67% of requests in Top 3 for a multidisciplinary medical and diagnostic center

Client

A multidisciplinary diagnostic and treatment centre in one of the regional centres in western Ukraine, providing a wide range of medical services for adults and children

Our Task

Growth of positions and targeted search traffic in priority areas:

• General medicine, consultations, manipulations
• Surgery
• Diagnostics

Background, Project’s Features

Region: one of the regional centers of western Ukraine and the region

Search engine: Google

Site platform: CMS based on YII framework

Language: Ukrainian, Russian

Start of work: May 2021

Niche Analysis

The medical niche in this region has an average level of competition — ranking in the top 10 for specific search requests:

• Clinics from the target geo
• Clinics from other regions (untarget geo)
• Health service aggregators
• Niche, specialized clinics
• Information sites

Competitor Analysis

At the stage of accepting the project, our experts carried out a comparative analysis of the basic metrics of the promoted site and competitors (all data taken from the Ahrefs.com service):

As you can see, compared to competitors, the initial situation is quite high: the clinic’s website ranks in the top positions for a lot of keywords and has the second-highest traffic from organics among competitors.

As far as the link factor is concerned, the domain being promoted is inferior to the main competitor in terms of quality and number of backlinks.

Based on the situation, we decided to work in two directions:

1. Maintaining and improving existing positions for priority keywords
2. Expanding the structure and creating new landing pages for additional organic traffic growth

Work Process

Internal Optimisation

At the beginning of the work, we carried out a detailed technical audit of the site to identify critical errors in internal optimization, checking it due to 44 points. The site needed improvement on 19 items, 12 of which have high priority.

A list of all the recommendations:

The specification was implemented by our specialists in two phases over a period of 2 months.

Checking The Site Compliance With The Assessors Guidelines

In the medical niche, EAT factors (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) are extremely important. We have analyzed these website factors and made recommendations on how to improve them.

An approximate list of improvements we have made to the website is provided next.

Pages of the Services section:

• Gave advice on how to write informative and useful texts
• Added feedback functionality
• Implemented a Frequently Asked Questions block about the services provided
• Added an Additional Services block

Service pages:

• Put the feedback block on the main page
• Set up a Licence And Certificates page
• Gave advice on creating the About Clinic, Rules And Regulations, Payment Methods, and Vacancies pages

Link Profile

As you know, external website optimization is extremely important, especially given the competition in the medical niche.

First of all, our experts conducted an audit of the existing link mass, analyzing all donors by Ahrefs and Search Console, and rejecting low-quality platforms using the Google Disavow Tool.

At the start of the work, the site being promoted had these indicators:

• Donor domains — 105
• The total number of links — 402
• DR — 21
• Dofollow links — 27%
• There are 44 phrases in the anchor list, mostly branded anchors
• We sent 72 domains with low-quality and spammy links with disavow

During a year of promotion we received 187 links placed on 102 unique domains. Every month we published 10-15 links to the promoted domain on quality donors.

We started posting articles from regional thematic and media sites, gradually moving to top thematic and all-Ukrainian mass media.

Screenshot of the growth graph for donor domains and organic traffic in ahrefs.com:

All donors are thoroughly checked by our experts using our own donor quality scoring model.

Semantic Core And Content

With these goals in mind, over the 17 months of work on the project, we assembled a semantic core of 1,587 targeted commercial requests, divided into 187 semantic groups.

Examples:

Based on the collected SC, our experts prepared the tasks to revise existing texts or write new ones.

The written texts met all the requirements of expertise and authority — the information was presented in an encyclopedic form and provided comprehensive answers to all the users’ questions on the topic. In addition, the articles and descriptions were supplemented with visual content: images, videos, and ‘before and after’ photos.

An example of the structure of a textual description of a service page:

• What it is
• Indications for the procedure
• Contraindications, possible side effects
• Preparation for the procedure
• How the procedure is conducted
• Restrictions after the procedure
• Recommendations for care
• FAQ

For each page, our experts wrote optimized meta tags, title and description, including the necessary keywords, and added emoji to increase CTR.

Examples of snippets from priority requests:

Structure Extending

We made recommendations to expand the structure of categories and subcategories for clinic services to cover all search requests.

For example, for the Ultrasound category, after modifications, the structure was as follows:

Results

In 17 months of work on the project, our experts have managed to increase the percentage of output of priority category requests:

• Top 10 — up to 84%
• Top 5 — up to 76%
• Top 3 — up to 67%

The number of ranking requests:

• Top 10 — increased from 602 to 1,371
• Top 3 — increased from 388 to 739

Below, in the screenshots, examples of positions for several priority groups are presented.

Bringing the site’s pages to the top 3 for existing and newly created pages respectively increased the site’s traffic.

Free search traffic in May 2022 increased by 1% compared to the same period last year (the situation in the country is worth considering), due to the increase in the visibility of the project, the subsidence of traffic due to the war was covered.

Free search traffic in August 2022 was up 11% compared to the same period last year.

What Next

• Complete the implementation of recommendations to improve the EAT factors (creation of the Media About Us, About Clinic pages)
• Implement an English-language version of the website
• Add the FAQ section for all category and subcategory pages
• Expand semantics and create new pages
• Work on increasing the amount of the links

Conclusion

Despite the fact that competition in the niche is constantly increasing, and strong competitors are ranking at the top, our team managed to take the expected positions and achieve our traffic growth targets.

Key success factors:

• A comprehensive approach to promotion work: technical, internal, and external optimization
• Work on the EAT factors
• Work on expanding semantics and creating new landing pages
• Expert content produced by the clinic’s staff

Client’s feedback:

We are not new to working on promoting our website. We value a personal approach, but we also have our own vision, so the work must be in line with our values. We are demanding, so every action has to answer the question “why.” We respect the users of the clinic’s website, so, for the sake of caring for people, information authenticity and convenience are important.

We are glad that Aweb has become our partner because the company understands the values of our cooperation and what we work for. I can say with certainty that the advantages of our work are consistency, transparency of processes, comprehensiveness, and good communication. And most importantly, the result itself.

There have been several occasions when extra work needed to be done urgently, and it is pleasing that the manager and team then responded quickly.

I also note that there has been an understanding of the difficulties of working since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Developing a website is always a collaboration; you cannot put all the responsibility solely on the contractor, because it is a team effort where everyone has to work together. Thank Aweb for taking on part of the responsibility. I wish you success!

– Anna Ovsyankina, Marketing Specialist

Project Participants

Project Manager: Oleksandra Nesina

Optimizer: Lehkobyt Andrii

Link Specialist: Yevhen Fedchenko