A new direct-care dermatology practice. A market dominated by multi-location groups with a decade of head start. Twelve months later, appointment requests up 9,750 percent. Today, the apex page ranks number one for the head term.
When Modern Dermatology opened in South Tampa, the practice had everything that matters in a healthcare brand. A board-certified founder, Dr. Alexandra Grob. A direct-care model that no other dermatology practice in Tampa Bay was running. A finished, modern interior. What it did not have was visibility. Six organic visits per month. Domain Rating 0.2. Zero top-three keyword rankings. The site was a Squarespace template, fine for a soft launch, not built for what came next.
The competitive picture was real. PHDermatology runs nine offices across Tampa Bay with a Domain Rating of 31 and more than four hundred referring domains. Dermatology Associates of Tampa Bay was already holding the number two position for the head term. A brand-new practice does not earn search share by being clinically excellent alone. It earns share by being structurally findable first, then by giving the right visitor a reason to choose differently.
We built Modern Dermatology a fully custom platform on Next.js, hosted on Vercel, with full HSTS and edge caching. The result is one of the most technically complete board-certified Tampa dermatology sites in the market. One hundred and nineteen indexable pages. Every service, every condition, every comparison guide, and thirty-six South Tampa neighborhood landing pages. JSON-LD on every route, Organization, MedicalBusiness, MedicalClinic, two Physician profiles, MedicalWebPage, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, AggregateRating, validated to schema.org spec, not just to Google’s lenient parser.
The content layer goes wider than the typical practice site. Service pages with answer-first FAQ blocks. Comparison guides for the four highest-stake decisions a patient makes (Mohs versus excision, fillers versus biostimulators, Botox versus Dysport, peel versus microneedling versus laser). An editorial Insights journal authored by Dr. Grob and Dr. Alexander Dane personally. Decision tools (Find Your Treatment, Skin Cancer Check, Cosmetic Concierge). Every page links into a relevance graph, not a navigation tree, so authority flows where it should.
The local depth is the real lever. PHDermatology has one office page that reaches South Tampa. Modern Dermatology has thirty-six neighborhood pages: Hyde Park, SoHo, Davis Islands, Bayshore Beautiful, Beach Park, Palma Ceia, every named submarket. Each one renders unique local context. This is how a single-office practice can outpage a nine-office competitor in geographic breadth, and the rankings reflect it. Number four for “hyde park dermatology.” Number eight for “soho dermatology,” with positions still climbing as link equity matures.
Most importantly, the head term moved.
In April 2025, Modern Dermatology did not rank for “dermatologist tampa” at all. By the twelve-month mark it had reached position three; as of June 2026, the apex page sits at position one for that keyword, 1,800 monthly searches, ahead of practices with eight times the backlink count. From not ranking at all to the number-one organic result in just over a year, on a foundation we are still building out.
Google’s AI Overview tells the same story from the other direction. Ask it for a Tampa dermatologist and Modern Dermatology is the first practice it names, ahead of the nine-office groups, and the booking link it hands back is themodernderm.com. That is the part most practices never reach: not just ranked first, but cited first by the engine that now answers the question before the blue links load.
Here is the part that matters strategically. Every number on this page was earned on the Squarespace foundation we inherited. Modern Dermatology migrated to the new Next.js platform on April 28, 2026. The 7,445 percent visit growth and 9,750 percent appointment-request growth happened before the technical foundation was where it should be. Year two on the new system should compound year one. The site is live at themodernderm.com.
Starting position: Squarespace template, Domain Rating 0.2, six organic visits per month, zero top-three rankings. We optimized the Google Business Profile, ran the citation engine across the standard healthcare directory set, layered schema onto the inherited template, and audited the existing content for the structural gaps that were holding it back. Traffic moved from six to twenty-six visits per month. Domain Rating crossed 0.8.
Built the editorial Insights journal with three founder-authored articles. Launched neighborhood landing pages for the highest-intent South Tampa submarkets. Shipped the first three comparison guides for high-stakes patient decisions. Layered FAQ schema on every service page. Traffic crossed 200 organic visits per month. Domain Rating crossed 3.0 for the first time. The first appointment-request lift showed up in the practice management system.
Form flow rebuilt for the direct-care model: phone-first, Spruce for existing patients, Jane for new and returning. Live Google reviews surfaced through a custom widget, replacing the static testimonial block. Decision tools shipped (Find Your Treatment, Skin Cancer Check, Cosmetic Concierge). Practice hours synced into Google Business Profile from a single source of truth in the Macbach CRM. Traffic crossed 290 visits per month. Appointment-request growth accelerated.
Full custom Next.js platform built from zero, designed around the practice’s direct-care positioning. 119 indexable pages: services, conditions, comparison guides, thirty-six neighborhood pages, and the editorial journal. Schema graph hand-authored and validated to schema.org spec. HSTS preload-eligible header, IndexNow integration, edge caching, GA4 wired with proper conversion events. DNS cutover to Vercel completed April 28, 2026. The new platform inherits a year of accumulated equity and provides the technical foundation year two will compound on.
Every Macbach engagement starts with a practice audit. Ten questions, three minutes. We return a real read on where your practice stands, and whether Macbach is the right fit.