How Leveraging Consumer Language And SEO Best Practices Led To A 10x Organic Traffic Increase

A national healthcare provider with 100+ locations approached the Marketing Garage to improve their organic Google rankings and local maps rankings. Although they were the leader in their category, they felt that they were underrepresented in search engines and were ranking poorly for a variety of valuable keywords.

Through a combination of extensive keyword research to uncover the language that consumers actually use, along with the implementation of SEO best practices, we were able to reach first page rankings for a variety of high value keywords. This ultimately created a monthly 10x increase in traffic from search engines.

Although our client is the national leader in their category, they were largely underrepresented in search engines at both the local and national level. After popping the hood, we found that they were ranking relatively poorly while missing out on significant keyword targeting opportunities.

Their site was semi-optimized, but had significant room for improvement. The largest problem was that they were not targeting the most valuable keywords. Instead of optimizing for consumer language, their focus was on acronyms with multiple meanings or medical terms that most consumers wouldn’t know.

At the local level, many of their clinics were also ranking lower than their smaller competitors. They lacked a standard template to follow, and many locations had minor but costly mistakes impacting their ability to rank in Google maps.

After popping the hood on their website, we found a couple key areas to improve, the most significant being a change in their targeted keywords. Originally, their targeted keywords were more geared towards professionals than consumers. To fix this, we performed extensive keyword research and found a couple useful trends that allowed us to beat the competition.

Our client’s healthcare category provides products that treat a common medical condition which some people may feel self-conscious about. This meant that consumers were frequently googling their symptoms and using slang or other informal language in an attempt to self-diagnose. We found that the other competitors in this category were completely missing this trend, instead also targeting medical terms that most people wouldn’t know.

We also took advantage of another interesting search trend. While consumers were more likely to use unofficial language while self-diagnosing, when attempting to treat the condition, they switched to using very specific medical language. We found that they tended to know which devices and add-ons they needed. These consumers began to use acronyms and other terms that they would not have used during the self-diagnosis stage, our theory being that at this stage a professional likely told them exactly what they needed. We took advantage of this trend, optimizing for specific medical devices that other competitors missed.

Our client’s on-page SEO was also updated to follow all of the latest best practices. We found significant room for improvement, especially on the home page. While deeper pages of their website were optimized, their homepage was not and was used more as a flow-through page. This is a common and significant mistake since Google generally sees your homepage as the most authoritative and as a result it’s most likely to rank.

All 100+ local maps listings were improved to follow an optimized template so that all information was organized, accurate, and the proper categories were used. We also made sure that each maps listing was connected to the proper corresponding local page on our client’s website, and corrected all information that didn’t match the website. This helps to improve the credibility of your listing for Google’s algorithm. Not using matching addresses, phone numbers, hours, or other information is a common mistake that we see.

We saw an almost immediate growth in our targeted rankings and traffic. These keyword rankings continued to grow for over a year even after the completion of the project. After the keywords reached their top ranks, we saw a monthly improvement of over 10x the traffic from search engines compared to our pre-project monthly benchmark. Search engine traffic shifted from a small contributor to the largest source of traffic for our client.

A few years later, we were asked for a second time to further improve our client’s SEO. Although still relatively strong, their traffic was beginning to stagnate and their rankings had began to decrease.

This is a common problem that we see when SEO projects are not maintained over time. The Google Algorithm is constantly changing, the terms that people use change, and it’s easy to make SEO mistakes as multiple stakeholders make changes to a website.

In addition to correcting all previous mistakes, we also took advantage of an interesting search trend in this category. Consumers were now using more exact language than ever, now searching for specific brands and product numbers at much higher rates than they were a few years ago. We used this to optimize the site structure and build out individual product pages.

After making further updates, improvements, and fixing common mistakes which can build up over time, we were able to again hit new highs in rankings and traffic, with 2 of our most valuable terms reaching top 3 positions for the first time.