As Sistrix puts it on their blog, "many SEOs do great work but may not have gained that much visibility". In this case study we tackle one of the three projects that achieved the greatest visibility in the dental clinic sector.
The dental clinics and dentists sector is one of the most competitive and has grown significantly in recent years. According to the Spanish General Council of Dentists, there are currently 4,840 licensed dentists in Barcelona alone.
In the case of this Barcelona clinic, the evolution over the past year has grown progressively. Let's see how.
Step one: defining a solid strategy and actions
The first change came with a new design to refresh the clinic's image. We took advantage of this redesign to organize the large volume of content the project had, content of great quality, but poorly classified from an SEO standpoint and without a clear structural organization, which harmed user experience and, by extension, its ranking.
We ran a full analysis and, based on that, designed a strategic plan with specific actions. The most notable include:
Visibility index evolution
In the chart below, we can see how the project's visibility index grew after launching the new design in February 2017. According to the Sistrix tool, this project was among the three sites that grew the most in traffic in 2017, as shown in their article SEO – Newcomer of 2017.
Organic traffic evolution driven by the actions taken
Since the launch in February 2017, and as we can see in the Semrush chart, there's clear organic traffic growth stemming from the actions executed.
As a point to keep in mind, we observed that the estimated cost of the keywords ranked through organic traffic represents a saving of $42,300 per month for this client, given these are transactional keywords with high CPCs.
This is a project generating a high volume of content daily, so it's important to run a terminology analysis to avoid cannibalization issues, among others.
Since then, the volume of ranked keywords has also grown considerably, reaching roughly 6,000 terms, 637 of them in Top 3 and 1,878 in Top 10.
Below, some of the most important keywords for the sector:
Key factors of the SEO strategy we implemented
Of all the actions executed, the following stand out as the main ones:
1 – Defining the information architecture. We analysed what structure the new website should have in order to apply the necessary improvements, respecting the client's guidelines around featured treatments. We restructured the site, establishing the level each section should have. The result was better content organization and a better distribution of link juice, improving both traffic and rankings.
2 – Content restructuring and quality. Keeping the structure from the previous point, built around core services, we ran a deep analysis of every URL that made up the original site with the goal of grouping them by type. The outcome was both an expansion of the content and coherent distribution of it. This action gave the main pages quality content for both users and Google.
3 – Internal linking. This was a project with a large number of URLs spread across pages and posts that made crawling difficult and delivered a poor user experience. Building on the new architecture described above, we set guidelines to help distribute link juice properly.
Project summary
We started from a project with an enormous amount of content and major architectural and usability shortcomings. We set a strategy to fix all the on-page issues ahead of the new design.
Between 1 February 2017 and 30 April 2018, organic traffic grew by 1,324.05% since we started the actions, and the curve shows a clear upward trend. Organic visits went from 129,309 to 1,841,421, with an average of 400 daily visits from Barcelona alone.
Which factors drove this change?
If we assess the most relevant factors that contributed to the project's improvement, we'd highlight the following:
We keep running regular on-page SEO reviews along with a defined link-building strategy to sustain the project's evolution and reach new goals.