Writing under the advertising rules
Most of what a general agency reaches for is restricted or prohibited for a regulated health service. This page sets out what we build instead, and the one part of the standard playbook we won’t run at all.
We don’t give legal advice
We say this first, because everything below is a description of how we write, not a statement of what the law requires of you.
Where a decision turns on the law, we say so and recommend you take it to a lawyer. 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 and you engage the firm directly, so the advice is yours to rely on, not something passed along second-hand through us.
What we build authority from
Four things, all of them checkable by someone other than you.
- Qualifications and registration. Named practitioners, their training, their registration. Attached to the pages they’re actually speaking on.
- Publications and presentations. Journals, conference programs, professional media.
- Professional memberships. Colleges, societies, associations.
- Plain explanations of how treatment is delivered. What happens, in what order, how long it takes, what recovery looks like, and who a treatment isn’t suitable for.
These aren’t a substitute for the restricted material. For this purpose they’re better material, because a search engine and an AI assistant can both verify them somewhere other than your own website — which is exactly what they’re looking for.
Review generation: we don’t do it for AHPRA-regulated practices
This is a deliberate exclusion, not an oversight, and it costs us work.
AHPRA National Law s.133 prohibits testimonials in advertising a regulated health service, and its reach extends to media the business controls. A Google Business Profile is a profile the business manages. Soliciting, incentivising or managing reviews on it can touch that restriction.
The standard local-search playbook treats review generation as the first move. Carried into a regulated practice, that would make us the party who put you in breach. So we leave it out and build map visibility from the parts of a profile that aren’t affected: categories, services, attributes, hours, service areas, questions and answers, photos of the premises, and the consistency of your business details.
For businesses that aren’t AHPRA-regulated, this restriction doesn’t apply and we’ll say so. We’re describing our policy for regulated practices, not a universal rule.
How a page gets written
Five steps, and your approval is the last one every time.
- 01You tell us what you want to grow. Treatments, not keywords.
- 02We draft. Structure first, then the plain explanation, then who’s speaking.
- 03Your practitioners review it and are credited by name. They’re the ones whose registration is attached to it.
- 04Where the page is really an advertisement, we recommend legal review and arrange it. If you decline on a particular page, we record that and you sign off on publication.
- 05Nothing is published without your written approval. No exceptions, at any level.
What we won’t write
Five things, whatever the brief says.
- Claims about outcomes we can’t support
- Anything that reads as a promise of a clinical or commercial result
- Comparative claims about other practices
- Language that implies accreditation or endorsement that doesn’t exist
- Copy that works around a restriction rather than within it
Common questions
- Is this a compliance service?
- 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.
- Who is responsible if a page turns out to be a problem?
- You publish it, so it’s yours. That’s why nothing goes out without your written approval, why we recommend independent legal review for pages that are really advertisements, and why we record it when you decline that review on a page.
- Can you work with our existing lawyer?
- Yes, and we’d prefer to. You engage them directly either way.
- What about our old blog posts and social media?
- A website is advertising in its entirety, not just the pages labelled as campaigns. Old material is where we most often find problems, and the review covers what’s on the site.
Where to go from here
The full list of what we decline, and the measurement that starts it all.