Macbach
vs Healthgrades.
Healthgrades is a consumer directory you rent a profile on, one that can show your competitors' ads on your own listing until you pay to remove them. Macbach builds the search visibility, the site, and the CRM you actually own. The question is whether your budget should rent a slot or build an asset.
Based on publicly available pricing pages, published agency contracts we have reviewed, and the patterns we see when practices leave one agency for another. We do not trash competitors; we frame tradeoffs.
Your own search presence. Local rankings, an owned website, schema, and reviews on your Google profile, all of it an asset on property you control.
A profile on Healthgrades' directory. You are a listing on someone else's property, competing for attention on a page Healthgrades owns and monetizes.
None. Your site is yours. There are no competitor ads on it, by definition.
Healthgrades' own Elevated-Profile materials describe placing competing providers' promotions on a practice's free profile, with a paid upgrade to suppress them. You are paying, in effect, to keep competitors off your own listing.
Your site, domain, content, and patient data are yours, and the site stays live and yours. The rankings it earned do not evaporate when you leave. What's licensed is the managed engine on top, the forms, the live optimization, the local pages, and the CRM. Still categorically different from a directory profile, which reverts entirely.
No. The profile lives on Healthgrades. Stop paying and the upgrade ends; the listing reverts to the free, ad-bearing version. Nothing portable was built.
We build review velocity on your Google Business Profile, the reviews that actually influence local ranking and the map pack, owned by you.
Reviews accumulate on Healthgrades' site, where they drive traffic and value to Healthgrades. Useful for reputation, but not an asset you control.
A CRM that arrives full of patients, fed by the rankings, the site, and the forms we own end to end.
Directory referrals and contact actions from your profile. Real, but capped by your slot on a shared page and the competitors advertising beside you.
Healthcare only since 2007, building the search and conversion engine for the practice.
A consumer healthcare directory and review marketplace. Its product is the directory, not your growth.
Server-side validation, no PHI in analytics or ad remarketing, patient data never sent to ad platforms.
Profile and lead handling occur on Healthgrades' platform under its own policies; you do not control the data flow.
Published, scope-based fees for building and running your own engine. The spend compounds into an asset you keep.
A recurring fee to upgrade a profile you will never own. The spend stops working the day you stop paying.
You keep your site, your content, the rankings you earned, and your patient data, and we never take the site offline or withhold the data. The managed engine, the forms, live optimization, local pages, and CRM, is a service that ends with the engagement. The honest contrast is not zero-cost exit; it is keeping a real, ranking asset and your data versus a listing that reverts to nothing.
You keep nothing. The listing reverts and the visibility you rented disappears.
Where Healthgrades
actually wins.
Healthgrades is not an agency, and this is not a feature-for-feature fight. It is a large consumer directory with real search traffic, and having an accurate, claimed profile there is reasonable hygiene for almost any practice. People do search Healthgrades, and being present and correct on it has value.
The honest issue is the business model. A free Healthgrades profile can show competing providers' promotions, and the paid Elevated Profile exists, by Healthgrades' own description, to suppress those competitor placements and add features. So a meaningful part of what you would pay for is keeping rivals off a page about your own practice, on a property you will never own. When you stop paying, it reverts. Nothing portable was built.
The fit test: claim your Healthgrades profile, keep it accurate, and treat it as one of several directory listings, fine. But if the goal is patient acquisition that compounds, the dollars belong in visibility you own, local rankings, your own site, reviews on your Google profile, and a CRM that fills itself. That is the difference between renting a slot on someone else's page and building an engine on your own.
Before you ask.
- Does Healthgrades really put competitors' ads on my profile?
- Healthgrades' own Elevated-Profile marketing describes the free profile as carrying competing providers' promotions, with the paid upgrade designed to remove those competitor placements and add features. So part of what the upgrade buys is suppressing rivals on a page about your own practice. Confirm the current specifics in Healthgrades' materials, but that is the documented model.
- Should I still have a Healthgrades profile?
- Yes, claim it and keep it accurate. It is a high-traffic consumer directory and basic presence is sensible hygiene. The question is not whether to exist there; it is whether to pour your acquisition budget into a profile you will never own versus visibility you do.
- What does Macbach do that a Healthgrades upgrade cannot?
- Build an asset you actually own. We earn your local rankings, build your site on your own domain, drive reviews onto your Google profile, and feed a CRM that arrives full of patients. Your site, your rankings, and your patient data live on property you control, not on someone else's directory, so they don't vanish the way a rented listing does. The CRM and the live engine are a service we run while we work together; the owned asset underneath is yours to keep.
- Is Healthgrades a marketing agency?
- No. It is a consumer healthcare directory and review marketplace. Its product is the directory. We are a healthcare marketing engine; we build the search presence, the site, and the patient pipeline. Different category entirely, which is exactly why comparing the spend is worth doing.
Compare the shortlist
against your practice.
Ten questions, three minutes. The audit returns a real read on where the practice stands and whether Macbach is the right partner, or whether Healthgrades is.