The Check the Surgeon Across Town Also Passed

Plastic surgeons write the tidiest code of any trade I audit.

I said that out loud on a call in March, then spent the next twenty minutes taking pieces of it back.

He’d phoned me about his search rankings. Two rooms and a laser suite, a practice he grew out of one rented office, and a marketing company in another state he’d been paying every month since 2022.

“Be straight with me. Is my website broken?”

No. Not one thing on it.

“Then what am I paying to get fixed?”

I asked him to read me the invoice, which is a rude request and the fastest way I know to find out what’s actually going on.

He got through four lines and stopped on the third. Technical SEO, it said, three years of paying for search engine optimization without once asking anyone what he was buying.

What I found while he was talking

I opened his homepage on my laptop and went underneath it, into the part of a page written for machines instead of patients.

Your address sits in your footer. Your hours sit on your contact page.

You can pick out both in half a second, because you’ve been reading pages your whole life and you know an address when you see one.

A search engine gets no such luck. Schema markup is a run of tags in your code doing the job of the printed spine on a filing box, telling whatever picks it up what’s inside before anybody opens the thing.

His had the lot. Name, address, phone, hours, the star rating, the list of procedures, and both locations kept properly apart from each other.

So I told him his code was clean, which, coming from a trade that finishes first of the 47 I check, is a bit like telling a surgeon he’d washed his hands.

82.3% of the plastic surgery sites I opened carry those tags, which means his page was doing what his whole trade does.

“So it’s working.”

It’s doing the exact job it was built to do.

“Then why does my phone sound the same as it did in 2022?”

Because the practice across town has them too

Nobody puts that sentence on an invoice.

You don’t compete with roofers, or florists, or the accountant two doors down. You compete with the four other practices your patient found in the same search, and every one of them lands in the same place you do.

Once a whole trade gets good at something, being good at it stops being an edge. It quietly turns into the price of admission.

Assisted living did the same thing with title tags, where 99.7% of sites carry one and not a single habit behind that number costs a dollar.

Owning a website went that way years ago. 92.2% of the practices I sampled have one, so a domain and a homepage buy you a place in the line and nothing else.

The tags went the same way, later and much more quietly. 70.5% of every site I audit carries them now, and a thing that common has stopped being a reason for anyone to pick you.

Did the person selling it to you mention that part? Mine never did either, back when I was the one buying tools off people who knew more than I did.

Ten years ago I could win an argument in a boardroom by opening a competitor’s website and pointing at all the things it didn’t have, and that argument stopped working somewhere around the season the software began doing the work for everybody at once.

So does first place count for nothing?

It counts for something, and I’d rather not talk you out of it altogether.

A page carrying none of those tags hands a search engine a wall of text and asks it to guess, and a guess turns up on a stranger’s screen as the wrong phone number, or last year’s opening hours, or a branch you closed in 2023.

If you’d rather not take my word that yours carries them, one browser tab and five minutes settles it.

So the tags matter the way the lock on your back door matters. You’d notice their absence inside a week, and you will never once notice them working.

What you can’t do is buy an advantage with them, because the advantage went away the year everyone else caught up.

The two bits I took back

The first one: I handed him the tidy code line like it was a compliment to him.

It isn’t one. He didn’t write those tags, and I doubt his marketing company did either.

Every practice site I’ve opened in the last two years had them sitting there, and not one owner I’ve asked could tell me who put them in. Software you’re already paying for does it while you type your opening hours into a box.

The second: tidy is not the same as good, and I’ve been sloppy about that difference for years.

A page can name every part of itself perfectly and still say nothing a frightened woman wants to hear at eleven at night.

I followed one of those evenings all the way through once, and she did everything except call.

“So I cross off the third line.”

Cross off the third line.

What I’d do with that money instead

Spend it on the parts nobody can install for you.

What happens at a first consultation, minute by minute, from the car park onwards. What you say to the patient you turn down, and why you turn her down.

Who you refer out, and to whom. What recovery looks like on day four, when the flowers have died and she’s staring at the ceiling wondering what she’s done.

None of that arrives with a plugin. It has to come out of your head on a Tuesday, when you’d rather be doing almost anything else.

A plain looking page that answers the question a woman has been carrying around for two years will earn its keep against a beautiful one that answers nothing, and no amount of tidy code has ever changed that.

The practice websites I keep in my examples file differ from each other in exactly one way, and the code isn’t it. Every one of them answers a question a patient was too embarrassed to type.

What do you get asked in the room, over and over, in a lowered voice? Is any of it written down anywhere on your website?

Every plastic surgery site I build ships with those tags already in place, and I’ve never charged a penny for them, because billing you for that would feel like billing you for the door being on its hinges.

They belong on the checklist you run before a site goes live, not on a monthly invoice.

Now go and look at what the tidy part is describing

I’d still say the opening line to your face. The tidiest code in medicine, and my own audit of 1,812 sites in your trade is sitting behind the claim.

But tidy is a word for a room nobody ever sits in.

So open your homepage tonight and read the first screen the way a stranger reads it, at arm’s length, in a hurry, with three other tabs waiting.

Find me one thing on it that the practice across town couldn’t have bought this morning with the same software you did.

If you come up empty, send me the address and I’ll tell you which sentence I’d write first. You’ll notice it isn’t a line of code.