This is for a physician-owned orthopedic practice — one surgeon or twenty — that gets most of its patients from referrals and knows that pipeline is narrowing. It is not for a hospital-employed department whose marketing runs through a health system communications office. It is not for a practice booked six weeks out whose real constraint is OR time. And it is not for anyone who wants a promised number of surgical cases per month, because that is a claim I will not make about a US medical practice.
Free, no obligation
Send me your practice and I’ll tell you the three things I’d fix first
Thirty minutes, on a call, looking at your actual site and your actual search results. If the fixes are things you can do yourself, I’ll say so. Pricing is published below — $800 or $1,500 a month, no contract. Cancel any month and keep everything I build.
I am Mandeep Singh. I have run Sprout Sage Solutions since 2020 from Chandigarh, India, working with US and international businesses. I lead every account personally, supported by a team of 17. Pricing is published below. No contract, cancel any month, keep everything I build.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
The practices where this pays off share a shape. Physician-owned or a small partnership. At least one surgeon with room in the schedule — a new associate building a book, a subspecialist whose referral base has not caught up to their fellowship. A website that ranks for the practice name and almost nothing else. And when you ask where last month’s new patients came from, the honest answer is a shrug and the name of one referring internist.
Where I am the wrong choice: a practice already at capacity, since more demand lengthens your wait and a longer wait is what sends a patient down the highway. A group mid-transaction with a PE buyer, where these decisions get re-made by someone else in six months. A department inside a health system, because the brand, the domain and the listings belong to the system. And anyone wanting case-volume guarantees. I will tell you which of these you are on the first call, before you pay me anything.
What I actually do for an orthopedic practice
Roughly in order. I rebuild the Google Business Profile for every location and, where it makes sense, for individual surgeons. I build or rewrite procedure-level pages, because that is the unit search rewards. I fix the appointment request so a patient in pain can finish it on a phone with one hand. I make the phone line and the form measurable. I build the insurance page properly. And I set up review requests that run continuously instead of in bursts when someone remembers.
What I do not do: brand campaigns, physician recruitment marketing, billboards, or social media as a standalone product. None of them is what a group with an underbooked shoulder surgeon should buy first.
The claims I will not make, and the rules I work inside
In a regulated specialty the constraints are the product. An agency that does not know them writes something that earns you a letter.
- No surgical outcome claims. Nothing will say your repairs hold better, your revisions are rarer, or your patients recover faster. Not in a headline, a meta description, or an ad.
- No success-rate statistics without a published source. Any number — a return-to-activity range, a recovery window — is cited to published literature and framed as what the literature reports, not what your practice achieves. Your internal data does not become a marketing statistic unless you decide, with your own counsel, to stand behind it.
- No before-and-after imagery without written consent. That includes X-rays, arthroscopy stills, scar photos and range-of-motion video. A consent for surgery is not a consent to publish; HIPAA restricts marketing use of patient information without an authorization that actually says marketing.
- No “best surgeon” superlatives. No “top orthopedic surgeon in the state,” no “leading shoulder specialist,” no unearned rankings. State medical boards treat unsubstantiated superlatives as false or misleading advertising, and the boards, not Google, are the ones who act.
- Credentials stated exactly. Board certification by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, subspecialty certificates and fellowship training get written the way the certifying body words them. “Fellowship-trained in sports medicine” and “sports medicine specialist” are not interchangeable in every state.
- No testimonial describing a clinical result. A patient can say your office was kind and your explanation clear. Once they describe their outcome it is an endorsement of medical efficacy, and the FTC’s endorsement rules and your board’s advertising rules both apply.
- Referral work stays on the right side of the line. Nothing I build pays for, rewards, or is contingent on a referral. Education for referring clinicians is legitimate; anything resembling compensation for volume is a federal problem, not a marketing one.
- Tracking scoped carefully. Third-party advertising pixels do not go on pages where a visitor’s presence implies a condition.
I am not your attorney or your compliance officer. I write to these constraints by default and flag anything needing your counsel before it publishes rather than after.
Procedure pages are the ranking unit, not “our services”
Most orthopedic sites have one page called Services and five thin sub-pages that read like a textbook contents page. The searches that produce consults are specific: rotator cuff repair recovery, reverse shoulder replacement, ACL reconstruction, partial knee replacement, meniscus tear surgery or not, labral tear treatment, carpal tunnel release, Achilles rupture. Each is a distinct question from a distinct person at a distinct point in their decision.
A page that works says what the problem is in the words a person uses, who is a candidate and who is not, what the non-operative path looks like first, what the operation involves, what recovery is realistically shaped like, how insurance usually treats it, and what happens at the first visit. I build these against your actual subspecialties, in order of search demand crossed with the cases you want more of. Every page is attributed to the surgeon who performs the procedure and reviewed by them before it publishes — the difference between a page a colleague respects and one a patient’s brother-in-law who is a nurse picks apart.
Google Business Profile, per location and per surgeon
“Orthopedic surgeon near me” is decided in the map pack, and orthopedic profiles are usually half-built. Generic primary category. Missing secondary categories for sports medicine, hand surgery or a walk-in injury clinic. Groups running one profile for four offices, which makes three of them invisible from their own neighborhoods.
I work each location profile field by field — categories, services in patient language, hours, the appointment link wired to your scheduling system rather than the homepage, real photos, and the Q&A entries about parking, imaging and plans accepted, because if you do not write them a stranger will. Practitioner profiles are the piece almost everyone skips: Google allows public-facing surgeons their own listings, and that listing is what a referred patient finds in the referring office’s parking lot. I check rankings on a grid across the service area, because a practice that appears from its own lot and vanishes four miles west has a fixable problem that averaged rank reports hide.
Referrals and self-referring patients are two different jobs
Every orthopedic group I have looked at is built on referrals — primary care, urgent care, emergency departments, physical therapists under direct access, athletic trainers, occupational health. That channel is not going away and I will not pretend digital replaces it. What changed is that a referral is now a suggestion rather than an instruction. The patient is handed a name, goes home, and searches it. If your page for that surgeon is thin, or the hospital directory profile outranks your own site for your own surgeon, you have lost control of the moment that decides whether they book.
The self-referring patient is a different person: a shoulder that has hurt for four months, no referral, a plan that may or may not require one. They search a symptom, read three pages, and call whoever seems competent and reachable. They are invisible in your referral reporting and usually the whole upside. For the referring side I build what a clinician needs — a referral page with a form that works, a route for records and imaging, subspecialty pages a PCP can scan. None of it involves paying anyone for anything.
Insurance status and speed to appointment decide who converts
A practice can rank first for every procedure in its county and convert badly because a patient cannot tell whether their plan is accepted. I build the insurance page as a real page: which plans each location accepts, whether a referral or authorization is typically required, what happens if you are out of network, and what you need at the first visit. Where services are cash-pay — regenerative and orthobiologic injections being the common case — those get their own page with the price stated, because burying a cash price produces an angry phone call instead of a booking.
Then there is the bottleneck nobody markets their way out of: a patient in pain books whoever can see them soonest. In month one I look at how long the phone tree runs before a human, whether an online request is answered in an hour or on Thursday, and whether anyone holds same-week slots for acute injuries. I do not run your front desk. I will show you the recordings and say plainly when the fix is a scheduling change rather than a marketing purchase.
Reviews, and what you cannot say back
Reviews matter more for surgeons than for almost any other local business, because the decision carries real risk and the patient has no other way to judge. Velocity matters more than raw count: two hundred reviews and none this year reads as stale to a patient and to Google. So requests get tied to visit type, timed to when someone is likely to respond, and excluded for visits where a request would be inappropriate. That exclusion is not optional and I will not build a system that cannot do it.
The response is where practices get caught. You cannot reply to a negative review by explaining what happened, because confirming that someone was your patient is itself a disclosure, and practices have been penalized for exactly that. The template is short, says nothing about care, and moves the conversation to a name and a phone number in the office.
Paid search, and when I tell you not to buy it
Paid search earns its keep in a few situations. Acute injury intent, where somebody searching at nine at night calls whoever looks open. A new location or associate who needs a schedule filled faster than organic can fill it. And defending your surgeons’ names when aggregators bid on them.
It works badly when you bid broad terms like “knee pain” against a health system with a brand budget, or when a third of your calls go to voicemail. Before recommending spend I want to know which service lines have room, what your payer mix does to the value of a case, and what happens to a call at 4:50 on a Friday. Ad spend goes to Google on your card, never through me, and management is quoted separately.
What it costs
Two tiers, flat monthly, published so you can decide before you speak to me.
Starter — $800 a month. Google Business Profile management for your locations: categories, services, photos, posts and Q&A. On-page fixes to your highest-intent pages — top procedures, surgeon bios, insurance, and the appointment request. Review-request setup with visit-type filtering and response templates. Call and form tracking. A monthly report and a call with me to read it.
Core — $1,500 a month. Everything in Starter, plus four published pieces a month aimed at procedure and second-opinion searches, surgeon-attributed and surgeon-reviewed. Location pages for each office. Practitioner profile buildout. Citation cleanup. Internal linking across the procedure clusters. Schema markup for the practice, the locations, the surgeons and the procedures. Most multi-surgeon groups end up here.
Not included: ad spend; software you already run; photography and video, though I will tell you exactly what to shoot; paid directory placements; website rebuilds and landing pages, quoted separately as projects; Google Ads management, also separate. I list exclusions because “starting at” pricing that omits half the work is how a $1,500 retainer becomes a much larger invoice in month two. For market context I publish the same breakdown for physical therapy practices, chiropractors, plastic surgery practices and dental practices.
Still reading? That usually means the fit is about right. The call costs nothing and I don’t run a pitch deck.
How the first 30, 60 and 90 days run
Days 1 to 30
Week one is audit and access: profiles, site, search performance data, call handling, request form, scheduling reality, plus a grid check across the service area. I ask your schedulers what people call and ask about, because that list beats any keyword tool. By the end of week two you get written findings ranked by what moves your schedule soonest. Weeks three and four are execution on the location profiles, the highest-intent pages, and tracking. You will not see ranking movement in thirty days.
Days 31 to 60
Build-out. Procedure pages get written, surgeon-reviewed and published. Bios get rebuilt. Citations get cleaned. Schema goes in. Reviews start arriving at a steadier rate, usually the first thing an owner notices without being told. Local ranking typically moves on specific searches — a procedure plus a place — long before broad terms.
Days 61 to 90
By day ninety we should answer a real question with data rather than impressions: is the phone ringing differently than in month zero, and from where. This is also when I recommend or rule out paid search on evidence. And it is the point at which cancelling costs you nothing, which is the entire design of the arrangement.
Who does the work
I lead every account personally, supported by a team of 17. The strategy, the audit, the findings and the monthly call are mine. I read your search data and decide what gets built in what order. When you email, you get me. Production — content drafted to my brief, citation cleanup, page builds, technical implementation — runs through specialists on my team.
I run Sprout Sage Solutions out of Chandigarh, India, and have since 2020. I say it up front because you will find it anyway. My hours overlap your morning on the US East Coast, and I schedule calls around clinic and OR days rather than around mine.
Proof, and what it is actually worth
Here is what I can substantiate. I have shipped 450+ websites since starting Sprout Sage Solutions in 2020. I have 224 jobs delivered on Upwork with a 96% Job Success score, where the history is public and you can read it yourself. There are 17 Google reviews on the business profile.
None of the case studies on this site are orthopedic practices. I am not going to imply otherwise, and I would be careful with any agency showing you a specialty portfolio without naming a single client.
The local SEO map pack rescue is closest in mechanics to what a group needs: a grid audit across a service area, a full Google Business Profile rebuild, and a review system built for continuous velocity rather than a one-time push. Same levers, different industry. What happened there happened in that market against that competitive set, and I am not presenting it as a forecast for yours.
The form rebuild teardown covers a service-business contact form reworked into a short multi-step flow with the mobile call-to-action moved into thumb reach. Relevant because orthopedic appointment requests fail the same ways: too long, asking for insurance details before a phone number, unusable one-handed. That outcome belongs to that engagement. The full set is at the case studies hub — read them as evidence of method, not prediction.
There is also published work here in adjacent musculoskeletal specialties: SEO for physical therapists, how physical therapy clinics get more patients, SEO for chiropractors and SEO for plastic surgeons.
Objections worth raising before you hire me
“Why not a healthcare-specialist agency?”
Sometimes you should, and I will say so on the call. If you need business associate agreements across a health system, a named account team and a firm your board recognizes, that is a real product and it is not mine. A specialist agency gives you a template refined across many similar practices and a process that does not depend on one person. What you often also get is a strategy set in a kickoff call you never see again, a twelve-month agreement, and pricing published nowhere. From me you get the senior person on the account every month, published pricing and no contract — and a smaller firm in a different time zone with a finite roster.
“Why not use the hospital’s marketing department?”
If your surgeons are employed and the system owns the brand and the domain, you should, and I would be the wrong hire. If you are physician-owned and the system markets you as a courtesy of affiliation, look hard at what that is worth. A system’s marketing exists to fill the system’s service lines. Its directory profile for your surgeon frequently outranks your own website for your own surgeon’s name, and points at a system scheduling line rather than yours. That is not malice. The question is whether you want a presence in your own name that you keep if the affiliation changes.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
You cancel. No notice period, no termination fee, and you keep everything I built. That is the only guarantee I make, because it is the only one I control. What I ask is that we define “work” together in month one, in writing: calls attributable to search, requests from the site, appearance on the grid for the procedures you want more of.
What you keep if you leave
Everything. The website and every page on it. The Google Business Profiles, in your name, with your access — I do not create them under my own account. The practitioner profiles. The tracking setup. The review templates and workflow. Anything I provision is created under your ownership from day one.
No contracts. Cancel any month. Keep everything built. I do not build agency-locked stacks where leaving means losing your tracking numbers, because that is a way of keeping clients who want to go.
Questions surgeons and practice managers ask me
Will you work with a competing orthopedic group in our market?
No. If I am already working with a practice in your service area I will tell you on the first call and decline. Geographic exclusivity is the only kind that means anything in local search.
Do you guarantee a number of new patients or surgical cases?
No, and I would be wary of anyone who does. For a US medical practice a quantified volume promise is a claim someone may eventually ask you to substantiate.
Who writes the clinical content, and does a surgeon review it?
My team drafts to my brief, I edit, and the surgeon who performs the procedure approves before publication, with their name and credentials on the page. If your surgeons will not give me an hour a month for review, say so on the first call.
We have five locations. Does each need its own everything?
Each needs its own Google Business Profile and its own page with real detail: who sees patients there, hours, parking, what is offered at that site. What they share is the procedure library. Duplicating procedure pages per location weakens all of them.
Can you work with our EHR or practice management system?
For marketing I need visit types, a route for review requests, and a scheduling link that can be linked to. I do not touch anything clinical. Tell me what you run on the first call and I will confirm before you commit to anything.
Our website is old. Do you need to rebuild it?
Usually not immediately. Most practice sites need rewritten pages, a fixed request flow and proper structure far more than a new design. If it does need a rebuild, that is quoted separately as a project.
How do you handle workers’ compensation and personal injury?
As separate service lines with their own pages, because the searcher, the intake and the referral sources are all different. Whether you want more of it is a decision about your payer mix.
How long before we should expect results?
Profiles and tracking land in the first thirty days. Local ranking movement usually starts on specific long-tail searches before broad ones. Anyone giving you a firm date for page-one rankings is guessing and charging you for the guess.
Book a free 30-minute call
The call is free and there is no deck. I look at your profiles, your site and your search data live, and give you three specific things to fix that week whether or not you hire me. If we are not a fit, I will say so.
Book the free 30-minute call, or call me directly at +91 97297 12388.
If your question is narrower, I have written separately about orthopedic surgeon SEO and about sports medicine marketing.
