Website Of A Specialized Clinic: Promotion Resulted In Three Times More Organic Traffic

Most of our clients are from the premium segment, and therefore it is necessary to maintain certain internal standards of service quality and communication between patients and staff. One way to achieve this quality is for each patient to be managed by a separate supervisor. Additionally, the medical staff comprises highly qualified doctors with international certifications.

At the beginning of the collaboration, the client’s request was to conduct advertising. However, we promptly recognized that this was only part of the solution. During negotiations and contract signing, the client understood the necessity of implementing SEO strategies as well.

We began by analyzing the channels through which new patients were arriving at the clinic. There were three primary sources:

Partner channel: this is a recommendation format for interaction from some other clinics. When patients seek certain services, these partner clinics recommend our client’s clinic for specialized treatments.

Online advertising: This format includes contextual advertising, targeted advertising, and SEO.

Recommendations directly from friends and relatives of clients: Patients often refer their friends and relatives to the clinic based on their positive experiences.

Initially, the interaction process with each patient was complex. For example, a typical patient journey might include:

Given the complexity of these touchpoints, it was crucial to optimize each stage of the patient’s journey to enhance overall engagement and conversion.

Analytics showed that the organic source of traffic, and therefore sales, were search queries in different systems. At the same time, traffic indicators systematically showed a decline. The reason for this was the specifics of the ranking—the algorithms worked differently in different search engines. For example, a certain query in X search engine will display an article that meets the most narrow topic, but Y search engine will output more general material. And since the clinic’s website contained a lot of information on general topics on its pages, it ranked well on one search engine but not on others.

The root cause of these discrepancies was an update to the ranking algorithms in 2018, which particularly impacted medical websites. As a result, traffic to the clinic’s website was cut in half.

The clinic spent six months attempting to address this decline in traffic, but efforts with other agencies yielded no results. The main issue was the lack of a cohesive strategy; the previous steps were taken haphazardly without a unified approach to site development and optimization.

Start of our work: February 2019. The first step is a full-fledged SEO audit while developing a strategy for promoting the clinic’s website.

We have outlined two of the most important goals: preparing the site for the next update and ranking it higher in the search results.

The combined goal was divided into the following steps:

1. Technical Corrections: Identify and fix all site bugs, errors, and technical issues affecting speed.

2. New Pages Development: Create sections for specific services offered by the clinic.

3. Content Enhancement: Write new articles on relevant medical topics.

We assigned the first two tasks to developers, providing them with detailed technical specifications. We managed the third task ourselves, focusing on content creation.

Ranking in one of the search engines implied the presence of materials with the narrowest topics within the medical field. Such materials existed on the site even before we started working with the clinic, but they had to be re-linked.

Our further audit revealed user demand limits—60,000 search queries—providing insights into potential visibility, semantic frequency, and traffic indicators.

Another evaluation criterion is how popular each query was. We formed a specific sample: those requests that directly related to the services provided by the clinic became the basis for the content plan of future narrow-topic materials for the website.

We decided to build the process based on the following points:

We collaborated with medical experts and specialized copywriters. It was important for us that all the articles we wrote should meet our goals, which means that they should meet the requirements of search engines.

The total volume of new content was 25 articles. We reworked articles that had been on the site for a long time and were considered outdated: they had to be rewritten and relinked, taking into account that search algorithms contain a number of requirements, such as the structure of the material, query mentions, the appearance of articles, and how convenient they are for users.

In some cases, we filtered related user requests to determine whether new articles were needed or existing ones required modifications, improving search engine rankings.

Our efforts led to significant improvements in the site’s search engine rankings across multiple platforms. By March 2019, following another algorithm update, the site ranked even higher. By fall 2019, the search engine indicators reflected substantial growth as a result of our comprehensive SEO work:

At certain points, we saw a decrease in traffic. To understand the reasons and determine the next steps, we conducted a thorough analysis of our client’s clinic’s competitors. One of the most significant cases occurred during the coronavirus pandemic. During this period, the clinic’s patient traffic was the lowest. Although it was logical and expected, the loss of patients resulted in serious losses for the medical clinic.

After analyzing the situation, we get a real picture of how the market for medical services actually behaves. It was important for us to show the clinic that the decline in demand is not unique to them but affected their competitors as well. This comprehensive approach laid the foundation for making informed and rational decisions moving forward.

Demand indicators are compiled in a separate table:

Companies that, like our client in this case, develop thanks to services in highly specialized segments, do not necessarily belong exclusively to the field of medicine, but also to other sectors, such as construction. Regardless of their specific industry, similar companies should follow these strategies:

Maintain Search Engine Visibility: Regularly monitor and control the site’s visibility on search engines. Updates to search algorithms can significantly impact traffic, often causing a notable decline.

Implement Comprehensive Analytics: Use end-to-end analytics to track and analyze the user’s journey on the site. This allows for informed decision-making and strategic planning. Our client’s clinic is currently adopting this approach.