Why coverage is assessed against your own services
The usual approach to this problem starts with a list of search terms bought from a tool, sorted by volume, and worked down until the budget runs out. That approach has two defects for a clinic. It optimises for what is measurable rather than for what is asked, and it produces pages about services the clinic does not perform, which generate enquiries that have to be declined.
This instrument inverts the input. It starts from your service list, which you know is accurate, and applies a fixed set of nine questions that patients ask in consultation regardless of procedure. Those nine are not derived from a keyword tool. They are the questions any reasonable person asks before consenting to something done to their body: what is it, is it for me, what will it feel like, how long will I be out of action, what does it cost, how long does it last, what could go wrong, what else could I do, who is doing it, and what if I am unhappy.
Scoring coverage this way produces a grid rather than a list, and a grid makes absence visible. A clinic looking at a list of published pages sees productivity. The same clinic looking at a grid with fourteen empty cells sees a plan.
It also produces content that survives changes in how search works. A page that answers a real question asked by a real patient is useful to a search engine, to an answer engine, and to the patient sitting in your waiting room with a printout. A page written to match a phrase is useful to none of them for very long.
How to build and score the grid
Write your services down the left-hand side of a sheet. Not treatment categories: individual services, as a patient would name them. Write the nine questions across the top. You now have a grid, and every cell is a page that either exists or does not.
Fill each cell with one of four marks. Absent means nothing is published. Mentioned means a sentence exists somewhere. Answered means a reader could act on it. Documented means it is answered, specific, and carries a source or a stated basis where one is needed.
Score each of the ten criteria on this instrument 0 to 3 by looking down its column. Score 0 if any service is Absent for that question, 1 if the column is mostly Mentioned, 2 if the column is mostly Answered, and 3 if the column is Documented throughout. Scoring by the weakest cell rather than the average is deliberate: a patient interested in the service you neglected does not benefit from your thoroughness elsewhere.
The tenth criterion, what happens if the patient is unhappy, is scored once for the site rather than per service, since a single published route is sufficient.
Keep the grid. It is the working document; the total is only a summary of it.
Common scoring errors
Counting a FAQ entry as coverage. A single line inside a general question list is Mentioned, not Answered. The test is whether a reader could act on it without asking you.
Scoring the flagship service and generalising. Every column must be scored by its weakest cell. Clinics almost always have one beautifully documented procedure and several that were added to the price list and never written up.
Treating price ranges as unpublishable. A stated range with stated inclusions is a price for this purpose. Only the absence of any figure scores 0. If you have decided not to publish prices, that is a legitimate commercial choice, and it should be scored as the gap it is rather than argued away. The pricing transparency scorecard examines that decision properly.
Omitting alternatives you do not offer. The criterion asks about alternatives, not about your catalogue. A page that lists only your own options scores 1 at most.
Scoring risk coverage from marketing copy. "As with any procedure there are minor risks" is not risk coverage. Name them.
Sequencing the work the grid reveals
A completed grid usually shows more gaps than a clinic can close in a quarter, which makes sequencing the real output. Three ordering rules hold up in practice.
First, close whole rows before whole columns. A service that answers all nine questions is useful to the patient considering it. A site that answers question four for every service is useful to nobody, because no patient has a question about recovery in the abstract.
Second, order the rows by what you want more of. The instrument deliberately does not weight services by search volume, because a clinic knows things a volume estimate does not: which procedures it performs best, which have capacity, and which it would rather not do more of.
Third, write the uncomfortable answers early rather than last. Exclusions, risks and complaint routes are the ones clinics defer, and they are the ones that build the standing that makes the rest credible. A page that tells a reader they are not a candidate is the most persuasive page on a clinic website, because it is the only one that could have gone the other way.
When rows are complete, assess quality with the treatment page quality rubric, and check that what you have written is compliant with the advertising compliance self-audit before publication.