Two vocabularies, one practice owner in the middle.Audiology and search terms, defined

Frequency runs along the horizontal axis in octave steps from 250 Hz to 8 kHz; hearing level runs down the vertical axis in decibels. Right ear is plotted with a circle in red, left ear with a cross in blue, and an aided result with an A.

The convention that matters for anyone writing about it: down is worse. Age-related loss characteristically slopes away at the high-frequency end first, which is why an audiogram of presbycusis looks like a line falling to the right.

The most common form of hearing loss and the one most of a practice's patients have. It accumulates slowly enough that the person adapts continuously and rarely notices a moment of change, which is why the delay between onset and seeking help is measured in years.

Because it takes the high frequencies first, the early experience is not quietness but unclarity — consonants disappear before vowels, so speech is audible and not intelligible. That distinction is the single most useful thing to explain on a website, because it matches what people actually search for.

Extremely common, frequently associated with hearing loss, and the subject of the most urgent and most emotionally loaded searches in the category. People search at night, using noise words rather than hearing words.

Commercially it is one of the best opportunities available to an independent practice: real demand, high intent, no retail competition, and locally almost nobody has written a serious page about it.

Videonystagmography measures eye movements to assess vestibular function. Patients arrive at this through dizziness rather than hearing, and they search using sensations — the room spinning when I roll over, dizzy when I turn my head — rather than diagnoses.

It sits between audiology, ENT and physical therapy, which means patients are often bounced between them. A practice that can explain the pathway clearly captures a market with very little competition for it.

Low ticket, unglamorous, and consistently undervalued. Someone with an occluded ear searches with genuine urgency, is seen quickly, experiences dramatic relief, and is then sitting in your chair having a conversation about hearing they assumed was gone.

Retail cannot provide it. Most practices offer it and have no page for it.

A probe microphone measures what the device is actually delivering at the eardrum, against the target for that person's loss. Ear canals differ enough that an unverified fitting can be substantially off target without anyone knowing.

It is the clearest concrete differentiator between a fitted device and a self-fitted one, most patients have never heard of it, and one plain sentence explaining it does more persuasive work than any claim about years of experience.

Sold without a prescription or a professional fitting, aimed at perceived mild-to-moderate loss in adults. The category took the bottom of the market, most of which was not converting for practices anyway.

Its more useful effect was to create a large audience who bought a device, got a poor result because nobody measured their hearing, and are now searching — a warm, self-qualified group that has already accepted the problem is real.

Common through Medicare Advantage plans and insurers. They deliver volume at compressed margins, and a practice's mix between administrator patients and private-pay patients substantially determines what a new patient is actually worth.

It matters to marketing because a lead is not a lead: an enquiry that arrives through a benefit is a different financial event from one that arrives directly, and reporting that does not separate them is misleading.

Bundled pricing quotes one number covering the hardware and the follow-up care. Unbundled pricing separates them, which makes the professional service visible as a thing being paid for.

It also makes a practice's price look lower next to retail on the device line while making the care explicit, which changes how a pricing page should be written.

Usually three results. For near me searches it takes the overwhelming share of clicks, which makes it the single most valuable position in local search.

It is computed from where the searcher is standing, so a practice does not have one position in it — it has a different position in every neighbourhood, and checking from the office always flatters.

A grid of coordinates across the catchment, each queried for the same terms, rendered as a map of positions. It turns a single misleading number into a picture of where a practice is actually visible.

It is the only honest way to report local performance for a business whose customers will not travel far, and it routinely reveals that a practice ranking first at its own pin is invisible four miles away.

Relevance is how well the profile and site match the query, and is the part most under your control through categories, services and page content. Distance is proximity to the searcher and is almost entirely outside it. Prominence is reputation: reviews, citations, links and general notability.

Because distance is so heavily weighted in this category, the practical strategy is to maximise relevance and prominence for the area you are genuinely close to, rather than to chase towns you have no presence in.

Old suite numbers, a pre-merger practice name, a tracking number published where the main number should be — each variation weakens the association between the listing and the business.

In healthcare this is worse than in most industries because provider directories and insurer listings propagate old data widely and are slow to correct.

Related to search optimisation but measured differently: the answer is a shortlist of two or three names with no second page, so the outcome is binary rather than graded.

What moves it is entity consistency, third-party corroboration, reviews, and content written as clear liftable statements rather than hedged marketing prose.

Assembled from every source that mentions you: your site, your profile, directories, associations, licensing bodies, press. A practice with conflicting names, addresses or provider lists across those sources has a blurry entity, and blurry entities get named less often by assistants.

Entity work is unglamorous cleanup, and it is most of what separates practices that get cited from practices that do not.

For a practice the useful types are MedicalBusiness or MedicalClinic for the organisation, MedicalWebPage for clinical content, Physician or Person for providers, and FAQPage for genuine question blocks.

It does not make a page rank by itself. It makes a page legible, which matters more for assistants than it ever did for search results.

Health topics are held to a higher standard because bad information causes harm. In practice this means clinical content should be attributed to a named, credentialed clinician, reviewed, dated, and corroborated by sources that are not you.

It is the main structural reason we will not publish clinical content under a provider's name without that provider reading it — quite apart from it being their reputation.

Someone searching hearing aid prices may be comparison shopping, may be trying to find out whether they can afford care at all, or may be checking whether an over-the-counter device is a reasonable substitute. One page cannot serve all three well.

In this category intent maps roughly onto a journey from reassurance-seeking to purchase, and the highest-volume terms sit at the wrong end of it for an independent practice.

Most common with location pages that differ only by town name, and with service pages that were built faster than they were thought about.

The fix is usually consolidation rather than more content: one strong page beats two similar ones, and deleting or merging is frequently the highest-return action available.

Essential in a category whose customers call rather than fill in forms. Done through unique numbers per channel, with dynamic insertion swapping the displayed number based on how the visitor arrived.

Two cautions: implemented carelessly it can display one number while a screen reader announces another, and recording consent law varies by state and is the practice's responsibility as the party being called.

Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift. They are genuine ranking inputs and they are frequently oversold as the main event.

For this audience the practical value is not the ranking effect but the experience: layout shift that moves a button as an older user reaches for it is a conversion problem before it is a metric.

Covers contrast, keyboard operability, target size, focus visibility, captions and more. AA is the level referenced by most regulation and most demand letters.

For a hearing practice it is unusual in being simultaneously the compliance floor and the highest-return conversion work available, because the audience it protects is the entire audience.