Certain Types of Websites Receive More Scrutiny from Google than others
These are known as YMYL sites, which stands for ‘Your Money, Your Life.’
Essentially, the acronym refers to any website that could potentially negatively impact a user’s health, happiness, and finances. Therefore, websites from the medical, legal, and financial sectors all qualify as YMYL.
Google wants to keep low-quality websites that spread misinformation out of its search results, especially the top-ranked organic positions.
That’s why YMYL websites must adhere to extremely strict standards for safety and trustworthiness. The content they produce must be factually accurate, high-quality, and helpful in order to rank well.
As a result, doing SEO for YMYL websites is a challenging endeavor requiring top-notch expertise.
When done right, SEO can drastically improve the online visibility of medical practices, build brand awareness, and generate more patients.
In this medical SEO case study, we’ll share the story of how we achieved a 387% increase in a behavioral therapist’s organic traffic in less than 6 months.
Through a combination of airtight content creation (with rigorous fact checking) and a clever backlink strategy, we were able to drastically improve the site’s keyword rankings – leading to a massive influx of traffic.
Just look at this upward trend:
As you can see, their traffic grew from literally nothing to a consistent rise to the top (with several big spikes in between where we capitalized on trending keywords).
How did we do it?
Stay tuned to find out!
The Client: A Behavioral Therapist Office with 28 Years of Experience
This time, our client runs a behavioral therapy practice in New York specializing in treating anxiety and mood-based disorders.
She’s been in practice since 1995 and boasts incredible expertise in her line of work. In fact, her work has been cited in over 200 publications worldwide.
Needless to say, she runs a well-known and well-respected practice that attracts patients from all walks of life.
The only problem was the client’s online visibility.
As you can see in the graph above, they were generating next-to-no traffic at all for a very long time.
Even for well-known local businesses, online marketing through search engines is a must in the current era, especially post-pandemic.
2020 saw a huge uptick in telemedicine and virtual appointments, meaning visibility on search engines (and the capability to see patients remotely) became more important than ever.
As this study points out, virtual medicine has enjoyed staying power due to its convenience, and telehealth remains extremely prevalent to this day (similar to how remote working remains popular).
Thus, medical practices that were able to thrive on in-house patient visits and word-of-mouth referrals pre-pandemic had to transition into the digital space. Namely, they had to start advertising through their website and on search engines.
Our client got in touch with us after realizing they needed to strengthen their online presence due to their patient’s shifting priorities (i.e., finding them online and wanting to schedule virtual visits).
They found a few of our testimonials and reviews online and decided to get in touch for a free SEO consultation. The client described how despite their flawless reputation and bustling practice, they were struggling to gain any traction online.
The problem?
Their website wasn’t optimized for SEO
Since a lot of work needed to be done in order for the site to start generating traffic, we put the client on a Star SEO campaign.
Unlike our standalone SEO products, Star SEO is a fully managed service where we connect clients with a dedicated campaign manager. The manager then uses a combination of all our products to develop a cohesive SEO strategy for the client’s website.
It’s our go-to diagnosis whenever a website needs top-to-bottom SEO work, which was definitely the case for this website.
The SEO Audit: Optimizing the Site and Looking For Easy Wins
First things first, we had to audit the client’s website to ensure crucial SEO factors were in order.
These include:
- Looking for any major indexing errors on Google Search Console
- Checking for duplicate content
- Analyzing the site’s internal linking structure
- Beefing up thin content (any page that has less than 1,000 words)
Once these technical factors are squared away, we move on to looking for easy-win opportunities. These are keywords that the website already ranks for, just not in one of the top positions. Any keyword ranking in positions 4 – 30 qualifies as an easy-win opportunity.
With some basic optimizations, easy-win pages can start ranking higher in just a few weeks instead of months. This is because:
- The content is already ranking for the keyword, making it easier to rank higher
- The web page already appears in Google’s index, so you don’t have to wait for indexing (which can take weeks or months)
In this client’s case, we only discovered a handful of easy-win opportunities. This was because the website didn’t contain much content, but we were about to change that.
The Strategy: 6 – 8 Blogs Per Month + Backlinks for Core Pages
In order to rank for trending keywords in your industry, you have to create content centered around them.
Otherwise, there won’t be anywhere on your website for the keywords to appear.
This is why blogging has become such an integral part of SEO. By creating blogs for trending keywords, you’ll attract members of your target audience to your website in droves.
Since the client’s site was light on content, we churned out 6 – 8 high-quality blogs per month.
Bear in mind that these were YMYL blogs, meaning the stakes were extra high for our writers. It was crucial that they only include 100% factual information backed up by trusted sources.
Luckily, our team of writers is used to this pressure, so they knocked it out of the park.
Besides blogging our butts off, we also incorporated a link-building strategy where we built backlinks pointing at the site’s main service pages – in turn giving them a strong boost in the search rankings.
Our primary method was to target relevant link insertions.
In particular, we found instances on other medical sites where it made perfect sense to link to one of our client’s blogs or services. This made the outreach process extremely easy, and we didn’t have to create much original content to obtain valuable backlinks.
The Results: 387% Boost in Traffic, Ranking for 2.4K Relevant Keywords
Once the blogs we wrote and backlinks we built took effect, the client’s website took off in a big way.
Their traffic shot up by 387% and has been on a steady rise ever since.
They’re also ranking for 2,000+ keywords related to behavioral therapy in their location, which has brought in a ton of new patients.
Do you want to dominate the local search results for your medical practice’s niche?
Star SEO is your ticket to simplified SEO success, so don’t wait to get in touch so that we can discuss your specific needs!
