A Medical Website That Put Skin Cancer Care First: The Woods Medical Centre

The Woods Medical Centre is a GP practice in Scarborough, WA. Its doctors wanted to be known for skin checks and skin cancer care, without losing the local families who recognise The Woods as their preferred General Practice. This is how a medical website was reworked to do both, inside the advertising rules that apply to every Australian health practice.

The case

As is often the case, I inherited The Woods’ website in 2022. It was a wix.com website and needed a really good overhaul. When the business was sold, I gave it a revamp. The Woods is good local GP website, but needed some work. Five services sat side by side at the same volume: general practice, skin cancer, women’s health, travel medicine, and chronic disease and family care. Someone searching “GP Scarborough” found what they needed.

Then the street got busier. New clinics opened (and are opening) nearby, some of them bulk billing. The Woods noticed: a few patients moved to cheaper appointments, other clinics.

A private-billing practice can’t win a price war against bulk billing, and it shouldn’t try. It can win on what its doctors do. The Woods’ GPs had been building their skin cancer work, including skin checks and Total Body Photography including dermoscopy, excisions, setc. They have solid skin cancer qualifications, and they wanted to be known for it.

So the brief was to move The Woods from “a GP in Scarborough” to “a Scarborough GP practice with a strong focus on skin cancer”, without losing the families who already know it as their GP.

The catch: medical websites have rules

Most businesses can say they’re the best. Australian health practices can’t. AHPRA’s advertising guidelines cover every regulated health service, and a clinic’s website is advertising.

• No “specialist”. It’s a protected title for registered specialists such as dermatologists. A GP with a skin cancer focus can’t use it, or “specialises” either.
• No unprovable superlatives. “Leading”, “best” and “Perth’s top” are all out.
• No patient testimonials. Section 133 of the National Law rules them out for regulated health services.
• No comparisons with other clinics.

That rules out the usual way of saying “we’re the skin cancer people”. What’s left is proof: what the doctors are trained in, what equipment the clinic uses, what happens in an appointment, what it costs and how quickly you can book. It’s harder to write. It’s also much harder for the clinic down the road to copy.

If a web designer has ever offered to call your GPs “skin specialists”, that’s the first thing to fix.

The clues

• Skin cancer was one service of five. Nothing on the home page told a visitor, or Google, that the clinic took skin more seriously than travel vaccinations.
• The most distinctive service was hard to find. Total Body Photography sat a click or two deep and didn’t have the front loading it needed (these machines are very expensive).
• “GP Scarborough” was worth keeping. The site already ranked for it. Swapping everything for skin cancer terms would have thrown that away.
• AI tools were giving out the wrong details. AI assistants were pulling the clinic’s hours and billing from its Healthdirect listing, not from the website. Correcting them in a chat changes nothing; the source has to be fixed.
• The structured data was generic. The default schema didn’t describe the doctors or the clinic’s skin cancer work.
• The price question went unanswered. With bulk-billing clinics nearby, “how much?” was the question patients cared about most, and the site didn’t answer it clearly. I’ve added a huge prrice section and made all prices more clearly visible. A lot of medical clinics hide or avoid this. It was an opportunity.
• Booking links were generic. A patient wanting a skin check landed on a general HotDoc page and had to find the right doctor and appointment type themselves. We’ve made these hotdoc links direct to the corresponding page.

What we changed

1. Four pillars, skin first. The home page was rebuilt around skin checks, Total Body Photography, women’s health and travel medicine, in that order. Skin cancer moved from one service among five to the clinic’s lead.
2. Kept the GP. “GP Scarborough” stays in the titles, headings and local content, so families looking for a regular doctor still find one.
3. Proof instead of adjectives. Credentials, equipment, appointment steps are now shown on the page.
4. Fees answered on the page. A fees FAQ explains what an appointment costs, what Medicare covers and why. Patients comparing with bulk billing get a straight answer before they ring.
5. A clearer path to Total Body Photography. The dedicated page and direct booking link for the doctors who run it.
6. Schema for the clinic and every doctor. Custom structured data (added through Rank Math) describes the clinic and each doctor’s areas of interest. It uses knowsAbout, not medicalSpecialty, because the latter implies a specialist registration GPs don’t hold. Even the code has to follow AHPRA.
7. Fixed the source. The clinic’s Healthdirect (National Health Services Directory) listing was corrected, so search engines and AI tools give out the right hours and billing.
8. Faster pages. Server-level caching was added.
9. Still editable by the clinic. Pages use standard Elementor widgets rather than hand-coded HTML, so reception and the practice manager can update hours, doctors and notices without calling me. The old home page is kept as a draft, just in case.

The new home page went live in October 2026.

Case status: open

What can be shown now:

• skin cancer care leads the home page, with “GP Scarborough” kept
• every claim is backed by something checkable: no “specialist”, no “leading”, no testimonials
• clinic and doctor schema is live and validated.
• the Healthdirect listing is corrected, and
• the price question has an answer on the page.

Next on the list:

• HotDoc links that go straight to the right doctor and appointment type
• detailed skin check and Total Body Photography pages that answer the questions patients actually ask, and
• counting bookings by service, so the next update comes with a scoreboard.
• more service landing pages.

I’ll add Search Console figures and booking numbers here in early 2027, comparing the same months before and after the switch.

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Got a case for your medical website?

You might have a case if:

• your site lists every service at the same volume, and the work you want more of is buried
• your doctors are described as “specialists” or “leading” and aren’t registered specialists
• AI assistants give out the wrong hours or billing for your clinic
• a cheaper clinic has opened nearby and your site doesn’t explain what you offer for the price, or
• your staff can’t update a doctor’s profile or the opening hours without a developer.

I work every medical website the same way. I’ve built a few over the years. My job is to: find out what the practice wants more of, prove it with things AHPRA lets you say, and make sure Google, AI tools and Healthdirect all tell the same story.

For a free first look, send me your clinic’s website address and I’ll check it against the AHPRA advertising basics and tell you where Google and AI tools are getting your hours from. If you’d rather start with the numbers, try an SEO Site Check, or see how I approach website design.