The rules limit what you can say
You’ve been told what you can’t write: testimonials, before-and-after photos, claims about outcomes. What nobody seems to tell you is what to write instead. That’s the more useful question, and it’s the one this page is about.
The restrictions are real, and they’re not the interesting part
Most of the everyday tools of marketing a service business are restricted or prohibited for a regulated health service.
Every agency that works in this sector knows the list. Knowing it isn’t a skill. The skill is knowing what’s left — and there’s more of it than most people assume.
We don’t give legal advice, and this page isn’t it
Where a decision turns on the law, we say so and recommend you take it to a lawyer. What follows is how we write, not what the law requires of you.
For pages that are really advertisements (treatment pages, landing pages, price pages, campaigns) we recommend having a lawyer review the wording before it goes live. We arrange it; you engage the firm directly, so the advice is yours to rely on.
What’s left is what machines can verify anyway
Qualifications, publications, professional memberships and plain explanations of how treatment is actually delivered.
This is the part that surprises people. Those four things aren’t a consolation prize. They’re exactly what a search engine and an AI assistant look for when they decide whether to trust a source and credit it: something checkable, attached to a named person, backed up somewhere other than your own website.
A business that can’t use testimonials gets pushed towards exactly the material that works best on the systems now deciding who gets named. The constraint and the opportunity point the same way.
What this looks like on a page
Concretely, on a treatment page:
- Who’s speaking. A named practitioner with their qualifications and registration, not anonymous copy.
- How the treatment is actually delivered. What happens, in what order, how long it takes, what the recovery is like. Written plainly, not as adjectives.
- What it doesn’t suit. A page that says who a treatment isn’t for reads as more trustworthy to a person, and gives a machine something specific to credit.
- What’s written about you elsewhere. Professional bodies, publications, conference programs, journals. This is the corroboration layer, and it’s the one most businesses have never built.
Where the risk actually sits
In our experience, the exposure comes less from the treatment pages people worry about and more from the material nobody’s looking at.
- Old blog posts written before anyone thought about the rules
- Social media captions
- Pages a previous agency built that nobody has read since
- Photographs used without thinking about what they imply
A website is advertising in its entirety, not just the pages labelled as campaigns.
Common questions
- Is this a compliance audit?
- No. Our review isn’t a compliance audit, and it isn’t legal advice. Where something we find would be hard to fix without running into the advertising rules, we say so and explain what the safer options are.
- Do you sell compliance training?
- No. We don’t sell compliance reviews or training as products. The rules shape everything we write, but here they’re a method, not something off the shelf.
- Our lawyer already reviewed the site. Do we still need this?
- Those are different questions. A lawyer tells you whether the wording is defensible. We measure whether anyone can find you, and write the pages that get you found, within the wording that’s defensible.
- What if we’re not AHPRA-regulated?
- Then some of this doesn’t apply to you, and we’d say so rather than sell you a constraint you don’t have. The Australian Consumer Law still applies to everyone.
Where to go from here
The review flags any finding you’d struggle to act on without running into the rules, and what the safer options are.