Not on page one? Here's what page one is worth.

Open Search Console, go to Performance, and set the date range to the last three months. Now add a filter on Query, choose doesn't contain, and type your clinic's name. Add one more for each way people spell it. What's left is the searches from people who didn't already know you.

In the clinic sites we've opened up, two thirds or more of the Google clicks came from people typing the clinic's name. Those people were coming anyway. They'd have found you on Maps, or in a text from a mate. Counting them as SEO is how an agency gets to show you a nice green line while nothing has changed.

So the number you're looking at now is the real one. For a lot of clinics it's small. That's not bad news. It's the starting line, and it's the first number we save before we touch a site.

Still in Performance, open the Queries tab and switch on average position. Sort by impressions. Now look for rows where the position is 10 or better, the impressions are in the hundreds, and the clicks are one or none.

On an Adelaide neuro rehab clinic we went through in September, 58 searches fit that description over sixteen months. Between them they'd been shown 11,308 times. 'Rehabilitation' on its own was 879 impressions. 'Workplace rehab services' was 318. Page one, every one of them, and Google had been putting the clinic there for over a year with next to nothing to show for it.

That's the list you fix first. You're already on the page. Google already thinks you're a fair answer. The reason nobody clicks is what they see: a title that's cut off, a description that reads like a map, or a page that says the wrong thing. All of that is on your side of the fence, and it's a day's work, not a year's.

Google doesn't publish click rates by position, so the most useful public data is the Sistrix study: over 80 million searches, mobile results, first published in July 2020 and updated in July 2025. Spot one gets 28.5 percent of the clicks. Spot two gets 15.7 percent. Spot three gets 11 percent. Spot ten, the bottom of page one, gets 2.5 percent. Page two gets under one percent.

Read that again with a clinic hat on. Spot ten is worth less than a tenth of spot one. Spot three is worth less than half. So 'we're on page one' can mean you get one click in forty, and that's where most of those 58 searches were sitting.

It cuts the other way too. If your home page sits at spot two for 'physio' and your suburb, moving it to spot one nearly doubles the clicks from that search without a single extra person searching. The searches are already happening. The only thing that changes is who gets them.

Not every search is worth the same. 'Physio near me' from someone with a sore back is a new patient. 'What does a physio do' is a school project. The ones to chase have a service and a place in them, or a condition and a place, and you already show for them somewhere in the top twenty.

On that Adelaide clinic, the stroke rehab page was the one that stood out. Over sixteen months, 17,612 impressions and 184 clicks, at an average position of 24.5. Page three. In the last three months it was shown for 'stroke rehabilitation' 395 times and 'stroke physiotherapy near me' 368 times, with no clicks for either. Apart from the menu, that page had one link from inside the rest of the site. One. That's not a content problem, it's a plumbing problem, and plumbing is the kind of thing that moves.

I'll be straight with you about what moves a clinic up a page. Titles that say what the page is. One page per search instead of five fighting. Telling Google in the code that you're a clinic, with your address and hours. Pages on your own site linking to the page you want to rank. And writing one page a month that answers a question your patients ask you across the plinth.

What doesn't: buying links, link swaps, bulk directory listings and a ranking report every month. Google penalises the first three and nobody reads the fourth. If you've paid for SEO before and nothing moved, I'd bet the invoice was for the second list.