Dermatology & Med Spa Marketing
The Med Spa Marketing Agency
For Dermatology and Aesthetics.
Skin checks and Mohs run on insurance and referrals. Injectables, lasers and facials run on self-pay patients comparing prices on their phones. We market the two sides on their own terms, so the cosmetic chairs fill without crowding out the medical schedule.
368,000
Monthly searches for “dermatologist near me”
90,500
Monthly searches for “botox near me”
40,500
Monthly searches for “med spa near me”
Source: Semrush US database, monthly searches and keyword difficulty, October 2026
Where Aesthetic Marketing Stalls
One Practice, Two Patients, One Generic Marketing Plan.
A dermatology group with a cosmetic wing, or a med spa with a medical director, is serving a patient who is referred and insured and a patient who is shopping and paying cash. Most marketing plans pick one voice and lose the other.
The medical side is booked out. The cosmetic chairs sit empty on Tuesdays.
Skin cancer screening fills itself through referrals, while injector and laser time is the revenue that marketing actually moves. Campaigns that promote “comprehensive dermatology” spend budget on the side of the business that never needed it.
Your Botox page could belong to any spa in town.
Experienced injectors, natural results, a relaxing space. When every page in the market makes the same three promises, Google and AI answers fall back on whoever lists a unit price, an injector name and a membership rate.
You are trying to outrank the whole country for “dermatologist.”
At a keyword difficulty of 75, “dermatologist near me” is one of the hardest health terms there is. Treatment and city searches like microneedling at KD 8 or laser hair removal at KD 16 are far more winnable and closer to a booking.
Ad accounts built around brand names that cannot be targeted.
Botox, Dysport and Xeomin are prescription products. Campaigns copied from a retail playbook either get disapproved or end up bidding on vague terms, and the spa concludes that Google Ads does not work.
Members are treated like first-time visitors.
Most aesthetic revenue comes back on a schedule: tox every few months, laser in a series, facials monthly. If reporting only counts new leads, nobody sees whether rebooking and membership pages are paying for the search program.
Reviews are collected with gift cards and hope.
Incentives tied to a positive review, selective review requests and buried complaints are exactly what federal rules now penalize. A review program has to be built so every patient gets the same ask.
What We Do
Med Spa and Dermatology Marketing, Channel by Channel
Six disciplines, each split between the cosmetic patient who pays out of pocket and the medical patient who arrives insured.
How Aesthetic Search Works
What Makes Dermatology and Med Spa Marketing Different
Self-pay demand, prescription products and state scope-of-practice rules shape this market more than any ranking factor. These are the specifics we plan around.
Ads Policy
Neuromodulator Names Need Certification to Target
Google’s October 2025 Healthcare and Medicines update lets US advertisers mention prescription drug terms in ads and landing pages, but keyword targeting those terms requires certification. For a spa, that is the difference between bidding on the name patients type and bidding around it, so we sort out certification before the campaign is built.
Payers
Insurance Pays for One Side Only
Skin cancer screening, Mohs surgery and treatment of skin disease are billed to insurance and often arrive by referral. Treatments done for appearance are self-pay. The two sides need different keywords, different landing pages and different success measures, even under one roof.
Scope
Who Injects Is a State Question
Injections are treated as the practice of medicine in every state, but the rules on who may inject and how they must be supervised vary from state to state. Treatment pages should name the provider and their license, which is both the safer copy and the detail that separates your page from the spa down the street.
Credentials
Board Certified Means Something Specific
A board-certified dermatologist has passed the American Board of Dermatology exams after four years of postgraduate training, one general year and three of dermatology residency. When a practice has that credential, it belongs near the top of every page, because cosmetic shoppers rarely know who is behind a med spa brand.
Reviews
Federal Rules Now Cover the Review Ask
The FTC’s rule banning fake reviews took effect on October 21, 2024. It covers fake and bought reviews and suppressing negative ones, and it lets the FTC seek civil penalties for knowing violations. A review program that asks every patient the same way, with no reward tied to a good rating, is the safe default.
AI Search
Treatment Questions Are Moving to Assistants
The American Med Spa Association counted 10,488 US med spas in 2023, and BrightLocal found the share of consumers using AI tools for local recommendations rose from 6% to 45% in a year. In a market that crowded, the spa an assistant names is the one with specific, checkable facts on its pages.
Patient Search Demand
The Searches Skin and Aesthetic Patients Run
National monthly searches and keyword difficulty for treatment and specialist queries. The medical head term is brutal. Most treatment searches are not.
Medical Dermatology
- dermatologist near me368,000/mo · KD 75
- skin cancer screening near me2,400/mo · KD 24
- mohs surgery near me1,000/mo · KD 40
Injectables
- botox near me90,500/mo · KD 19
- med spa near me40,500/mo · KD 59
Laser & Body
- laser hair removal near me60,500/mo · KD 16
- coolsculpting near me18,100/mo · KD 14
Skin Treatments
- hydrafacial near me27,100/mo · KD 21
- microneedling near me27,100/mo · KD 8
Source: Semrush US database, monthly searches and keyword difficulty, October 2026
How We Work
How a Dermatology or Med Spa Engagement Runs
- 01
Split medical and cosmetic demand
We list every treatment you offer, mark which side of the business it sits on, and rank them by margin, capacity and how winnable the local search is. The plan targets the treatments with open chairs, not the ones with a waitlist.
- 02
Name the people and the prices
Provider bios with license and credential, treatment pages with the price basis and membership rate, and Business Profiles whose categories match what you sell. These are the facts that let search engines and assistants tell you apart.
- 03
Launch compliant paid search
Treatment campaigns go live while pages earn rankings, with prescription product terms handled under certification and imagery checked against health ad rules before anything ships.
- 04
Report on bookings and rebookings
Calls, forms and online bookings tracked by treatment and location, plus how many patients return. No patient health details go to ad platforms.
Working with Bryan Passanisi
“Bryan makes things happen and has an incredible attention to detail on all of the small SEO tweaks that add up to big results.”
Jean Kim Hahn, Senior Director Global Marketing, MiniMed
“Bryan takes the time to educate other business partners on SEO. Because of that, more integrated branded ideas were able to be executed.”
David Nielsen, Lead SEO, Genentech
“Bryan has an unbelievable drive to excel at everything he does. He thinks through all the approaches, identifies those most likely to yield the most impressive results, executes quickly, analyzes the results, communicates the insights and builds upon them.”
Mike Berry, Ex Adobe, eBay, PayPal
The Expert
Bryan Passanisi
Founder, Brown Bear Digital
Bryan Passanisi is establishing himself as one of the sharpest emerging voices at the intersection of SEO and AI search. With 15 years of hands-on experience building and scaling search programs, he brings a depth of knowledge most agencies simply can't match — and a relentless focus on what's actually moving results right now.
As search evolves around AI Overviews, generative engines, and large language models, Bryan is at the front of it — testing, building, and translating what's changing into strategy that compounds. He understands the full search landscape, from technical SEO and entity optimization to GEO and LLM visibility, and he founded Brown Bear to give businesses direct access to that expertise without the agency overhead.
- 15 years across SEO, AI search, and paid strategy
- Deep expertise in GEO, entity SEO, and AI Overviews
- Direct access — no account managers, no hand-offs
Awards
- 2025Semrush AI/GEO Award Winner
- 2022Digiday Awards, Best Search Campaign Winner
Common Questions
Dermatologists & Med Spas, Answered
A med spa marketing agency gets an aesthetic clinic found and booked by people searching for a treatment near them. At Brown Bear that means treatment and city pages, Business Profile work, paid search organized by treatment, review programs that follow federal rules, and AI search work so assistants describe your clinic accurately when someone asks where to go.
You can mention it, but targeting it takes more. Under Google’s October 2025 Healthcare and Medicines update, US advertisers can use prescription drug terms in ads and on landing pages without certification, but must be certified to keyword target those terms. We either set up that certification or build the campaign around treatment terms that do not need it.
Usually the services need separate pages, campaigns and reporting, even if they share a website. The medical patient is often insured and referred, while the cosmetic patient pays out of pocket and compares prices. Whether you need two sites or two Business Profiles depends on how the spa is set up, which our med spa SEO guide walks through in detail.
We ask every patient the same way, at the same point after their visit, with no reward tied to a positive rating and no filtering of who gets asked. The FTC rule that took effect in October 2024 targets fake reviews and the suppression of negative ones, so a consistent, unfiltered ask is the safest program and usually the most productive one.
The med spa SEO guide on our blog is the do-it-yourself version: site setup, Business Profiles, treatment and membership pages, and what to track. This page explains how Brown Bear runs that work as an agency engagement for dermatology practices and med spas, adding paid search, conversion work and reporting.
Our confirmed medical client work centers on plastic surgery practices, where we run SEO, AI search and paid search. Their cosmetic, self-pay patients search much like med spa patients do, and we have published our own med spa research. We will show you that research applied to your market rather than borrowed case studies.
Further Reading
Aesthetic and Medical Search Research
- Med Spa SEO: How to Rank Injectables and Memberships→Our guide to site setup, Business Profiles, treatment pages and memberships for spas that want to stand apart.
- Plastic Surgery Reviews: Generation, Response, and SEO Impact→How cosmetic practices ask for reviews, answer them, and what they do for local rankings.
- What AI Actually Reads Before It Recommends Your Practice→The third-party sites that shape what ChatGPT and AI Overviews say about a practice.
- What Is YMYL SEO?→Why Google holds health pages to a higher standard and what that means for treatment copy.
See Which Treatments You Can Win
Tell us your treatments, locations and where your schedule has gaps. We will show you which searches in your market are open and what it would take to fill those chairs.