The 20-minute call that writes your practice websiteDon't write it. Say it, then edit.
The 20-minute call is how a practice website gets written without the clinician writing it. Record twenty minutes of a clinician answering the question patients ask most, out loud, as they would in the exam room. Map the transcript into levels, check each branch against real searches, and write the pages that have both demand and a good answer.
When clinicians write, they perform; when they talk, they explain
When people write their own website copy, they perform. When they talk, they explain. The performing voice produces “compassionate, whole-person care you can trust.” The explaining voice produces “most kids with this don't need the full panel, and here's how we decide.” The second one is the only one that helps anybody.
“compassionate, whole-person care you can trust.”
“most kids with this don't need the full panel, and here's how we decide.”
Owners we have done this with tend to say some version of the same thing afterwards: “I've been saying that to patients for years and it never occurred to me to put it on the website.” That is the whole method. The content already exists. It is in your mouth, not in a keyboard.
The explaining voice is also the one that gets quoted, by a patient telling a friend and by an AI assistant assembling an answer. It has specifics, it hedges honestly, and it answers the question that was asked. Google's guidance on its AI features asks for the same thing: pages that answer the question plainly. [Source: Google]. So the instruction is not “write better.” It is “don't write. Talk, then edit.”
Twenty minutes, a recorder, one question, another person
Twenty uninterrupted minutes, a phone voice memo or any recording app, and one question to start on. No script, no slides, no notes. Four rules.
Twenty minutes is the number. Ten is too short to get past the polished answer. Forty and you start editing yourself as you speak.
Somewhere quiet enough to transcribe. A parked car is fine. The front desk between patients is not.
Have someone ask the questions. Talking to a person beats talking to a phone by a wide margin; you explain rather than announce. A spouse, a nurse, your office manager.
Let silence sit. The best material in almost every one of these arrives about three seconds after the speaker thinks they have finished. Don't fill the gap.
Record with the clinician's permission. Nothing about a real patient belongs on it; talk about kinds of patients, never a person.
Ask these five, in this order, and let each run as long as it runs
The last one is where the good pages come from.
“What's the question parents or patients ask you every single week?”
This produces your highest-value page almost every time. It is usually some version of "is this normal," "what will it cost," or "do I still need insurance."
“What do patients get wrong about this before they book?”
Misconceptions are searches. People type their wrong belief into Google before they call anybody. "Functional medicine is just supplements" and "DPC means no insurance at all" are pages waiting to be written.
“Walk me through a first visit like I've never had one.”
From the parking lot to the plan in writing, with times. Produces the how-it-works section of every service page, and usually three or four pages nobody thought to write: what the labs cost and who bills them, what happens between visits.
“Which patient would you take ten more of, and which do you refer out?”
Gives you both the service to build first and the "who this isn't for" section, which almost no practice publishes and patients trust most.
“What would you tell a friend that you'd never put on a website?”
Always the best answer of the five. The reason it feels unpublishable is usually that it is the only honest thing anyone in your specialty has said out loud about that topic.
Follow-ups that keep the good material coming: “why does that happen?”, “what does that cost someone?”, “when is that not true?”, and best of all, “say more about that.”
Break the transcript into levels, from the surface answer to the things only an insider says
Almost every practice has published the first two levels and nothing below them, which is precisely why the pages below are winnable. Read the transcript with a pen and mark each passage with the deepest level it reaches.
The house is the picture we use. A website is a set of rooms on a lot. Most practice sites have the frame up and the rooms empty, and nothing at all below the ground floor.
| Level | What it holds | Practice example | Usually published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| L0–L1 | The lot and the house: who you are, what you do | "We're a direct primary care practice in Anytown" | Always |
| L2 | The rooms: one per service | "Our services": memberships, first visits, telehealth, labs | Usually |
| L3 | The decorations: prices, photos, FAQs, specifics | "What a first visit costs and what happens" | Rarely |
| L4 | Nuance and judgment: how you decide, what you'd advise | "When we don't order the full panel" | Almost never |
| L5 | The backyard brawls: where you disagree with your field | "Why we don't do 15-minute visits" | Almost never |
| L6 | Bruises: what went wrong and what you learned | "The intake form we scrapped, and why" | Never |
| L7 | The silent part, out loud | "What every DPC doctor knows about panel size" | Never |
Levels 4 through 7 are where a practice wins, for a reason that is almost arithmetic: nobody else has written them. Ten practices in your city have a Level 2 page about memberships. null has a Level 5 page explaining why they refuse to run 15-minute visits. When someone searches that, yours may be the only page that answers it.
Before writing anything, check each branch against what people actually search
Branches with demand and no good page anywhere become the build list. Branches nobody searches get parked, however much you want to write them. Three checks, none of which needs a paid tool.
Then sort what's left by how hard each search is to win and start with the easy ones; that sorting is its own subject: which searches a new practice website can actually win. Resist starting with the branch you most want to write. It is usually a philosophy page, and nobody is searching for one.
Pull the passage, put the answer at the top, keep the clinician's phrases
Pull the relevant passage from the transcript, put the direct answer in the first 40 to 60 words, keep the speaker's own phrases, and structure the rest the way a reader needs it.
One call, more than a dozen page ideas
When I ran this on a practice site, one twenty-minute recording on the question parents ask that clinician most produced more than a dozen page ideas after about three hours of mapping. Roughly two thirds were written over the following months. The rest are still the backlog, which is how it should work: one call buys you a year of knowing what to write next, in an order you chose on purpose.
Two things I would do differently. I would ask question five, the “what would you tell a friend” one, earlier; it changed the shape of the whole map and I nearly ran out of time for it. And I would plan a second recording from the start. Twenty minutes gets you one deep vein, not the whole seam.
The transcript is raw material, not a finished medical page
A clinician talking freely says things that are true in the room and need a source on a page. “Most of these resolve on their own” is a fine thing to say to a parent and a health claim once published under your name. Google says its systems give more weight to signs of reliability on topics that affect health, and the FTC expects health claims to be backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence. [Source: Google]. [Source: FTC]. We are not lawyers; ask yours.
So the rule at our end, and the one we suggest for yours: a clinician reviews every clinical sentence before it publishes, every claim that can be cited is cited to the literature, and every claim that can't is softened or cut. Each page names its author or reviewer, with credentials and a date. What E-E-A-T asks of a practice and what the FTC asks of a health claim. The voice stays the clinician's. The claims get the care of a chart note.
Common questions about the 20-minute call
Sources and notes
- •Google Search Central: guidance on AI features
- •Google Search Central: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (E-E-A-T and YMYL)
- •FTC: Health Products Compliance Guidance
- •The method in this guide is the one we use to write practice pages. Every quoted phrase, example page title and practice on this page is invented; no real practice's transcript is quoted.
This guide is general information, not legal or medical advice. We review this page and date each review at the top.
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