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.
Why the Map-pack decides whether your practice exists.
A mechanical breakdown of how Google assembles the three-pack in 2026, proximity, relevance, prominence, and the five GBP signals that still move rankings.
The condition page is the new hero page.
Why the homepage-first mental model is broken for healthcare, and how we structure condition and procedure pages to both rank organically and convert.
What healthcare CAC actually looks like in 2026.
Real acquisition-cost ranges across concierge, dental specialty, weight loss, and medspa, with the payback curve that separates practices making money from practices funding Google.
HIPAA-compliant paid acquisition: what’s actually allowed in 2026.
A mechanical guide to running paid acquisition for a healthcare practice without violating HIPAA, LegitScripts, or platform policy, with the four configurations we see break compliance in audits.
Review velocity beats review volume.
Why steady monthly review cadence outperforms accumulated volume in Google’s 2026 local signal, with per-vertical benchmarks and the ten-step workflow we run for MapsPRO clients.
The healthcare schema graph.
A technical guide to building a properly-linked schema graph for healthcare sites, the @id pattern, which types to use, how the AI Overviews read medical entities, and the six common mistakes that fragment the graph.
The GLP-1 marketing compliance timeline, 2022 to 2026.
Four years of policy shifts on semaglutide and tirzepatide marketing. FDA shortage status, LegitScript certification, state AG actions, ad-platform rules, and the compliance posture that actually holds up in 2026.
Concierge retention mechanics: the numbers that decide the book.
In membership-model medicine, a 10-point retention improvement matters more than a 10-point acquisition improvement. The operational stack that compounds: onboarding, quarterly touchpoints, renewal letters, member events, and the referral multiplier.
Dental specialty growth runs through the referring dentist.
Endodontic, periodontic, oral surgery, and prosthodontic practices win on the referring general-dentist relationship first and direct-to-patient marketing second. The referring-dentist website surface, communication patterns, and what actually gets referred.
Medspa membership economics: why transactional medspas plateau.
Injectables-only medspas hit a revenue ceiling set by local new-patient velocity and rising CAC. Membership-model medspas compound. The math, the structure of a well-designed medspa membership, and what breaks when the membership is priced wrong.
The State of Healthcare Marketing: 2026 benchmarks.
Paid-search CPCs, organic ranking velocity, review velocity, patient acquisition cost, LTV:CAC, HIPAA compliance, and AI Overview citation patterns across concierge, specialty, dental, weight loss, medspa, and DPC. Aggregated from the Macbach client roster, coverage period Jan 2025 through Mar 2026.
New pieces land roughly monthly.
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