A specialist opening their own practice has spent a decade becoming excellent at one thing and roughly zero time on the question of how anybody finds out. The instinct is to treat it as advertising: a website, a logo, some ads. That is the wrong model, and in Switzerland it is also the one most likely to get a complaint filed against you.
Medicine is a regulated profession with rules about what you may claim, and the demand you actually want does not arrive through advertising anyway. It arrives through referral and through search: someone in pain typing a symptom, or a GP deciding who to send them to. Those two channels reward completely different work from a campaign.
This article is for the doctor opening a practice of two to eight people, and for the practice manager of a group practice of fifteen who has been told to "do something about the website". It covers what you may say, how patients now look for a doctor, how local search decides who appears, the sequence that produces patients, and the intake problem that wastes most of the effort.
What can a Swiss doctor actually say in public?
Factual information about qualifications, specialisation, location, services and how to book. The Medical Professions Act allows advertising only if it is objective, meets a public need and is neither misleading nor intrusive. That rules out comparative claims, success rates presented as promises and anything that reads like a promised cure. Write every sentence as if a colleague or the cantonal authority will ask you to evidence it.
The rule is in Article 40 of the Medical Professions Act, among the professional duties of anyone practising a university medical profession under their own professional responsibility. The same Act, in Article 34, requires a licence from the canton where you practise, and the cantonal health authorities supervise those duties. Members of the FMH, the Swiss medical association, also have its code of professional conduct to follow, and its rules on information and advertising are worth reading alongside the statute.
The Unfair Competition Act applies on top. Article 3 treats misleading information about your own services, and titles that suggest qualifications you do not hold, as unfair, and Article 9 lets a competitor ask a court to stop it. A claim you cannot substantiate is actionable by a colleague down the road, not only by a regulator.
If you ever mention a product rather than a service, a third set of rules applies. Swissmedic points to Articles 31 and 32 of the Therapeutic Products Act and the Medicinal Products Advertising Ordinance as the legal basis, and Article 32 of the Act makes advertising prescription-only medicines to the general public unlawful. An aesthetics or dermatology page that names a prescription-only product brand is the usual trap.
The practical effect is that most of the playbook a general agency will hand you is unusable. Testimonials about outcomes, before-and-after comparisons, superlatives and "leading specialist" phrasing all sit somewhere between risky and prohibited. This is not a constraint to work around. It is a filter that removes the tactics that were never going to work and leaves the ones that do.
How do patients in Switzerland look for a doctor now?
Mostly online, and increasingly all the way to the booking. In the Federal Statistical Office's 2025 survey of internet use, 70 percent of residents aged 15 to 88 said they had searched for health information online in the previous three months. More than a third had booked a doctor's or hospital appointment through a practice or hospital website or app, over three times the share in 2017.
The BFS table shows the same pattern in every age group. Among people aged 60 and over, 59 percent searched for health information online in 2025 and 24 percent booked an appointment online. Your older patients are not a reason to skip the website; they are using it.
The other half of the search is verification. Patients and referring doctors can look you up in MedReg, the federal register of medical professions, which publishes diplomas, specialisations, cantonal licences and the work addresses of licence holders. Make sure your entry is correct before you open, and that the name, specialisation and address on your website match it exactly. A mismatch between the register, your website and your listing is the kind of small doubt that sends a cautious GP to a colleague instead.
Why specificity beats visibility
The reflex is to want to be seen by everyone. For a clinical practice that is both impossible and undesirable. A neurosurgeon does not need traffic; they need the small number of people each month who have a specific condition and are within travelling distance.
That changes the unit of work. Instead of one page that says what you do, you need one page per condition you actually treat, each written to answer the question a patient or a referring GP types. "Trigeminal neuralgia treatment Zurich" is a query. "Excellence in neurosurgical care" is not a query, and nothing you do will make it one.
Search engines are explicit that health is held to a higher bar. Google's guidance on helpful, reliable content says its systems give even more weight to signals of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust for topics that could significantly affect people's health. For a practice, that means named doctors, their real qualifications, and pages that say plainly who wrote them and when they were last reviewed. Marking the page up with the Physician type from schema.org, with your medical specialty and address, helps machines read the same facts a patient reads.
The same logic applies to the referral side. A GP deciding where to send a patient is checking whether you handle that specific presentation, what your intake process is, and how quickly you can see someone. A page that answers those three things does more for referral volume than any amount of brand work.
What does algorithmic positioning mean for a clinic?
It means deciding what to publish based on measured demand rather than on what feels important. You pull the real search volumes and phrasings for every condition you treat, rank them by volume against how well the existing results answer them, and write in that order. Then you measure which pages produce enquiries and let that reorder the queue.
It is not a growth-hacking tactic and there is nothing automated about the writing. The algorithmic part is the prioritisation: an explicit, repeatable rule for what gets published next, replacing the usual method of publishing whatever the busiest person had an opinion about. The scoring rule and its limits are set out in building a brand with an algorithm instead of a budget.
For a practice with limited time, that ordering is most of the value. In the launches we have seen, twelve pages written in the right sequence outperform forty written in no sequence, and cost a fraction of the effort.
How does Google decide which practice to show nearby?
By relevance, distance and prominence. Google states that local results depend mainly on how well a business profile matches the search, how far the business is from the person searching, and how well known it is, including links and reviews. It also states that nobody can pay for a better local ranking. A complete, verified profile with accurate hours is therefore the cheapest step a new practice can take.
Google's local ranking guidance lists the practical steps: verify the location, give a complete and accurate address, category and hours, keep special opening hours current, and respond to reviews. Each of those is clerical work a medical assistant can do in an afternoon, and none of it touches the professional rules on advertising.
Reviews need more care in medicine than in retail. Our advice is not to solicit reviews actively until you have checked the position of your cantonal medical society, because patient recommendations sit awkwardly with the professional rules on advertising. Reply to reviews factually and briefly, and never confirm in a reply that the reviewer is a patient: professional secrecy applies in public too.
What actually produces patients, and how fast
The channels differ enormously in both speed and durability, and most practices pick the fast one and then wonder why it stops when they stop paying.
| Channel | Time to first effect | What it costs when you stop | Regulatory exposure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Referring GPs and colleagues | Weeks to months | Nothing; relationships persist | Low |
| Condition pages ranked in search | Three to nine months | Nothing; pages keep ranking | Low if factual |
| Business profile and directories | Days to weeks | Little; listing remains | Low |
| Paid search | Days | Everything; volume stops with the budget | Medium; ad copy is scrutinised |
| General brand advertising | Slow and hard to attribute | Everything | Highest |
Timings are typical of what we have observed in Swiss practice launches and vary with competition in the canton and the specificity of the condition.
The sequencing that follows is unglamorous. Get the practice listed and the intake process working. Write the condition pages in demand order. Speak to referrers directly. Use paid search only to cover the gap while the pages mature, and treat it as rent, not as an asset.
How long before a new practice sees referrals?
Direct referrals can start within weeks, because they depend on conversations rather than on indexing. Search-driven enquiries take longer: a new domain with no history typically needs several months before condition pages rank for anything competitive. Practices that plan for both timelines at once stay solvent through the gap. Practices that plan only for search run out of patience in month three.
The part nobody budgets for
Intake. A practice can rank first, get the call, and lose the patient because nobody answers the phone between 12:00 and 14:00 and the contact form goes to an address the practice manager checks weekly.
This is the least interesting problem and the most common one. Before spending anything on being found, make the path from "found you" to "booked" work: one number that is answered, one form that reaches a person, and a stated response time you actually meet. Everything upstream is wasted if this leaks. It is the same pattern we describe for digital transformation in the first 90 days: the constraint is almost never the technology.
Patient data makes this stricter than in other sectors. The Federal Act on Data Protection classes data relating to health as sensitive personal data, and requires you to inform people when you collect personal data, including through a web form. Ask only for what you need to book, say who receives it, and keep the form off any tool that sends data abroad without your knowledge. The wider obligations are in our revised FADP checklist, and the basic controls for a small practice's systems in cybersecurity priorities for Swiss SMEs. If you are considering automated triage or an assistant on top of that, the boundaries are narrower still; we set them out in what AI is actually allowed to do in Swiss healthcare.
What does this cost a small practice?
Mostly time, and less money than an agency proposal suggests. In the practice launches we have seen, a solo specialist needs a few days to set up the register entry, the business profile and the intake process, then roughly one day per condition page, written with someone who knows search. A group practice of fifteen spends more on coordination than on writing, because every page needs a doctor's sign-off.
What changes with size is who owns the work. In a practice of two or three, the doctor writes and the medical assistant owns intake. At fifteen, a practice manager owns the queue of pages, the profile and the response times, and each doctor owns the accuracy of their own pages. These are typical observations, not a quote; they depend on how many conditions you treat and how competitive your canton is.
Where this fits
Most of the work above is not marketing. It is digital transformation at the scale of a small practice: making the process from first search to first appointment observable and reliable, then improving the parts that measurably leak. The clinical and regulatory context that shapes it is covered across our healthcare work, and the way to put the whole plan on one page is in how to write a digital strategy for an SME.
A practice of three people does not need a strategy document. It needs to know which twelve pages to write, in what order, and who answers the phone.
Sources
- Fedlex — Medical Professions Act, SR 811.11, Art. 34 cantonal licence and Art. 40 professional duties, German text
- Fedlex — Federal Act against Unfair Competition, SR 241, Art. 3 and Art. 9
- Fedlex — Therapeutic Products Act, SR 812.21, Art. 31 and 32 on advertising medicinal products
- Swissmedic — Advertising of medicinal products, legal basis and guidance
- Fedlex — Federal Act on Data Protection, SR 235.1, Art. 5 sensitive personal data and Art. 19 duty to inform
- Federal Office of Public Health — MedReg register of medical professions, what the public register shows
- Federal Statistical Office — Individuals and online activities, STAT-TAB, Omnibus ICT survey 2017–2025
- Google Business Profile Help — Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, relevance, distance and prominence
- Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, E-E-A-T and health topics
- Schema.org — Physician, structured data type for a physician's practice
Related reading
- AI in Swiss healthcare: what is allowed, and where it actually helps
- Can you build a brand with an algorithm instead of a budget?
- Digital transformation for an SME: what to do in the first 90 days
- The revised FADP: what Swiss companies actually have to do
- Digital transformation consulting
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