Most content agency websites look identical by the third one you open. Same claims, same generic hero copy, same "we understand your industry" line with nothing behind it. If you're building a shortlist for a health tech content engine, the differences that matter are rarely on the homepage. They're in what an agency does with its own content, and in what it leaves out of its pitch.
A short list of things to look for will cut 15 agencies down to 3 worth a call, faster than any 20-question RFP.
Most of this filtering happens with a laptop and 20 minutes, before a single email gets sent. Marketers tend to skip this stage because it feels less productive than getting on a call, even though a call with the wrong agency costs an hour you won't get back and a follow-up email you'll have to write to let them down. Screening first means the calls you do take are with agencies that already cleared the bar.
Read their own content before you read their portfolio
A portfolio shows you client work, filtered and often approved by someone else's brand guidelines. An agency's own site shows you what it actually believes, unfiltered.
Open their blog. Is it current, or has the "latest post" been sitting there since March? An agency that can't hold its own publishing cadence is telling you something about what your retainer will look like by month 4.
Read 2 or 3 posts closely. Do they sound like a strategist who's spent real time in this market, or a generalist who ran a keyword report and wrote toward it? You'll usually know within a paragraph. Health tech has its own vocabulary: procurement caution, clinical sign-off, patient acquisition cost, DSO consolidation. An agency fluent in the space uses this language the way you'd use it in a hallway conversation with a peer, not like it's translating from a glossary.
Check who they name as the buyer, not just the industry
"We write for health tech" names a category, not a buyer.
Look for language that names a specific role under a specific pressure: a marketing lead answering to a VP after a flat quarter, a founder writing content between fundraising calls, a practice owner deciding whether to trust a vendor before a demo ever gets booked. That kind of specificity is hard to fake. It only shows up if the agency has actually sat across from that person, or read enough sales call transcripts to know what keeps them up at night.
Generic agencies describe your industry. The right one describes your buyer's Tuesday.
Look for the difference between health practice tech and digital health
These two markets share a sector label and almost nothing else. A practice owner buying scheduling software and a clinician evaluating a digital therapeutic are answering different questions, with different stakes and different people signing off.
An agency that treats "health tech" as one undifferentiated blob probably writes generic content for both, which means neither reader gets what they actually need. Ask, or look for evidence in their published work, whether they distinguish between writing for a business buyer and writing for a clinical one. If every piece in their portfolio reads the same regardless of audience, that's your answer.
The same test applies inside digital health itself. A patient-facing app and a clinician-facing diagnostic tool sell into completely different rooms, even when the company is the same. If an agency's sample work can't tell the difference between a patient reading for reassurance and a clinician reading for evidence, it's producing content that satisfies neither one particularly well.
Read one case study end to end, not just the headline
Skip the top-line number and read the middle, where most agencies get thin.
Look for the baseline they started from, the actual mechanism connecting the content to the result (which pages, which keywords, which stage of the funnel), and an honest account of how long it took. An agency that can walk you through the unglamorous middle of how a result happened is one that likely produced it. An agency that jumps straight from "we started working together" to a big number skipped the part that would let you judge whether it's real.
If a case study reads like it was written to close you rather than inform you, treat that as data too. And if every case study on the site somehow ends in a suspiciously round number, ask yourself whether that's the actual outcome or the outcome that photographs best in a pitch deck.
Look for a defined process, not just a promise
Every agency promises quality. Fewer describe how they get there.
Look for specifics, either on their site or in your first exchange with them: how a brief gets built, who reviews for clinical or technical accuracy before a draft reaches you, what happens when a claim can't be verified. Vague answers here ("we just make sure it's good") are a preview of what every future review cycle will feel like: unstructured, and dependent on you catching problems they should have caught first.
Watch for promises that don't match a slow category
If an agency tells you they can get you ranking in 60 days, that's a sign they haven't worked in a YMYL category before, or they're hoping you haven't heard the term.
Health and medical content sits under Google's stricter Your Money or Your Life standards, and a clinical buyer reads more skeptically than a consumer shopping for running shoes. Real movement in this category usually takes 2 to 4 quarters, not 2 months. An agency that quotes you a fast timeline is either inexperienced in health tech specifically, or telling you what you want to hear instead of what's true. Either way, you'll find out which one it was around month 3, after you've already signed.
The agencies worth hiring tend to undersell the early timeline and overdeliver on what happens once the content actually starts ranking. That's a harder pitch to make on a sales call, which is exactly why so few agencies make it.
Check how they price, and what that rewards
Per-word pricing rewards length. Per-article pricing with no strategy attached rewards volume. Neither rewards judgment, which is the thing you're actually paying for when the topic is complex and the reader is skeptical.
A retainer built around a defined scope, with strategy included, tends to reward the right thing: fewer, sharper pieces that a cautious buyer actually finishes reading. Ask what's included beyond the word count. If the answer is only "4 articles a month," you're looking at a vendor. If it includes a strategy call, keyword research and a content brief before anything gets written, you're closer to a partner.
Notice what's missing, not just what's on the page
A site that talks entirely about SEO tactics and says nothing about how a clinical buyer evaluates trust is missing the part of this market that actually decides whether content converts. A wall of client logos with no explanation of why those clients hired them is missing the reasoning you need to make a decision.
The gap is often more informative than what's there. If an agency's whole pitch is speed and volume, with nothing about buyer psychology, procurement caution or regulatory sensitivity, they probably haven't worked in a market like yours long enough for those things to show up unprompted.
Check whether it would survive a compliance reviewer's read
You don't need to run a full legal review on an agency's sample content, but skim it with your compliance or clinical reviewer's eyes for a minute. Are claims sourced or vague? Does anything read like it would get flagged and bounced back for a rewrite at your company?
An agency used to writing for consumer SaaS treats an unverified stat as a minor risk. In a clinical or regulated market, an invented number is the kind of thing that ends up in front of legal, or worse, in front of a clinician who fact-checks it in public. If their sample content wouldn't clear your own review process, it won't clear it once you're the client either.
Look for a point of view, not just a niche
Plenty of agencies will claim health tech as a specialty. Fewer will actually argue for something, or admit where a common approach falls short.
An agency with a real point of view tells you, unprompted, why generic SEO advice underperforms in a regulated market, or why a demo-first funnel loses clinical buyers before they ever request a demo. That's a sign of opinions formed by doing the work, not opinions borrowed from reading about the work.
You can usually spot the difference in how they handle disagreement. A generalist agency will nod along with whatever direction you suggest. One with a real point of view will occasionally push back, on your keyword choice, your headline, your assumption about what your buyer wants to read. That friction is uncomfortable in a first meeting and useful for the next 12 months.
Build a shortlist before you book a single call
Do this filtering first and you'll walk into every call already knowing which 2 agencies are worth your hour. That's the real value of looking before you ask: it turns a 6-week vendor search into a 2-week one, and it means the questions you do ask on the call are sharper, because you're not spending the first 20 minutes finding out whether they understand your market at all.
PulseCopy exists for the buyer doing exactly this kind of screening: a marketing lead or founder in health tech who's tired of re-explaining the basics to a new writer every quarter. If the signals above are what you're checking for, they're also the ones we'd want you to check on us.