Medical Content That Meets Turkiye's Promotion Rules
Compliance in medical content is not only about the copy. A practical checklist for title tags, meta descriptions, schema, review widgets and ad pages.
By Roozbeh Nazari · CEO
Promotional and informational activity by health service providers is governed in Turkiye by a dedicated regulation. According to the Ministry of Health's own announcement, the Regulation on Promotion and Information Activities in Health Services was published in the Official Gazette dated 29 July 2023, issue 32263, and came into force on publication. This article is not legal advice; it is a list of what an SEO and content team can fix on its own side before the legal review begins.
Because the most common situation we see in practice is this: the clinic is careful in the copy, but the compliance risk is not in the copy itself — it sits in the technical layer around it. In the title tag, the meta description, the structured data, the review widget and the ad landing page. All of those are published content and all of them fall under the same assessment.
The copy first: four sentence patterns and their alternatives
Most content teams work from a list of "banned words", and that list ages fast, because the problem is not in the word but in the job the sentence is doing. A more durable method is to recognise a risky sentence by what it does:
- Outcome commitment: a sentence saying that a result will occur. Its alternative is a mechanism sentence explaining how the process works.
- Superiority claim: a sentence placing the clinic or the doctor above others. Its alternative is a verifiable statement of fact containing no comparison.
- Demand-generating framing: a sentence presenting a medical procedure like a consumer product, using urgency or campaign language. Its alternative is an informational sentence noting that the decision depends on a medical consultation.
- Promotion through the patient: a sentence or image using a patient's experience as a promotional device. Here, rather than producing an alternative, you need a separate legal assessment.
This set of four is useful for building a shared vocabulary inside the team. When an editor says "that sentence is an outcome commitment" the argument ends; the argument about "is this word banned" never ends. We covered how we apply the same approach alongside YMYL review in detail in our hair transplant content article.
The layer around the copy: where it really gets missed
Now the substantive part. The following are published content, but they are usually absent from the content team's review list:
- Title tag and H1. The superiority claim carefully avoided in the body copy frequently sits in the title tag. The title tag is the first sentence shown in the search result, and it is promotional text.
- Meta description. Meta descriptions written to lift click-through can contain commitments that do not appear in the body copy. The meta description is read in the search result; not being visible on the page does not stop it being content.
- Structured data. Markup exposing ratings and review counts is a separate assessment for medical services. Structured data must also not contradict the information visible on the page.
- Review and rating widgets. How reviews are collected, whether they are filtered, and how they are presented on the page: that is a compliance decision, not a content decision.
- Ad landing pages. Advertising platforms have their own health policies and they apply independently of local regulation. Google's healthcare and medicines policy and Meta's advertising standards assess the same page separately.
- Before-and-after images. Their use falls directly under the regulation; adding a gallery and removing one both require legal assessment.
- Programmatically generated pages. Pages produced from a city or procedure template copy a single risky sentence in the template across hundreds of pages. Template review therefore matters more than page-by-page review.
Looking at that list, the picture is this: compliance risk accumulates less in the copy the content team writes than in the fragments different teams produce at different times. The meta description may be written by an SEO specialist, the structured data by a developer, the review widget by an agency and the ad landing page by a performance team. None of them sees what the others wrote, and what emerges in aggregate is a piece of promotional text that nobody individually approved.
The fix is not to change the teams but to change what the unit of review is: the thing being reviewed should not be "the article" but "the entire page as published". If a compliance check is being run for a page, that check should cover every piece of promotional text visible in the source.
Build it into the workflow, do not audit afterwards
Leaving compliance checking until after publication is an expensive choice. In a retrospective audit every correction becomes a separate publishing job, and the page being corrected has usually already been indexed.
A workable flow is built like this. First, the writer's own checklist at draft stage: the four sentence patterns above plus the fields around the copy. Second, an automated pre-publish check: a simple script catching pattern phrases should scan the title tag, the meta description and the structured data fields as well as the body copy. Third, a periodic sweep: the same checks across the whole site, because the old pages are published too.
The limit of the automated check should also be explicit. The script catches pattern phrases; it cannot assess context. The answer to "can we use this phrase" comes from legal, not from a script. The script's job is to make sure the sentence that needs to go to legal is not missed by anyone.
Two areas are frequently skipped in the periodic sweep. First, language versions: a sentence cleaned up on the Turkish page can come back through translation on the English or Arabic version. Translation is not exempt from compliance review and every language version must be scanned separately. Second, the archive: campaign pages and blog posts published years ago are usually on nobody's list but are still reachable.
Compliance and visibility do not conflict
The concern teams raise most often is this: taking out the commitment sentences weakens the copy, and the competitor gets ahead by talking more boldly. There is something real in that concern, but the outcome does not land the way people expect.
If removing the commitment leaves a gap, the problem is not the removal but the absence of information to put in its place. A page explaining how the process works, who it is not suitable for, what determines the cost and what the patient does at each stage ends up longer, more informative and more durable on the search side than the page that makes commitments. We build content architecture in the clinic vertical on that logic; we describe how it works on our clinics page and on the content SEO side.
There is also an asymmetry. Copy that makes commitments can be undone in one stroke by an audit or a policy update; the ad account can be suspended, the page can be pulled. Copy that explains mechanisms accumulates. The approach that looks slower in the short term means less rewriting and less downtime over the medium term.
A closing note: nothing in this article substitutes for legal advice. How the regulation applies to your clinic's specific situation depends on your type of activity and on the concrete content you publish; make that assessment with your legal counsel. The list here shows the areas you can clean up on your own side before you get to that assessment.