The rule, in the form it matters for a website
Advertising prescription-only medicines to the public is not permitted in the UK. For a clinic that is not an abstract point: it means the named product behind a treatment cannot be used to promote that treatment in public-facing material, however normal it looks on competitors’ sites.
Clinics generally know this about their body copy. What catches people out is that a website advertises in more places than its paragraphs.
- The page title and the meta description, which are what appear in Google results — frequently the most widely seen text a clinic publishes.
- The URL itself. A brand name in a page address is advertising it every time the link is shared, and it is the hardest one to remove cleanly.
- Image filenames and alt text, which survive almost every content rewrite because nobody opens the media library.
- Navigation labels, breadcrumbs and the internal links pointing at the page.
- Structured data, where a treatment name is often repeated in markup the reader never sees.
At Charis all of these carried product names before the rebuild, which is entirely typical. The copy had been reviewed at some point; the infrastructure around it never had.
Why the URL is the expensive one
Changing a sentence costs nothing. Changing a URL costs you whatever that address had earned, unless the change is handled properly.
A page address that has been live for years has accumulated links, bookmarks and Google’s own record of it. Rename it without a redirect and that is discarded: the old address returns an error, anyone following an old link lands nowhere, and the new page starts from zero. This is the single most common way a well-intentioned compliance fix damages a clinic’s search position.
The correct sequence is to decide the new address, publish the new page, and redirect the old address to it permanently so that both people and search engines are carried across. On the Charis rebuild every old address Google still held was redirected to its replacement, which is why a site that changed almost every URL did not lose its position — it gained one.
If you take one practical thing from this guide: do not quietly rename a treatment page to fix a brand name. Rename it, redirect it, and keep the redirect.
Claims you cannot evidence
The second fault is quieter and harder to spot because it reads like ordinary marketing. A percentage with no source. A duration presented as typical with nothing behind it. A superlative about the practitioner or the technique. None of it looks reckless on the page and all of it is the kind of thing that reads badly in a complaint.
The test we applied rewriting the Charis treatment pages was simple: could the practitioner produce the basis for this sentence if asked. Where the answer was no, the sentence was changed to something she could stand behind — which was almost always more specific and more persuasive than the claim it replaced.
That is worth saying plainly because clinics often expect compliance to cost them persuasiveness. In practice the evidenced version is usually the better sales copy. "Results vary and most people return at three to four months" tells a nervous reader more than "long-lasting results".
The inherited blog nobody wrote
Almost every clinic site we look at carries a pile of posts on medical topics with no named author, inherited from whoever built the previous site. Charis had around sixty of them.
They are a problem twice over. On a regulated health topic, unattributed clinical content is an exposure the practice is carrying for no benefit. And it is precisely the content search engines treat as least trustworthy: for health topics Google asks explicitly about the expertise and identity behind the page, and a post by nobody has neither.
The fix is not to write more. It is to remove what cannot be stood behind, and to publish what remains under a named practitioner with her credentials attached. At Charis the practitioner is a registered critical care nurse with advanced anatomy training — genuinely differentiating, and it had never reached a page. Putting that on the treatment pages where patients actually land did more than sixty anonymous articles ever did.
Who the form is allowed to talk to
Some treatments cannot lawfully be provided to under-18s in England, and an enquiry form that does not ask is a process gap sitting in the most visible part of the site.
On the Charis build the enquiry form is gated by date of birth, so the question is answered before an enquiry exists rather than during an awkward phone call afterwards. It is a small piece of work with a disproportionate effect on how defensible the process looks.
The broader principle applies to any regulated clinic: the website is part of the clinical process, not a brochure sitting alongside it. If a question has to be asked before treatment, the form is usually the cheapest and most reliable place to ask it.
What it cost, and what it did
The reasonable worry is that doing all of this makes a clinic site worse at its job. The measured answer, on this rebuild, is the opposite.
- The old Wix site had around 120 URLs and Google had indexed a handful of them. The rebuild is 162 pages, and within a week of launch roughly four in five were indexed against one in thirty before.
- The homepage loads completely in 0.38 seconds from 29 requests. The previous homepage made 193 requests and shipped over five megabytes of JavaScript.
- Cumulative layout shift is zero — nothing moves as the page loads, which matters on a site where a disclosure must actually be read.
- The practitioner publishes her own before-and-after results through a back office built for the clinic, with no content management licence to pay for.
All four figures were read on 6 September 2026 and are published with the case study on this site. Traffic and enquiry figures are deliberately not quoted here: at the time of measurement there was not a full month behind them, and a number that young is not evidence.
What to check on your own site this afternoon
- Search your own site for the product names you use. Check the page titles, not just the paragraphs.
- Look at your treatment page URLs. If a brand name is in one, plan the rename and the redirect together.
- Open your media library and read the filenames. This is where product names survive longest.
- Read your three busiest treatment pages as a nervous first-time patient. Can you tell who would be treating you, and what they are qualified in?
- Count the posts on your site with no named author. Decide which you can stand behind and remove the rest.
- Check whether your enquiry form asks the questions your clinical process requires before, rather than after, an enquiry.
None of this is legal advice and this is a web studio rather than a regulatory consultancy. What a page must and must not say is a judgement for the practice and its indemnity provider against current guidance. What we can tell you is where on a website those decisions actually get implemented — and it is rarely only the place people look.
