More consultation bookings from people searching for the treatments you offer

How do med spa clients search on Google?

By treatment first, then by place, price and person. They search "lip filler near me", "Botox cost per unit", "laser hair removal [city]" or the name of an injector a friend mentioned. These are planned purchases: the client reads, compares providers, looks at results and checks who will be holding the needle.

Injectables are where the volume is. In the American Society of Plastic Surgeons' latest annual report, neuromodulators and hyaluronic fillers accounted for 80 percent of all minimally invasive plastic surgery procedures in 2025. If those two treatments share one thin page on your site, that is the first thing to fix.

One caution for the body contouring page. The FDA states that it has not approved injectable silicone or any injectable fillers for body contouring or enhancement. Keep filler pages and contouring pages separate, and describe each treatment only for the uses your medical director signs off on.

Instagram or Google: where should a med spa put its effort?

Both, because they catch the client at different moments. Instagram shows your work to people who are not yet looking. Search catches the person who has decided on lip filler and is choosing where to get it this month. A med spa with a strong feed and a thin website wins the first moment and hands the second to whoever built the treatment page.

The practical rule: the website is where your work lives, and Instagram is where it is shown. A reel moves down the feed and is gone. The same result, with consent, on a filler page with the injector's name and a booking button, keeps answering searches for as long as the page is up. Check where your Instagram bio link lands: a client who wants to read before booking needs a treatment page, not a bare scheduler.

The table below is a different kind of search: practices looking for marketing help. It shows how many owners and managers in each market are asking the question you are reading about now.

What are the rules for before-and-after galleries?

Get written permission for each use, show results a typical client can expect, and say what was done. A gallery is what clients look at longest, and it is easy to build without paperwork. We are not your lawyer, so take the three points below to your compliance adviser.

• Consent. HIPAA requires a covered entity to obtain an authorization for any use of protected health information for marketing, and its de-identification standard lists full face photographic images as an identifier. Whether or not your practice is a covered entity, get a signed form that names the website, social media and ads separately.
• Typical results. The FTC's endorsement guidance says that if you cannot show an endorser's experience is what people will generally achieve, the ad must make clear what the generally expected results are. A gallery of only your three best outcomes, with no context, is the risk.
• Labels. State the treatment, the area and the time between photos, and keep lighting and angle consistent. A labeled photo also gives Google and AI engines text to read; an unlabeled image gives them nothing.

Do injector credentials matter for search?

Yes, to clients and to Google. Clients search for injectors by name and by title, and the FDA itself advises people to work with a licensed health care provider who is experienced in injecting dermal fillers. Google says it gives more weight to expertise and trust on topics that affect people's health, encourages clear information about who is behind a page, and treats invented credentials as deception.

So give every provider a page: license type and state, training in the treatments they perform, how long they have performed them, and a real photo. Name your medical director and say what they supervise. The American Med Spa Association notes that laws on med spa treatments vary from state to state, so a client cannot assume who is allowed to inject.

Can a med spa rely on Google Ads instead?

Ads are an option, with more restrictions than most local businesses face. Botox and its competitors are prescription drugs, and Google's healthcare policy for US campaigns says advertisers may use prescription drug terms in ads and landing pages, but must be certified in order to keyword-target these terms. Local Services Ads are not an easy substitute: Google's US screening list includes dermatologists and plastic surgeons under health care, with license and NPI checks, and does not list med spas as a category.

The map pack matters here too. Google ranks it on relevance, distance and prominence and states there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. We do not run ads or manage Business Profiles. We build the pages that both point to.

What do med spa websites usually get wrong?

• A treatment menu instead of treatment pages. Twenty treatments in a grid, each with two sentences, match none of the searches in the table above.
• "Call for pricing" on everything. Clients search prices before they call. You do not need a full price list, but say how each treatment is priced and what a consultation costs.
• Claims nobody reviewed. "Painless", "permanent" and "no downtime" are clinical statements. Have your medical director approve the wording on every page, and cut what they will not put their name to.
• One page per city, copied. For multi-location groups, Google's spam policies list pages targeted at specific cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse. A location page needs its own providers, hours, treatments and photos.
• A rebrand that dropped the old URLs. If bookings fell after a new site, our guide to a traffic drop after a website redesign covers what to compare, and our SEO migration work is how to avoid it next time.

Do ChatGPT and AI answers recommend med spas?

They do, by name, when someone asks where to get a treatment in a city. Ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for the best place for lip filler near you and note whether you are named, and which pages the answer points to. Answers change between runs, so one check is a snapshot, not a verdict. Being named and being cited are also separate things.

Schema markup alone does not get you into those answers. Our AI search optimization work starts there, and the guide to getting your business recommended by ChatGPT explains what is known and what is not.

What we would check on your site first

1. Whether each treatment you want to grow has its own page, and whether Google has indexed it. Technical SEO covers the fixes when it has not.
2. Whether the gallery, provider pages and treatment pages link to each other, so a client can go from a result to the person who did it to a booking.
3. Where your Instagram and Business Profile links land.
4. Whether a booked consultation can be traced back to the page that produced it.

Send us your site through the free site check. You get one useful finding in writing within two business days, with no call required. If the answer is your Business Profile rather than your website, we will say so and point you to our guide on a business not showing on Google Maps.