Dermatology SEO: Who Ranks for Dermatologist Searches in 20 Cities, and Where Your Practice Can Win

Search "dermatologist" plus any big city and you might expect a page full of Zocdoc listings, med spas and national chains. We pulled the top 10 Google results for that search in 20 cities and found something else. Dermatology practices held 76% of the results, and med spas held none. The private equity platforms that have bought practices across the country did not hold the #1 spot in any of the 20. This is Brown Bear's guide to dermatology SEO, built around where a practice can actually win.

It draws on that October 2026 Semrush pull, 34 searches in all. It also draws on what Bryan Passanisi, founder of Brown Bear Digital, has seen running SEO and AI search programs for plastic surgery and other medical practices. Where a point is our own observation rather than measured data, we say so.

Dermatology SEO here covers both medical and surgical dermatology, like skin checks, Mohs surgery and eczema care, and cosmetic dermatology performed by or under a board-certified dermatologist. If your business is a stand-alone med spa, our med spa SEO guide is the better fit. This one is written for the physician-led practice.

If you own an independent practice, you want to know whether the national group that just opened across town will bury you in search. If you're a Mohs surgeon, you want surgical patients to find you, not your partner's Botox page. And if you run marketing for a group with several offices, you need a plan that works the same way in every city.

By the end, you'll know which searches to chase first and how to set up Business Profiles and pages for a practice with several providers. You'll know what makes a page trustworthy to search engines and AI answers, and what this work costs. The longer payoff is a schedule filled with the patients your dermatologists want to see, from searches you can keep winning.

We cover it in four parts: the page-one map, the core work on listings, pages and trust, the AI search layer, and the business side of cost, timing and hiring. Start with what dermatology SEO is, and what it isn't.

What Dermatology SEO Is, and Where It Stops

Dermatology SEO is the work of getting a dermatology practice found, and then chosen, by patients searching Google and AI tools for a dermatologist, a procedure or help with a skin condition. It covers the map pack, the organic results and the AI answers above both. The goal is booked visits for the care your practice wants to grow, not raw traffic.

Two things make dermatology different from most medical specialties. First, one practice often serves two kinds of patient. One is insured, often referred, and needs a skin check or Mohs surgery. The other pays out of pocket and compares prices on laser treatments. Second, the competition is unusual. National groups backed by private equity have bought practices in many large metros, and med spas compete for the cosmetic side. A plan that treats all of that as one market will spend money in the wrong places.

The Dermatology Page-One Map: Who Holds Google's Top 10 in 20 Cities

Across 20 "dermatologist" plus city searches, practice websites held 76% of the top 10 results, health systems and academic medical centers held 18%, and directories and media held 6%. Med spas held none. On condition searches like "eczema treatment," the picture flips: health systems, medical reference sites, skincare brands and drug-price sites held 35 of 38 results, and no practice reached the top three.

Here is how we got those numbers. On October 18, 2026, we pulled the top 10 organic results from Semrush for "dermatologist" in Houston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Miami, New York, San Diego, Austin, Boston, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Orlando, Tampa, Charlotte and Nashville. We added four Mohs surgery searches, three cosmetic dermatologist searches, four condition searches and three cost searches. Then we sorted every result: health system, private equity platform, other practice, a single dermatologist's own named site, med spa, directory or media, and everything else. It is the same method as our orthopedic SEO study. The map pack and ads are not counted. We only labeled a group as private equity backed when that backing is publicly reported, so that count is a floor.

We call the result the Dermatology Page-One Map:

Three findings stood out. First, where a city has a major academic medical center, it often holds #1: Mount Sinai in New York, Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, Mass General Brigham in Boston, Vanderbilt in Nashville and five more. In the other 11 cities, a practice held #1. Second, directories barely show up. Zocdoc, Yelp, city magazines and the AAD's Find a Dermatologist tool held 11 of 196 results. Third, 55 of the 196 results were practice sites with the city right in the domain name, like dallasassocderm.com or charlottedermatology.com. Treat that as a pattern worth knowing, not a reason to rename your practice.

Picture a three-dermatologist practice in Tampa that has spent a year trying to rank for "dermatologist tampa" and is stuck on page two. The map shows Tampa General already at #2 and a page one made up mostly of established local practices, so the head term is a long climb. A Mohs surgery page built around the practice's fellowship-trained surgeon faces a much smaller field, and a plain-language Mohs cost page faces mostly financing and price sites. Same budget, better odds.

Independent Practices vs Private Equity Groups: What the Rankings Show

Private equity platforms showed up in 13 of the 20 cities, but they held only 6 of the 60 top-three spots and none of the #1 spots in general dermatologist searches. U.S. Dermatology Partners appeared in four cities and Epiphany Dermatology in four, alongside Pinnacle, Schweiger, Forefront, West Dermatology, Sanova and Academic Alliance in Dermatology. Their best result was in Phoenix, where two platforms took #2 and #3. The one place a platform held #1 was a Mohs search: U.S. Dermatology Partners for "mohs surgeon houston."

Scale alone did not win these searches. Our read is that Google ranks the page that best matches "dermatologist" in that city. The local practice at #1 usually brings years of reviews, a local name and pages written about its own doctors. A platform page that reads like a template for any city has less of that to show.

What you should do depends on which side you're on. If you're an independent practice, your edge is depth in one market. That means a page for every provider, a location page for every office, and reviews that name your doctors. Do not try to match a platform's footprint. If you're part of a private equity platform or a group that has acquired several practices, keep each acquired practice's local reviews and history working for you. Give every office its own location page and Business Profile. If you fold a well-ranked local site into a national template, redirect every old page to its new match first. Our guide for practices with more than one office covers that structure in depth.

Why Condition Searches Like Eczema Treatment Are the Wrong First Target

Condition searches bring huge volume. "Acne treatment" draws about 1.5 million searches a month, "eczema treatment" about 90,500 and "psoriasis treatment" about 60,500. But they also carry Semrush difficulty scores of 63 to 81. In our pull, health systems like Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic filled 10 of 38 results. Reference sites like the American Academy of Dermatology, the NHS and Medscape, plus brand and drug-price sites, filled 25 more. Practices held 3 of 38 results and none of the top three.

This matches what Bryan sees in plastic surgery. Big authority sites take over the definition questions, in both the results and the AI answers. The searches that still open the door for a practice are the local ones and the cost ones, because Google and AI tools read local intent into them. The dermatology data lines up with that split.

So treat condition content as support for your service pages. Put a short, clear answer to "what is eczema" on your eczema treatment page, written or reviewed by your dermatologist. Then spend the page on what only you can say: how your practice treats it, which providers see it, whether you offer biologics or phototherapy, and how insurance usually handles it.

Google Business Profiles for a Practice With Several Providers

Local search is where most dermatology visits start, and the Google Business Profile drives the map pack. For a practice with several providers, the rules matter. Under Google's guidelines for representing your business, each public-facing practitioner can have a profile of their own, titled with only the practitioner's name. The office keeps its own separate profile. A solo dermatologist at a branded office shares one profile, named "Practice: Doctor Name."

Two rules catch dermatology practices in particular. A practitioner should not have several profiles for different specialties, so your Mohs surgeon gets one profile, not one for surgery and one for cosmetics. And a department that works as its own business, with a separate entrance and a different primary category, can have its own profile. That is the test for whether a cosmetic suite or in-house med spa gets a listing of its own.

Picture a practice with four dermatologists, two physician assistants and a cosmetic suite, all under one office profile. Every review and every "near me" match lands on one listing that says "Dermatologist" and nothing else. A profile for each public-facing provider, with reviews from that provider's own patients, gives the practice more chances in the map pack. It also gives the Mohs surgeon's specialty a place to show.

Keep the basics clean across every listing: the same practice name, address and phone number on Google, Apple, Bing, Healthgrades, Zocdoc and your site. In Bryan's AI visibility audits, odd variations of a practice's name, address or phone number are the most common actual error he finds, and the easiest to fix.

Service Pages That Separate Medical, Surgical and Cosmetic Dermatology

The pages that win local dermatology searches are specific. One page per service, written for the city you serve, with the provider who does it, what the visit involves and how to book. "Mohs surgery in Plano" beats a general "Skin Cancer" page, because it matches what the patient typed.

Medical and cosmetic pages answer different questions, so build them differently. Each page should answer, near the top:

• Who the treatment is for, and when to see someone else first
• Which of your providers performs it, with their credentials
• What the visit or recovery looks like
• For medical care, how insurance and referrals usually work. For cosmetic care, the price basis and any package or membership rate
• How to book, with the phone number and form near the top

The cost line is the one practices skip, and the Page-One Map says it is the biggest gap. "Mohs surgery cost" draws about 880 searches a month at a Semrush difficulty of 17, and "dermatologist visit cost" about 720 at a difficulty of 6. In our pull, two practice pages led the Mohs cost search. For visit cost, CareCredit, Sidecar Health and a Reddit thread held the top three, with practice pages at #4 through #7. A practice that explains its real self-pay rates, insurance steps and what drives the price is competing with financing sites, not with Mayo Clinic.

Say you run a skin cancer practice outside Atlanta. You add a page called "What Mohs Surgery Costs at Our Practice." It covers what Medicare and the main local plans usually pay, what a patient owes out of pocket, why some cases take more stages than others, and how to get a written estimate. It is the only page in that search written by the people who do the surgery. It also gives AI tools a local, specific answer to quote when a patient asks what Mohs surgery costs near them.

Provider Pages: Board Certification Is a Ranking Asset

Sites named for a single dermatologist made up 4% of the general dermatologist results, but 16% of the Mohs results and 13% of the cosmetic results. In Los Angeles, three of the top five Mohs results and the #1 cosmetic result were single-doctor sites. Patients searching for a procedure often search for the person who performs it.

That does not mean every dermatologist needs a separate website. It means every provider needs a page that could stand on its own:

• Board certification, stated the way the certifying board states it, plus any fellowship such as Mohs surgery
• The conditions and procedures they focus on, linked to the matching service pages
• Reviews from their own patients, and a real photo
• For physician assistants and nurse practitioners, their license and the dermatologist they work with

Board certification is checkable, which makes it worth stating precisely. Patients can confirm it with the American Board of Dermatology, which also runs a separate subspecialty certification in Micrographic Dermatologic Surgery, the subspecialty that covers Mohs surgery. A page that says "board-certified dermatologist and fellowship-trained Mohs surgeon" gives patients, Google and AI tools a fact they can verify.

Here the answer depends on how your practice is set up. If you're a solo dermatologist or a two-doctor practice, your name is your strongest brand. A deep provider page or personal site can rank on its own, as the Los Angeles results show. If you're a group of six or more providers, keep everyone on the practice domain with a full page and a Business Profile each. That way the group's authority lifts every page instead of splitting across a dozen thin sites.

Reviews, YMYL Standards and HIPAA in Review Replies

Dermatology is what Google calls YMYL content, short for "Your Money or Your Life," a health topic where bad advice can hurt someone. Google says its systems give extra weight to experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust on these topics, and that trust counts most. On a dermatology site, that means the dermatologist's name and credentials on clinical pages, a reviewed-by line with a date, and claims that match medical consensus.

Reviews help the map pack and give patients and AI tools a read on how the practice treats people. Ask every patient the same way, at the same point after the visit, and ask for reviews that name the provider and the care, so a review says "Dr. Patel" and "my skin check," not just "nice office." The FTC's rule on fake reviews took effect in October 2024. It covers buying reviews and suppressing negative ones, so a gift card for a five-star review is off the table.

Respond to reviews, but never confirm that the reviewer is a patient or mention any treatment. HHS has fined dental practices for disclosing patient details in replies to online reviews. The same HIPAA rule applies to dermatology, where a reply about "your mole removal" is a disclosure.

Technical SEO for Dermatology Websites

A technically sound dermatology site loads fast on a phone, shows its main content without waiting for scripts, and has one clean URL per page. Before-and-after galleries, booking widgets and chat tools can be weak spots, because they add JavaScript and can delay the content a patient came for.

It matters more now because many AI crawlers read the raw page without running scripts. Vercel's late 2024 analysis found that OpenAI's crawlers, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot did not render JavaScript at all. Bryan's view is that schema markup is worth keeping tidy, but it is not the big lever for AI search. The bigger levers are crawlability and pages that are easy to pull apart: a heading, a direct answer, then the detail.

Dermatology SEO in AI Search

AI Overviews and chatbots like ChatGPT now answer many of the questions patients used to type into Google. Google even shows an AI Overview for "dermatology seo" itself. For a practice, the goal is to be named when a patient asks who treats their problem nearby.

The most common finding in Bryan's AI visibility reviews is not wrong information. It is that the care a practice wants to be known for is buried, so AI tools describe a generalist. A practice with a fellowship-trained Mohs surgeon whose homepage leads with "comprehensive skin care for the whole family" will be described exactly that way. Lead each provider page and service page with the specialty, in plain words, and repeat it across your listings.

The other surprise for most owners is how much the third-party sites AI tools read shape what those tools say about a practice: review sites, directories, local news and hospital affiliation pages. So the AI layer is not a separate project. It is the same listings, reviews and specific pages above, kept consistent everywhere a patient or a crawler might look.

Dermatology SEO for Practices With a Med Spa, Cosmetic Dermatologists and Mohs Surgeons

Dermatology SEO is for any physician-led practice that wants patients to find its providers before they find someone else's. Before you pick a plan, look at which searches your patients run, because the Page-One Map shows the competition changes with the kind of care.

For dermatology practices that also run a med spa

Med spas did not appear once in 264 local dermatologist, Mohs and cosmetic dermatologist results. That suggests the spa competition happens on treatment searches like Botox, laser hair removal and HydraFacial, not on "dermatologist." Keep the dermatologist at the front of your medical and cosmetic dermatology pages. Build the spa's treatment, pricing and membership pages as their own section, using the playbook in our med spa guide. The two sides then stop competing with each other for the same searches.

For cosmetic dermatologists competing with academic centers

In New York, NYU Langone, Weill Cornell and Mount Sinai held three of the top four results for "cosmetic dermatologist nyc." In Los Angeles, the #1 result was one dermatologist's own site, and a beauty publication ranked on page one. Cosmetic dermatologist terms carry difficulty scores of 58 to 62. The winning move is the one the Los Angeles result shows: put the board-certified dermatologist's name, training and results at the center, and build treatment pages under that name.

For Mohs surgeons whose patients search by procedure and city

Mohs searches were the most practice-friendly lane in the study. For "mohs surgery dallas," practices held 9 of 10 results, led by mohsdallas.com, and only UT Southwestern represented a health system. In Houston, U.S. Dermatology Partners held #1 and MD Anderson #3, and in New York the academic centers held five of nine. Volumes are small, from 50 to 140 searches a month per city, but these searchers are usually looking for a surgeon, not for information. Give your Mohs surgeon a page, a cost page and a Business Profile of their own before anything else.

What Dermatology SEO Costs and How Long It Takes

Published pricing varies widely. One dermatology-focused vendor lists local SEO packages from about $899 to $2,499 a month and puts mid-level programs from traditional agencies at $2,000 to $5,000. Where you land depends on how many offices and providers you have and how crowded your market is.

The timeline depends on which lane you're in. If you're going after Mohs, provider and cost pages, the competition is thinner and you can see movement within a quarter. If you need "dermatologist" in a major city, those terms carry difficulty scores of 42 to 71. "Dermatologist near me" alone draws about 368,000 searches a month at a difficulty of 75. That is a year-long project, and anyone who promises it in 90 days is guessing.

Bryan's rule of thumb from plastic surgery is that a $1,500 to $2,000 monthly retainer over a year costs about the same as two procedures that came in through organic search. Dermatology is different, because a new medical patient and a new cosmetic patient are worth very different amounts. Run your own numbers below.

How to Choose a Dermatology SEO Agency

A good dermatology SEO agency can show you where your practice stands on the searches that matter to you. It will also tell you which ones it won't chase. A weak one sends a keyword list and a monthly traffic chart.

Before you sign, ask for four things:

1. A page-one review of your top five services in your city, showing who ranks and why.
2. A Business Profile plan: one per office, one per public-facing provider, with categories.
3. How they report booked appointments by service, medical and cosmetic separately, not just traffic.
4. Who writes clinical pages, and how your dermatologists review and sign off.

If a proposal treats your Mohs practice the same way it treats a med spa, that tells you what you need to know.

Grow Your Dermatology Practice With Brown Bear

Dermatology SEO pays off when you pick the right searches: the providers, procedures and cost questions where a practice can win page one, rather than the condition terms the reference sites already own. Brown Bear builds that map for medical practices, then does the listing, page and AI search work that follows from it. If you want to see where your practice stands, start with our marketing for dermatology practices.