SEO Agencies by Industry: Healthcare, Hotels, Restaurants & More

TL;DR

• An seo agency for healthcare must handle HIPAA compliance, E-E-A-T signals, and medical schema markup that generalist agencies typically ignore
• An seo agency for hotels lives and dies by the map pack, OTA competition, and seasonal demand patterns
• An seo agency for restaurants focuses on local SEO, review management, and the fact that 67% of searches lead to a visit within 48 hours
• An seo agency for contractors competes in one of the most aggressive local SEO markets, where Google Maps visibility drives 80%+ of leads
• An seo agency for b2b tech plays a longer game: high-intent keywords, thought leadership content, and conversion paths that span months
• Vertical expertise matters most in regulated or compliance-heavy industries. For simpler verticals, a strong generalist with local SEO skills often outperforms a niche specialist

Why Industry Matters More Than You Think

Seven percent of all daily Google searches are health-related. That's roughly 70,000 healthcare searches every minute. And yet the person searching "best hotel in Austin" has a completely different intent, timeline, and decision process than the person searching "commercial HVAC repair near me." One is browsing. The other needs someone at their door by tomorrow morning. Treating both with the same SEO playbook is a waste of money.

Three factors determine whether you need an industry-specific seo agency for healthcare or any other vertical: regulatory compliance requirements, complexity of the buyer's journey, and how localized the search behavior is. Healthcare checks all three boxes. Hotels check two. Restaurants and contractors are heavily localized but less complex. B2B tech has long buyer journeys but minimal local search behavior. Each combination demands a different approach.

If you're still figuring out what an SEO agency actually does before worrying about verticals, start with our complete guide to SEO agencies. It covers the fundamentals. This guide assumes you already know the basics and want to understand what changes when industry context enters the picture.

Healthcare: Where Compliance Meets Search

Healthcare is the most demanding vertical for SEO, full stop. An seo agency for healthcare operates under constraints that don't exist in any other industry. Get it wrong and you're not just losing rankings. You could be violating federal law.

HIPAA and Content Restrictions

An seo agency for healthcare can't just write keyword-stuffed blog posts. Patient testimonials need consent forms. Before-and-after photos have legal restrictions. Even the language on a service page has to avoid making claims that cross into medical advice. A generalist agency won't know any of this until they've already published something that creates liability for your practice.

Here's a number that should worry any healthcare provider: 49% of patients won't book with providers whose online listings have errors. Wrong address, outdated phone number, inconsistent hours across directories. A Yext study found that listing accuracy directly impacts patient acquisition. An seo agency for healthcare should be auditing your NAP (name, address, phone) data across every directory, not just Google.

E-E-A-T Is Non-Negotiable

Google's E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) hits healthcare harder than any other vertical. Your content needs named physician authors, proper credentials displayed, and citations to peer-reviewed sources. A blog post about knee replacement recovery written by a freelancer with no medical background won't rank, no matter how well it's optimized. Google actively penalizes YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content that lacks demonstrable expertise.

An seo agency for healthcare should be building detailed author bios, implementing medical schema markup (MedicalCondition, MedicalProcedure, Physician schema types), and actively earning backlinks from authoritative health sources. Links from WebMD, Mayo Clinic, or medical journals carry more weight than a hundred generic directory links. If your agency doesn't understand this distinction, they're not a healthcare SEO agency. They're a generalist with a healthcare landing page.

Local SEO for Multi-Location Practices

Eighty-seven percent of patients who find providers online book an appointment. The local pack is where most of that happens. For solo practitioners, this is straightforward: one Google Business Profile, one location page, consistent citations. But multi-location healthcare groups (urgent care chains, dental groups, specialty practices) face a much harder problem. Each location needs its own landing page with unique, locally-relevant content. Each Google Business Profile needs separate management. NAP data has to be consistent across every directory for every location.

Pricing for an seo agency for healthcare varies widely. Solo practices typically invest $750 to $1,500 per month. Multi-location groups spend $3,000 to $8,000 or more per month, depending on the number of locations and competitive density. First Page Sage maintains a list of top healthcare SEO agencies if you want to start vetting options. But don't pick a name off a list without asking the compliance questions first.

Hotels and Hospitality: Fighting the OTA Giants

An seo agency for hotels faces a unique challenge: you're competing against Booking.com, Expedia, and TripAdvisor for your own brand name. These OTAs spend billions on SEO and PPC. They will outbid you on branded terms. They will outrank you on generic terms. And they take a 15-25% commission on every booking they send your way. The whole point of hiring an seo agency for hotels is to claw back direct bookings.

The strategy breaks into three parts. First, own your branded search. Your hotel name should return your website, not an OTA listing, as the top result. Second, dominate local queries: "boutique hotel downtown [city]," "pet-friendly hotel near [landmark]," "hotel with rooftop bar [neighborhood]." OTAs optimize for broad terms but they can't match a local hotel on hyper-specific, long-tail queries. Third, target the queries OTAs don't bother with. Things like "best time to visit [city]," "weekend itinerary [destination]," and "what to do near [your hotel]." This content builds topical authority and captures travelers earlier in the booking funnel.

Seasonal demand patterns make hotel SEO fundamentally different from other verticals. An seo agency for hotels needs to plan content 3-6 months ahead. The page ranking for "ski resort near Denver" in December was published and optimized in August. Miss that window and you're invisible during your highest-revenue period. This requires an editorial calendar synced to booking patterns, not a generic monthly content schedule.

Schema markup matters here more than in most industries. Room pricing, availability, star ratings, review aggregation, and event listings all have structured data types. Hotels without this markup are invisible in rich results. And photo optimization? It drives real booking traffic. Google Images is a genuine acquisition channel for hotels, which is not something you can say about most B2B companies.

Restaurants: Reviews, Local, and the 48-Hour Window

Sixty-seven percent of restaurant-related searches lead to an in-person visit within 48 hours. That stat alone explains why an seo agency for restaurants should be obsessed with local SEO. The conversion window is tiny. If you're not visible when someone searches "Thai food near me" on a Tuesday evening, you've lost that customer to the place that is.

Google Maps is the storefront. An seo agency for restaurants needs to treat your Google Business Profile like your most important web page. Menu schema, accurate hours (including holiday hours, which most restaurants forget), photos of actual food (not stock photos, customers can tell), and a response strategy for every single review. A one-star drop on Google can reduce revenue by 5-9%. That's not a branding problem. That's a revenue problem.

Review management for restaurants goes beyond Google. An seo agency for restaurants needs to monitor and respond across Yelp, TripAdvisor, and DoorDash simultaneously. Each platform has different algorithms, different review policies, and different audiences. A strategy that works on Google might backfire on Yelp, where aggressive review solicitation can trigger their filter.

The content strategy is different here too. Nobody reads a 2,000-word blog post to decide where to eat. Short, snappy location pages, event pages ("live jazz every Friday"), and seasonal menus drive more organic traffic than blog content ever will. If you're a single-location restaurant, many of the basics in our guide to SEO agencies for small businesses apply directly. You don't necessarily need a restaurant-specific agency. You need one that's strong at local SEO.

Contractors and Home Services: The Most Competitive Local Market

An seo agency for contractors operates in one of the most cutthroat local SEO environments anywhere online. Plumbers, electricians, HVAC techs, and roofers all compete for a tiny set of "near me" keywords. In most metro areas, there are 50+ contractors fighting for three map pack spots. The margins between ranking and invisibility are razor thin.

Google Local Service Ads have changed the game completely. An seo agency for contractors now needs to manage both organic local SEO and LSA placements, because LSAs appear above the map pack. A homeowner searching "plumber near me" sees LSAs first, then the map pack, then organic results. If your agency is only optimizing for organic, you're starting the race in third place.

Reviews are currency in this space. Contractor businesses with 50+ Google reviews and a 4.5+ star rating dominate the local pack. A good seo agency for contractors will build a review generation system: automated follow-up emails or texts after completed jobs, QR codes on invoices, and staff training on how to ask for reviews naturally. This matters more than meta tags. Way more.

Service area pages are critical, and most contractor websites get this wrong. A roofing company serving 15 suburbs needs 15 unique, locally-relevant pages, not one page with a list of city names. Each page should reference local landmarks, mention specific neighborhoods, and include photos from actual jobs in that area. The homepage shouldn't try to rank for everything. Let the service pages and location pages do the heavy lifting while the homepage focuses on trust signals and conversions.

B2B Tech: Long Cycles, High Intent, Big Stakes

An seo agency for b2b tech plays an entirely different game from everything we've discussed so far. The keywords are lower volume but massively higher value. A single first-page ranking for "enterprise data warehouse solution" might be worth $500K+ in pipeline. One piece of content, properly optimized, can generate leads for years. But the timeline to get there is longer, and the content requirements are far more technical.

Content strategy for B2B tech centers on thought leadership: technical guides, comparison pages, integration documentation, and case studies with measurable outcomes. Not blog posts about "5 tips for better data management." That kind of content attracts tire-kickers, not buyers. An seo agency for b2b tech should be mapping content to every stage of the buyer's journey. Awareness content targets the problem ("why does data migration fail?"). Consideration content compares solutions ("Snowflake vs Databricks for mid-market companies"). Decision content helps the buyer evaluate vendors ("enterprise data platform RFP template"). Each stage requires different keywords, different formats, and different conversion goals.

The buyer's journey in B2B tech runs 6-18 months. That's not a reason to delay SEO. It's a reason to start earlier. An seo agency for b2b tech needs to understand that the blog post someone reads in January might influence a purchase decision in November. Attribution is harder here, and any agency that only tracks last-click conversions will underreport their own impact.

Technical SEO matters more in B2B tech because these sites tend to be larger, more complex, with gated content, dynamic pages, and JavaScript-heavy frameworks that create crawlability issues. If Googlebot can't render your React-based product pages, it doesn't matter how good your content is. For a deeper look at agencies doing this well, check out our top B2B SEO agencies for 2026. And if your company is specifically a SaaS product, our guide to SEO agencies for SaaS companies goes deeper on the SaaS-specific playbook.

Specialist vs Generalist: When Vertical Expertise Actually Matters

Here's the uncomfortable truth: 77% of agencies consider themselves "niche" in some way, according to an AgencyAnalytics survey. But most of that specialization is marketing, not capability. A self-proclaimed seo agency for healthcare that can't explain E-E-A-T or medical schema is just a generalist with a landing page. A supposed seo agency for hotels that's never dealt with OTA competition is the same thing.

When does vertical expertise genuinely matter? Three scenarios. First, industries with compliance requirements. An seo agency for healthcare, finance, or legal needs to understand regulatory constraints because mistakes have legal consequences. Second, industries with complex buyer journeys. An seo agency for b2b tech or enterprise SaaS needs to understand multi-stakeholder decision processes and 6-18 month sales cycles. Third, industries with unique search ecosystems. An seo agency for hotels competing against OTAs faces challenges that simply don't exist in other verticals.

When is a generalist fine, or even better? Restaurants. Strong local SEO fundamentals apply universally, and the compliance requirements are minimal. Most contractor businesses fall here too. An seo agency for contractors with strong local SEO skills beats a "contractor SEO specialist" that can't fix your site speed or build proper internal linking. And any business where the SEO challenge is primarily technical rather than content-driven will get more value from technical expertise than industry knowledge.

The contrarian take: in some verticals, a generalist agency with strong technical SEO chops will outperform a "specialist" that knows the industry vocabulary but can't audit your Core Web Vitals, fix your crawl budget issues, or build a proper internal linking architecture. Knowledge of your industry is valuable. But it's not a substitute for knowing how search engines actually work.

What to Ask Before You Hire

Regardless of your industry, these five questions will separate agencies that understand your vertical from those that don't. Use them in every initial call.

• "Show me 3 clients in my industry." Not a case study from 2019. Current clients with measurable results. If an seo agency for healthcare can't show you a practice they've grown in the last 12 months, their "healthcare expertise" is theoretical.
• "What compliance requirements apply to my industry's SEO?" If they can't answer this for healthcare or finance, walk away. For restaurants or contractors, this question is less critical, but their reaction still tells you something about how seriously they take industry context.
• "How do you handle local SEO for multi-location businesses?" Relevant whether you're an seo agency for healthcare with five clinic locations, a hotel group with properties in three cities, a restaurant chain, or a contractor serving 20 suburbs. Multi-location local SEO is complex. Their answer reveals whether they've done it before.
• "What does your first 90 days look like?" Vague answers mean vague results. You want specifics: audit timeline, strategy delivery date, first content milestones, technical fix prioritization.
• "What's your reporting cadence and what metrics do you track?" Industry-specific KPIs matter. Patient bookings for healthcare. Direct bookings vs OTA referrals for hotels. Phone calls and form fills for contractors. Demo requests and pipeline for B2B tech. If they only report on rankings and traffic, they're not tracking what actually drives your revenue. You can browse marketing agencies by category to find agencies that match your vertical.