Most firms show you a joint replacement win, which proves nothing about a torn hamstring.
A parent searching at midnight for her daughter's torn knee needs a page that answers like a surgeon, not filler. Before you sign anyone, get a name for who writes that page, who moves the calendar in August, and who calls the schools.
Most orthopedic case studies put in front of you are joint replacement wins. Traffic climbs, Map Pack rankings climb, the chart looks tidy. Replacement searches come from a 68-year-old who has already waited two years. That work belongs inside the broader orthopedic SEO services that carry the rest of your practice, but it proves nothing about a hamstring that tore in the second half.
So narrow the ask. A sports medicine SEO company should pull up the ACL reconstruction page, the UCL page, the concussion page, the runner's knee page, and show what each one did month by month. Look at rankings, calls, and booked consults on those specific pages. If every example ends in arthroplasty, the firm learned your specialty from a keyword tool.
A parent sits with her phone at 11pm, three days after her daughter's knee gave out in a tournament game. She wants one answer: when does she play again. Your return-to-play page either answers that in a way a surgeon would stand behind, or it reads like filler and she keeps scrolling toward the practice that wrote it properly.
Ask who writes that page. Not which agency, which person. Request two samples and read them as a clinician: bracing protocols, graft choices, phased loading, an honest range instead of a promise. Then ask who signs off before publication and how long that adds. Firms that welcome the question tend to show the other signals that separate genuine specialty depth from a vendor listing.
August hits and your Monday clinic fills with ankles, shoulders, and two concussions from Friday night. Content mapped out in January does not match that week. Settle one question before you sign: when volume shifts, who moves the calendar?
Make it a written clause. Name the person who reprioritizes the queue, the turnaround on a piece you request mid-season, and how many slots stay open each month for whatever the season sends. The full seasonal publishing plan for a sports medicine practice deserves its own read; here you only need the name of whoever owns it. Without a name, the calendar drifts toward whatever was easiest to write, and you publish a knee article in March while the baseball elbows pile up in your waiting room.
Every proposal lists authority building. Almost none say who picks up the phone. Mentions from the high school athletic director, the club soccer board, the physical therapy clinic that sends you post-op patients: someone has to ask for those, by name, in a real conversation.
Most of the time that someone turns out to be your front desk, discovering it in month four. Pin it down now. Who drafts the outreach, who sends it, who follows up after silence, and whether you are expected to supply the contacts. A firm marketing itself as a sports medicine SEO company near California or near Texas sits no closer to your athletic directors than one three states away, which is why the vendor checklist for an orthopedic firm counts far more than the address on the invoice.
Three months in, nobody should be showing you a full schedule. What you can see is movement on narrow injury terms, the ones carrying a body part and a sport. Position 40 to position 12 counts. So does a page that finally gets indexed and starts collecting impressions from your own county.
Watch the phones, and listen to what the caller says first. When someone names the injury instead of asking what you treat, your condition and procedure pages are sorting patients before they arrive. Ask for a tagged call log so you know which page sent them. None of that is revenue yet, and it should not be sold to you as revenue.
Early in my career I cut a program loose after a quarter that ran June through August. The off season looked like failure. The practice that kept paying saw its heaviest consult months land in September and February, and I had funded the build without ever collecting on it.
A full sports year gives you the only comparison that holds: this fall against last fall, this winter against last winter. By then you should count more new visits for the injuries you actually want, a shorter path from first call to surgical consult, and fewer empty slots in the weeks after a season ends. Judge on that. A single quarter tells you mostly about the sports calendar.
Before you sign anything, get the names: who writes, who calls, who moves the calendar, and which season you will be judged on.
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