How we transformed the organic SEO of a skin surgery brand

We recently had the privilege of leading a transformative SEO campaign for a chain of private skin surgery clinics – this is the story of how we did it.

The company we partnered with was a well-known and respected brand. With a strong reputation and a loyal customer base, they had successfully established clinics across the UK.

Despite its existing success, the brand wanted to further solidify its dominance in two of its core locations: Birmingham and London. These cities were home to their most established and profitable clinics, with the most potential for further expansion.

In both Birmingham and London, the market for private skin surgery is highly competitive, with many other clinics vying for the attention of potential clients. Our client understood that to maintain and grow their leadership position, they needed to continuously attract new clients whilst retaining existing ones.

Your money or your life

In SEO, few challenges are as exciting – and daunting – as helping a client in the highly competitive YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) sector.

YMYL is a term used by Google to classify websites that can potentially impact a person’s future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety. The YMYL sector includes topics that are key to individuals’ well-being and life decisions – including health and medical information.

Because of the potential impact these topics can have on a person’s life, Google applies stricter scrutiny to YMYL pages. The search engine emphasises the importance of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for these types of content, meaning that websites in the YMYL sector must provide highly accurate, reliable, and credible information to rank well in search results.

This is done to protect users from misleading, incorrect, or harmful information.

With bags of experience in healthcare marketing, and a rigorous focus on SEO best practices, we knew we were capable of steering the client’s website to growth despite the challenges their sector poses. 

Understanding the client’s needs

Understanding client needs is the first requirement in any digital marketing or SEO campaign, because it forms the foundation for developing an effective and tailored strategy.

SEO isn’t just about applying a set of best practices; it’s about understanding the context of the website and its market. No two SEO campaigns are the same.

Factors such as the client’s industry, the competitive landscape, the current state of their website, and their business objectives all influence the development of an SEO strategy. By deeply understanding the client’s specific needs, we can tailor our approach to address their unique situation rather than applying a generic, one-size-fits-all solution.

We also believe that SEO should not operate in a vacuum. The ultimate goal is to support the client’s broader business objectives, whether that’s increasing leads, driving sales, building brand awareness, or reducing reliance on paid search. Understanding these goals helps in designing an SEO strategy that directly contributes to the client’s success. 

This detailed understanding also helps when creating content. Content that is highly relevant to the audience’s needs and interests is more likely to rank well in search engines and convert visitors into customers.

This means understanding not just who the target audience is, but also what they are searching for, the problems they need solutions to, and the language they use to describe those problems.

Our client came to us with a clear objective: grow and consolidate their market share in Birmingham and London. With significant monthly spend on PPC campaigns in those areas, they were keen to also see if they could reduce costs by boosting their organic search presence. 

Developing a multi-faceted strategy

To achieve this goal, we needed to increase their visibility in search results for location-specific and also selected short-tail keywords, as well as improving the overall quality of their website.

We devised a comprehensive strategy that focused on three key areas: location silos, broadening website quality, and conversion rate optimisation.

1. Building location silos for targeted visibility

We knew that targeting local search terms was critical for driving organic traffic to the client’s clinics in Birmingham and London. To do this, we created dedicated content silos for these locations.

This involved developing “Skin Clinic Birmingham” and “Skin Clinic London” hubs, each designed to capture location-specific search queries.

From these main pages, we linked out to individual service pages for key procedures such as “Mole Removal.” Each page was meticulously crafted with bespoke content, including FAQs developed internally and also from the “People Also Ask” sections in search engine results.

This ensured that our content was not only relevant but also directly answered the questions potential clients were asking.

Additionally, we worked closely with the client to optimise their Google Business profiles for both Birmingham and London, encouraging them to also develop a proactive review approach. This helped bolster the local SEO efforts and ensured that their location pages ranked as strongly as possible.

2. Enhancing website quality across the board

Improving the site’s overall technical and content quality was our next priority. Because we had introduced location-based silos, this meant we could pivot the top-level navigation pages to target short-tail keywords that would attract a broader audience.

Short-tail keywords are typically more general and have higher search volumes than long-tail keywords. By optimising top-level navigation pages for these broad terms, you increase the likelihood of these pages appearing in search results for a wider audience.

To achieve this we went through a thorough process of content and metadata optimisation, refining the URL and site structure, and addressing technical issues like page speed and internal linking.

One of the more challenging aspects of this process was dealing with PPC-related pages that were cannibalising organic traffic. When both PPC and organic pages target the same keywords, they can end up competing for the same search queries.

This can cause search engines to split the relevance signals between these pages. As a result, neither page may rank as well as a single, well-optimised page would, leading to lower overall visibility in organic search.

To mitigate this, we no-indexed a significant number of these pages, preventing them from competing with our organic content. This detailed approach ensured that our SEO efforts had the maximum possible impact.

3. Improving conversions with conversion rate optimisation

As an agency, we want to help people improve their organic rankings and website traffic – but our main priority is to help them get more customers online and grow. 

So this means improving traffic is only part of the battle; converting that traffic into leads and consultations is equally important. Whilst not part of the initial brief, we convinced the client to look at CRO.

We implemented a rigorous conversion rate optimization (CRO) process, starting with the installation of Microsoft Clarity to gain insights from heatmaps and user recordings.

Based on this data, we made several strategic changes to the core landing pages:

• We introduced a carousel for “Before & After” photos to reduce scroll depth and keep visitors engaged.
• We repositioned calls-to-action (CTAs) higher on the page, ensuring they were visible to the high amount of users who scrolled less.
• We added short biographies of the lead surgeon to build trust with potential customers.
• We made customer testimonials more prominent to enhance credibility further.

These changes were also implemented on the PPC landing pages, leading to a significant increase in conversion rates for key services like Gynecomastia, which jumped from 4% to 10%.

Overcoming challenges

Every campaign faces hurdles, and ours was no different. One of the major challenges we encountered was keyword cannibalisation.

Initially, many top-level navigation pages ranked for Birmingham-related terms, which conflicted with our new Birmingham silo. 

We resolved this by:

• De-optimising the pages within the top-level navigation for terms related to Birmingham;
• Removing the address of the head clinic in Birmingham from pages within the top-level navigation;
• Interlinking to the Birmingham silo from the footer & Contact Us page;
• Assisting the brand in configuring their Google Business profiles to make it clear the business was a chain of clinics based around the country;
• Manually-submitting all pages in the Birmingham silo within Google Search Console.

Another challenge was operating within a YMYL industry, where accuracy and credibility are paramount. We tackled this by ensuring all medical content was rigorously reviewed and approved by the client’s internal team.

We also emphasised the expertise of the clinic’s principle surgeons through detailed biographies and focused on building E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) signals throughout the site.

Delivering growth

So did we achieve our mission of delivering SEO growth for the client? Definitely. Organic traffic increased by 321.7% year-on-year, with a significant surge as the campaign progressed and our strategies took full effect.

Keyword visibility also saw a massive boost, with tracked keywords increasing from 3.9% to 12.9%, an overall increase of 230.8%.

Our location-based silos performed exceptionally well. The Birmingham silo alone attracted over 800 visits in August and the London silo achieved similar success.

In terms of conversions, organic search goal completions more than doubled year on year! What’s more, this strategy is scalable. As the clinic’s presence is developed in other major cities, we have continued to work with them to build out other location hubs targeting more local searches.

Perhaps most importantly, we achieved our client’s goal of reducing their reliance on PPC. Organic traffic’s share of total website traffic increased from 18.4% to 45.1%, while PPC traffic’s share dropped from 61.9% to 45.7%.

This shift not only lowered their monthly healthcare PPC spend but also enhanced the overall efficiency and ROI of their digital marketing efforts.

Driving results within the health and medical sector

This campaign stands out as a great example of how targeted healthcare SEO strategies can drive significant results in a highly competitive market. Despite the challenges of working within the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) space and the ambitious goals set by our client, we exceeded expectations across the board. 

By combining strong technical SEO, precise content strategies, and data-led conversion rate optimisation (CRO), we were able to transform the client’s digital presence, drive quality traffic, and significantly boost conversions.

For any business facing similar challenges, this case study demonstrates the power of a well-rounded, data-driven approach to SEO. It’s not just about driving traffic—it’s about driving the right traffic, and then turning those visitors into valuable leads and customers.