SEO Case Study: Growing Online Visibility for a Medical Practice
Personal website of a urologist-andrologist
– Increase the number of consultation requests and service orders through the website
– Increase traffic from organic search results
– Improve rankings for important keywords and boost the clinic’s brand awareness
April, 2018 - present day
USA, NY
Challenges of the project
Promoting healthcare organizations can be a challenging — and sometimes even fruitless — process for a website if you don’t approach it with the right knowledge, tools, and guidance. We have experience and proven comprehensive solutions for healthcare internet marketing that enable doctors, medical practices, and large healthcare organizations to exceed their marketing goals by attracting patients from organic search.
Our result: Growth of search traffic from 493 to 4,625 visitors.
Team actions
Stages of work:
1. Optimizing a doctor’s website for patient convenience
Providing comprehensive information is the key to converting users into patients — and even into loyal, returning clients of your clinic.
That’s why the first priority should be the structure of service pages and delivering complete, clear content that answers potential patients’ questions. Improving the patient experience on your website significantly increases both lead generation and retention.
The design of your website should include personalized features, fast page speed, mobile-friendliness, and interactive elements.
During the project, we identified the following issues and implemented fixes, which will be described in this case study.
On the website, the services category contained non-professional photos. Example:
The presence of such images does not enhance the clinic’s image and looks unprofessional. After analyzing competitor websites in this medical field, we replaced all visuals with general medical photographs.
The feedback forms looked unfinished and did not match the overall design of the website:
For clients who want to “book online,” our marketer developed a booking form. If a user has questions, they can write them in a special field and receive an answer by email or phone.
Form 1:
Form 2:
Form 3:
A service page without pricing does not convert well in the medical field. It is always a clear advantage if you also specify treatment timelines or procedure durations.
Competitors often use semantic structuring on their service pages and include different types of commercial blocks. For example, one of the commercial ranking factors is the presence of prices. To address this, we added a multi-component pricing table on each service page:
On each service page, we implemented a visually highlighted block with information on how the appointment process works and how patients should prepare for it:
Of course, the information on service pages cannot be used for making a diagnosis — and patients must always be clearly informed of this:
To increase the amount of time users spend on the pages, we implemented a video block on the topic:
To handle informational queries and generate traffic to the website, we implemented a section called “Patient Guide” or “Disease Information,” which included detailed and comprehensive content about stages, treatment, diagnostics, removal, therapy, and more.
Low- and mid-frequency queries were promoted by working through the semantics that were not included in the main core. For this, a new section was implemented on the website: “I Am Interested.”
The implementation of this block significantly expanded the number of phrases for which the website ranks and led to an increase in site traffic:
With the implementation of this block, we were able to work through additional semantics — that is, queries not tracked in the position monitoring system.
For example:
– necrospermia treatment
– penile condyloma treatment
– leukocyturia
– burning after urination
– blood in urine
This made it possible to significantly increase the traffic growth of the promoted website. Below are the analytical data on the dynamics of keyword growth for the site:
General website metrics:
To confirm expertise and authority, each article included a link to the author along with a brief description of the specialist’s credentials.
A well-structured, well-functioning blog can and should generate organic website traffic.
All the necessary information is displayed to users above the fold, and then, to cover the targeted keywords, we place the text further down the page.
2. Development of an Adapted Mobile Version
According to research, about half of all traffic in the medical services sector comes from mobile devices, and conversion rates from phones rank the highest. Therefore, to avoid losing potential clients, the website must be responsive and fast.
As the analytics data show, the main source of traffic to the site comes from mobile devices:
During the analysis, it was found that the website’s page layout for mobile versions was implemented incorrectly. Elements were overlapping each other and becoming unreadable:
Unnecessary navigation elements were hidden in the adaptive version.
For mobile users, it’s better not to display overly long walls of text. That’s why we created a simplified content version specifically for mobile devices. Previously, mobile visitors had to scroll through an unstructured block of text like this:
One of the next steps in structuring the content was placing all the necessary patient information above the fold:
– Booking form:
– Pricing tables:
– The text was placed below these elements.
On the first screen of the adaptive (mobile) version and on desktop, the following information is displayed: “Each service contains brief information about the procedure, preparation, contraindications, the doctor, equipment, and treatment cost, as well as a booking form.”
3. Clinic Reputation
The reputation of a clinic plays a crucial role. After a geo-query (e.g., “clinic in [city]” or “doctor near me”), the second most popular branded search for a clinic or doctor is reviews.
The absence of a positive reputation does not make your website low-quality. However, if many trusted sources speak negatively about your clinic or doctors, this will likely make it more difficult to achieve higher rankings on Google.
To build a positive image of the doctor, we worked on managing reviews. On each service page, a dedicated reviews block was implemented:
Having reviews on service pages is an important ranking factor for medical (and not only medical) services. Just like product reviews influence purchase decisions, service reviews directly affect conversion rates. The reviews section should include as many positive messages as possible, with a short description of the service received and the appointment date.
Additionally, a separate page with all reviews about the doctor was implemented:
At the same time, work was carried out on developing profiles on specialized platforms:
In addition, we worked on building the clinic’s online reputation and monitoring reviews:
4. Development of Additional Functionality on the Doctor’s Website
An active “Ask a Question” form was introduced. This feature provides UGC (User-Generated Content) — free content for your website. UGC (User-Generated Content) is original content created by your audience. To implement this approach, we developed and launched a dedicated section:
In this section, your patients and website users can leave questions they are interested in, and by answering them, the doctor informs the patient about possible further diagnostics.
The implementation of this feature made it possible to:
– increase the time users spend on the site, which is a positive signal for search engines;
– increase the level of trust in the site, not only from users but also from search engines;
– provide an additional stage of interaction with the user, which can be decisive when making a decision about a service.
There is a specific SEO technique called semantic design.
Semantic website design means structuring a web resource based on semantics and the actual demand for services.
When building a semantic core for a medical website, queries that do not have a commercial intent are often overlooked:
- disease…
- causes…
- symptoms…
- diagnostics…
- prevention…
To ensure that such valuable queries are not excluded, we implemented a special block on each commercial service page that incorporated all of these additional informational queries.
This block consists of active links to extended information about the disease. It is implemented using the principle of internal linking to secondary pages. From the informational pages, there is a reverse link with an anchor pointing back to the commercial service page:
Thus, it becomes possible to monopolize the search results. For example, when someone searches for “prostatitis,” several of our relevant pages could appear in the SERP:
- our URL about symptoms;
- our URL about treatment;
- our URL about prevention;
- and so on.
A medical website must confirm its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) through its functionality, design, and content.
Since this site provides video materials and 18+ content, we decided to display an informational banner upon entry with a warning and action buttons: “I am 18 or older” and “I am under 18”.
For all SEO projects we manage, we recommend working with rich snippets, as their implementation increases the page CTR (click-through rate). Here is an example of a rich snippet we implemented for this urologist-andrologist’s website:
5. Local Search Engine Optimization
Medical marketing for doctors has become inherently local — this is a fact that requires no proof. While patients may be willing to travel long distances for a trusted specialist, their primary need is usually to find a doctor close to home or work. To address this, we optimized the urologist’s website pages to ensure they were well-structured and contained local ranking signals directly on the page. For example, the inclusion of the city name (“NY”) in titles, headers, and content helps search engines clearly associate the clinic with its geographic location.
This local optimization improves visibility in queries such as “urologist near me” or “urologist in NY”, ensuring the site attracts relevant patients searching for medical services in the immediate area.
As a result of all the actions described above, the website achieved first place in search engine results, with 90% of its pages now generating organic traffic.
RegisTeam has unique expertise in promoting medical websites to help you attract the patients you need from the Internet. As a certified Google Partner, we strictly adhere to Google’s highest standards — both in terms of ethics and project performance. This is confirmed by the analytical data presented in the project.
Results
So, what was the situation at the very beginning of this project? Traffic and keyword rankings were at an extremely low level, and the site’s structure and service pages were poorly developed. Since Google classifies medical websites as YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) resources, they fall under stricter E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) requirements. On this website, these critical parameters were completely neglected.
The primary goals set for the RegisTeam SEO team were:
- to increase the doctor’s brand visibility,
- and to grow organic traffic by at least two times.
And here are the RESULTS we achieved:
In March 2019 (the start of the project), the website received 1,058 visits from organic search.
In March 2020 (one year after the start of the project), the website received 3,610 visitors from organic search.
In March 2022 (three years after the start of the project), the website received 4,964 visitors from organic search.
This is exactly the kind of consistent growth in website promotion that can be achieved with the right SEO strategy. Promoting medical service websites is a complex and highly competitive niche, subject to special search engine requirements (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Only years of experience and the precise recommendations of RegisTeam SEO specialists can drive users to the site and convert their clicks into loyal, long-term clients.
Screenshots from the rank-tracking system show a situation where most keywords dropped out of the TOP results. This issue occurred because, for technical reasons, the website became temporarily inaccessible to users. However, we continuously monitor the availability of each project using uptime monitoring services. This allows us to respond quickly and effectively to any incident that may occur with the website.
Example of website availability data recorded by the monitoring service, with notifications sent directly to email.
