Anonymised and sector-framed. Figures are the client’s own, reported the same way each month, and shown here with their permission.
A functional-medicine clinic with genuine clinical credentials was effectively invisible for the diagnostics it actually offered. At an average position of 27.7, it was stranded on page three, so patients searching for exactly what the clinic delivered were finding competitors instead. The credentials were never the problem. The site described the practice in the clinic's own language, not in the words patients typed when they were looking for a specific test.
The credentials were never the problem. The words on the page were.
Started with how patients actually search
We began by mapping the real language patients use when looking for functional diagnostics, separating clinical terminology from the plain-English and test-specific queries people type into search. That told us the clinic was optimised for how practitioners describe their work rather than how patients look for it, which is why strong credentials were not translating into visibility. The gap between the two vocabularies became the brief for everything that followed.
Rebuilt content around the tests, not the practice
Rather than one broad services page, we structured content around the specific diagnostics patients search for, giving each its own clear, intent-matched page. Every page answered the questions a patient brings to that test: what it is, what it shows, who it is for, and what happens next. This let the clinic finally rank for the exact things it delivered instead of competing on generic, undifferentiated terms.
Tightened on-page and local relevance
With the structure right, we did the on-page work: titles, headings and body copy aligned to each query, internal links connecting related tests, and clean, unique metadata across the set. Because much of the demand carried local intent, we made the city-level signals explicit so the clinic surfaced for people searching for a given test in its area, not just for the condition in the abstract.
Kept the medical content credible and measured
Functional medicine is a space where overclaiming is easy and costly, so we wrote to be accurate and trustworthy rather than promotional. The content leaned on the clinic's real expertise and let the specifics do the persuading, which is exactly what both patients and search engines reward on health topics. Senior hands on every page meant the clinical nuance survived the rewrite intact.
The core shift was matching content to intent. Moving the average position from 27.7 to 10.9 took the clinic from page three, where almost no one looks, to the visible end of the results, and that jump is what carried the +19% in impressions: the pages were finally eligible for the searches patients were already making. Structuring content around individual diagnostics rather than the practice as a whole is what made those pages relevant to specific, high-intent queries.
Visibility only matters if it converts to visits, and it did, with organic clicks up 27%. The clearest proof of the approach is the SIBO test page reaching an average position of 1.1 for its city, effectively the top result for a patient searching that exact test locally. That is the pattern the whole rebuild was designed to repeat: the right page, in the patient's words, at the moment of the search.