Answer engine optimisation for skin clinics.

The medical half competes with the NHS and Mayo Clinic

Someone searching what does eczema look like is asking a question the NHS, Mayo Clinic and DermNet have already answered thoroughly, and an AI system reaching for a source will usually reach for one of those.

That is worth accepting rather than fighting. A local clinic will not outrank a national health body on a definition, and building the page that tries is the most common wasted effort in dermatology content.

What a clinic can own is the part those bodies do not cover: what happens at the appointment, how the condition is assessed here, what the treatment pathway looks like in this country, and when to see someone rather than wait.

The cosmetic half is where the rules bite

Cosmetic searches carry the commercial value. What a treatment involves, how long results last, what it should cost. Those are commercial questions and an assistant answers them in prose.

But in the UK, Botox is a prescription-only medicine and cannot be named in advertising directed at the public, which means the treatment patients search for by name is the one word the page may not use to sell.

Australia adds its own layer. AHPRA now publishes separate guidelines for advertising higher risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures, in effect from 2 September 2025, on top of the general advertising requirements.

So cosmetic AEO is a writing problem before it is a technical one. The page has to answer the question well enough to be quoted while staying inside a rule the AI system has no knowledge of.

Keeping the two halves apart

We separate medical and cosmetic content structurally, because they are different audiences, different rules and different competitors.

It also stops one side contaminating the other. A medical page that drifts into cosmetic promotion is harder to quote and easier to complain about, and a cosmetic page that borrows medical authority is the specific pattern regulators look for.

The structural argument is set out in our guide on whether a dermatology clinic should separate its cosmetic and medical pages.

What we actually change

We rewrite the answerable questions so the answer is in the first paragraph and survives quotation.

We remove the claims that cannot be substantiated, which on a cosmetic page is usually more than a clinic expects.

We add the material a national health body will never publish, which is how it works here, with this team, at this clinic.