
From an SEO perspective, each well-developed condition or procedure page represents another legitimate opportunity for the website to appear when somebody is searching for information.
Google itself continues to recommend useful, original, people-first content with genuine expertise and a clear overall purpose. It also states that the fundamental SEO principles remain relevant to its newer generative AI search experiences.
So my approach is not to reduce a medical website to ten pages simply in order to make it appear specialised.
Instead, I create a hierarchy.
One area becomes the core.
Related areas reinforce it.
Other legitimate areas of practice remain available around it.
Not everything needs the same visual weight, the same number of articles or the same prominence in the menu.
Every medical page is also a potential entrance
This has always mattered in SEO, but I believe it matters even more today.
A patient rarely arrives at a doctor’s website through the homepage.
They may enter through an article.
A condition page.
A procedure.
A very specific question.
Sometimes, surprisingly, through a subject that the doctor himself would never have chosen as the central focus of his marketing.
I have seen this happen with my own clients.
A relatively specialised condition that was never intended to become an important commercial page begins ranking extremely well. Patients start arriving through it. Some eventually undergo surgery.
The page has effectively become a door into the practice.
And the interesting part is that the patient who enters through that door does not necessarily have the condition they initially thought they had.
That has always happened with Google.
AI is making the journey even more interesting.
AI has changed the beginning of the patient journey
Increasingly, the first search does not look like this:
“colorectal surgeon Athens.”
It looks more like this:
“I have pain in the lower left side of my abdomen, bloating and a change in bowel habits. What could it be?”
The patient describes symptoms to ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI system.
The system may return several possible explanations.
The patient explores one of them.
They then move to Google, follow a source cited by an AI search experience, or visit a website that appears relevant to what they have just learned.
Google says that users of its AI search experiences are asking longer and more complex questions, while AI Overviews and AI Mode can expose users to a broader set of web sources.
ChatGPT Search can also surface public websites in its search results, and OpenAI operates OAI-SearchBot specifically for this purpose.
For medical marketing, this changes something fundamental.
We are no longer optimising only for the diagnosis a patient already knows.
We also need to think about the path that leads them towards that diagnosis.
Imagine someone enters a website because an AI system has suggested Condition A as one possible explanation for their symptoms.
Condition A may not even be one of the surgeon’s primary areas of interest.
But the visitor reads the page.
Then another.
They like the way the information is explained.
The website looks serious and contemporary.
The doctor’s training inspires confidence.
They book an appointment.
And after proper medical evaluation, it turns out that the actual diagnosis is Condition B, one of the areas in which that surgeon has significant expertise.
Had we removed the page about Condition A because it was not strategically important enough, that patient might never have entered the website in the first place.
This is why I am becoming increasingly reluctant to confuse specialisation with unnecessary content reduction.
Of course, there is a limit
A comprehensive medical website should never become a catalogue of conditions the doctor does not actually treat.
If a surgeon tells me:
“I don’t do this. I don’t want these cases. Remove it.”
I remove it.
No SEO opportunity is worth creating the wrong expectation for a patient or misrepresenting a doctor’s practice.
Likewise, adding hundreds of superficial AI-generated pages simply to capture search traffic is not a strategy. Google explicitly warns against creating large volumes of AI-generated pages without meaningful value for users.
The goal is not more pages at any cost.
The goal is more relevant, useful entry points into a clearly positioned medical brand.
Those are two very different things.
So what do I recommend?
For the surgeon whose website prompted this article, my next question is not:
“Which pages should we delete?”
It is:
“What do you want your name to become associated with over the next five years?”
That answer will determine the main pillar of the website.
It will influence the homepage, navigation, content depth, internal linking, blog strategy and eventually our advertising strategy.
Around that central pillar, however, I would retain a carefully selected ecosystem of conditions and procedures that genuinely belong to his clinical practice.
Some will attract significant traffic.
Others may never do so.
And one seemingly secondary page may unexpectedly become the page through which dozens of future patients first discover him.
That is perfectly fine.
Because a good medical website has two jobs.
It needs to tell the market what you want to be known for.
And at the same time, it needs to leave enough doors open for the right patients to find you.
In the age of AI search, I believe we need to become much better at doing both.
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