Ugh, this hits close to home. A friend of mine works at a mid-size clinic - they spent months on a full redesign, launched it proudly, and within two weeks the director was asking why new patient calls dropped. Turned out the dev agency 301-redirected almost nothing, schema markup vanished, and half the service pages lost their title tags in migration. The site looked incredible. Google just had no idea what it was anymore. The trap is treating a hospital website like a brochure instead of a search asset. Modern ≠ optimized. For medical specifically you also have E-E-A-T to worry about - Google scrutinizes health content hard under YMYL guidelines, so author credentials, trust signals, and structured data aren’t optional extras. I stumbled onto this breakdown a while back that actually maps out the full picture for clinics and hospitals without being too agency-salesy about it: medical SEO for small medical practices - worth bookmarking before your next move. Bottom line: run a technical audit before redesign, not after. Crawl the old site, document rankings, and make your dev team sign off on an SEO checklist at launch. Boring advice, but it saves a lot of painful “why did traffic drop” meetings.
