Award Winning Medical SEO Campaign Drives 13.7 Million Additional Monthly Visits

Challenge

To improve organic traffic to a leading health and medical site, based in Leeds, with over a million pages.

Solution

The project started with extensive research over a 3 month period conducting analysis around health search trends. We looked at over 10,000 health related search terms and assessed the site's current performance against them. We also assessed the website structure and on-site SEO factors.

The key insight we uncovered was that consumers were often not able to diagnose problems with medical terminology. People were conducting searches online using phrases such as ‘stop baby crying’, ‘heel pain’ and ‘am I depressed?’, rather than the medical equivalent (colic, plantar fasciitis etc.)

The site was performing strongly for the medical condition phrases that a doctor may use, but not the everyday phrases that the majority of consumers were using.

The SEO Works needed to position the website to be visible to everyday people with health concerns. Our strategy was to uplift the “human searchability” of Patient whilst also maintaining and growing the search visibility of medical terms.
Alongside optimising for these terms and medicines, we implemented a strategy to amend the core theme of the website to represent what the everyday person was searching for.

We broke these down into 4 target keyphrase areas: conditions, symptoms, treatment and causes. We identified high potential target search phrases where the site was not already performing, and blended this with longer tail search terms that an authority site should also appear in.

Results

When we started the campaign, the site received 5,250,000 visits from organic searches per month. Two years later that number dramatically increased to 19,000,000 visits per month. The campaign was such a success that it won the the Best B2C Campaign at the Drum Search Awards.