Articles by
Vince Schwellenbach.
Founder of Macbach. Healthcare-exclusive since 2007. Writing here on the practical, mechanical side of growing a medical practice, the parts most agencies either get wrong or prefer not to explain clearly.
Six pillars. More landing monthly.
How to get patients from ChatGPT.
Patients now ask ChatGPT and AI Overviews to find a doctor, and trust the answer they get back. Here is how a practice becomes the source those engines cite, and why the window is open now.
Announcing the 2026 Macbach Medspa Class.
The Macbach Lists recognition program, refined for medspa. Ten categories, two named anchor honorees so far, and the rest under editorial review for the full Class of 2026. Public methodology, with our active medspa client recused.
Announcing the 2026 Macbach Concierge Class.
Macbach's first annual editorial recognition list. Ten categories of concierge medicine, four named anchor honorees so far, and a public methodology with our active concierge clients recused.
The healthcare marketing glossary.
Thirty terms a doctor needs to read a marketing report or agency proposal without nodding along. CAC, LTV, payback, schema, BAA, and the rest, in plain English with the benchmarks that matter.
The 2026 Concierge Medicine Benchmark Report.
The deepest published read on US concierge medicine in 2026. Eleven sections on market structure, membership and acquisition economics, retention, and AI Overview citation patterns, from our first-party book and cross-checked against public sources.
Vibe coding by doctors: great for prototypes, dangerous for production.
AI coding agents let a non-engineer physician ship a working healthcare site in a weekend. The speed is real. So is the HIPAA exposure, the schema gap, and the bugs that pass type-check and fail on live patients.
The honest healthcare marketing agency comparison.
Macbach measured against four competitors on twelve operational dimensions: vertical focus, named-author authority, schema, transparent pricing, named clients, and AI Overview visibility.
The HIPAA marketing field guide for medical practices.
The eight HIPAA-adjacent surfaces a marketing program touches, from BAAs and tracking pixels to reviews, patient photos, and AI-generated content. Each one carries primary-source citations to HHS OCR and the CFR.
Why the Map-pack decides whether your practice exists.
How Google assembles the three-pack in 2026: proximity, relevance, prominence, and the five Google Business Profile signals that still move rankings.
The condition page is the new hero page.
Why the homepage-first model is broken for healthcare, and how we build condition and procedure pages that rank organically and convert.
What healthcare CAC actually looks like in 2026.
Real acquisition-cost ranges across concierge, dental, weight loss, and medspa, and the payback curve that separates practices making money from practices funding Google.
HIPAA-compliant paid acquisition: what’s actually allowed in 2026.
How to run paid acquisition for a practice without breaking HIPAA, LegitScript, or platform policy, plus the four setups we see fail compliance audits.
Review velocity beats review volume.
Why a steady monthly review cadence beats accumulated volume in Google’s 2026 local signal, with per-vertical benchmarks and the workflow we run for Ground clients.
The healthcare schema graph.
How to build a properly linked schema graph for a healthcare site: the @id pattern, the right types, how AI Overviews read medical entities, and the six mistakes that fragment it.
The GLP-1 marketing compliance timeline, 2022 to 2026.
Four years of policy shifts on semaglutide and tirzepatide marketing, from FDA shortage status to state actions and ad-platform rules, and the compliance posture that holds up in 2026.
Concierge retention mechanics: the numbers that decide the book.
In membership medicine, a 10-point retention gain beats a 10-point acquisition gain. The operational stack that compounds: onboarding, quarterly touchpoints, renewals, member events, and referrals.
Dental specialty growth runs through the referring dentist.
Endodontic, periodontic, oral surgery, and prosthodontic practices win on the referring-dentist relationship first, direct-to-patient marketing second. The referral surface, the communication patterns, and what actually gets referred.
The dental practice growth glossary.
Twenty-five terms a dental practice owner needs to read a marketing report or partnership pitch without nodding along. CAC, LTV, case acceptance, production per chair, recall, and the rest, in plain English.
The honest dental marketing agency comparison.
Macbach measured against four of the most-named dental agencies on twelve dimensions: specialty depth, schema, DDS reviewer attribution, referring-dentist capability, transparent pricing, and client tenure.
Dental CAC by specialty: what acquisition actually costs in 2026.
CAC, case value, LTV, and payback across general, ortho, endo, perio, oral surgery, cosmetic, and pediatric dentistry, and the LTV-to-CAC ratio that separates compounding practices from practices funding Google.
Medspa membership economics: why transactional medspas plateau.
Injectables-only medspas hit a ceiling set by local demand and rising CAC. Membership medspas compound. The math, the structure of a membership that works, and what breaks when it is priced wrong.
The State of Healthcare Marketing: 2026 benchmarks.
Paid-search CPCs, ranking velocity, acquisition cost, LTV:CAC, and AI Overview citation patterns across concierge, specialty, dental, weight loss, medspa, and DPC. Aggregated from our client roster, Jan 2025 through Mar 2026.
New pieces land roughly monthly.
Subscribe via RSS, or email Vince to be added to the list. Four to six pieces a year. No newsletters, no campaigns, just the pieces when they publish.