How can an urgent care center audit its own marketing?

An urgent care self-audit covers nine areas: Google Business Profile, website, search, paid ads, social, reviews, lead handling and speed-to-lead, tracking, and reporting. Audit each location separately. Group-level numbers hide the clinic with wrong hours, a broken check-in link or unanswered calls, and that clinic is usually where visits are leaking.

Set aside a few hours per location. Work from a phone, not a desktop, because most urgent care searches happen on mobile and often in a hurry. Search the way a patient would ("urgent care near me", "x-ray open now", "stitches walk-in") from near each clinic. Then work through the table below and note anything that fails.

Audit search and ads by looking at what a nearby patient actually sees, then at how your ad accounts are set up. Check map and organic results for core and service searches near each clinic. In the ads account, check ownership, schedules against clinic hours, location targeting, landing pages and whether conversions are measured in a HIPAA-safe way.

Search checks

• Search core terms and service terms from near each location on a phone.
• Note whether each clinic shows in the map results for its own neighborhood.
• Check that service pages appear for searches like DOT physicals, sports physicals or X-ray.
• Check that your location pages, not a directory listing, appear for your clinic's name.
• Look at how your center appears in AI answers. Our guide on urgent care in ChatGPT and AI search explains what to check.

Paid ads checks

• Ownership: the Google Ads and Meta accounts should be in your center's name, with billing on your card.
• Schedules: ads should pause when a clinic closes. Paying for clicks at 2 a.m. for a clinic that opens at 8 a.m. wastes budget.
• Targeting: each campaign should target the area around its clinic.
• Landing pages: each ad should land on the right location or service page, not the homepage.
• Policy: Google and Meta restrict health-related targeting. Check that audiences and ad copy do not imply knowledge of a person's health condition.
• Claims: check that ad copy about wait times, prices and services is accurate. If you promote DOT physicals, FMCSA says DOT medical exams must be done by a medical examiner listed on its National Registry, so confirm your examiners are listed.

Social checks

Look for recent posts, accurate hours, seasonal updates and nothing that could identify a patient. Social does not have to be busy. It does have to be accurate and safe.

Check what tracking runs on which pages, and whether your reports show calls and check-ins per location. Tracking should measure results without sending patient data to ad platforms. Reporting should let you see which location and channel produced each call or check-in, every week or month, not only clicks and impressions.

Tracking checks

• List every tag on your site using your tag manager or a browser tool. Note which pages each one fires on.
• Confirm no advertising pixels or session recording run on check-in, intake, portal or payment pages. The HHS Office for Civil Rights guidance on online tracking technologies was partly vacated for public pages in June 2024, but authenticated pages are still covered, and booking flows remain risky.
• Check that any vendor touching patient data, including call tracking with recordings, is covered by a BAA.
• Confirm each location has its own tracked number on its profile and location page.
• Check that check-in completions are counted in a HIPAA-safe way, such as server-side counts without patient details.

Our HIPAA-safe website tracking guide explains safe setups. Confirm specifics with your counsel.

Reporting checks

• Can you see calls, check-ins and profile actions by location?
• Can you see cost per call or check-in for each campaign?
• Can you see employer leads separately, if you sell occupational medicine?
• Do you have live access to the raw data, or only a monthly PDF?

The urgent care KPIs guide lists the numbers worth tracking.