Case Study Childrens Healthcare
Search Performance Turnaround for a Reputable Healthcare Education Website
Increase in non-brand clicks
Audited SEO checkpoints
Visitor growth in first 90 days
The Situation
A major educational healthcare website was launched in 1995 as a resource for parents, teens, and kids seeking information about pediatric medical conditions. The site eventually blossomed into a premier pediatric healthcare information hub boasting more than 12M monthly organic visits, with quality medical content reviewed by experienced physicians.
Fast forward to 2023, the team managing the site had developed a system for publishing content from the “mothership” to a wide number of pediatric clinic websites across the world. This opened the door to healthy partnerships with other hospitals– but not without introducing challenges for growing SEO traffic to the mothership. Content duplication coupled with a series of technical SEO issues eventually led to negative traffic trends, which were further amplified by impacts from updates to Google’s organic ranking algorithms.
The Transformation
By completing an SEO audit, providing prioritized focus areas for SEO evolution, and recommendations for a more SEO-friendly way of licensing content, Adept helped the client team begin the road to SEO recovery. Following the audit, Adept has worked with internal teams to implement recommendations. Within the first 3 months of SEO implementation, the site had recovered 4.9MM organic clicks (a 22% increase period-over-period).
The Work
The key focus areas identified in the audit were addressing content duplication, improving website authority, enhancing visibility in relevant (in-reach) SERPs, and reinforcing the technical foundation. With these focus areas, Adept and the internal team set out to future-proof the SEO strategy for the primary content-hub website– reversing the negative trend and mitigating impacts from future algorithm updates.
Addressing the duplicate content concerns also meant reimagining the system for licensing content to other websites. In many cases, these other websites were earning organic traffic from content that originated on the content-hub—SEO-so related changes on the content-hub had the potential to also impact these licensee partners.
In addition to support for the other SEO focus areas, Adept developed a series of options for managing licensed content—which required some creative and thoughtful departures from the standard SEO best practices. Each option was plotted with expected impact to licensees vs the expected impact to the content-hub. This allowed the client stakeholders to have informed discussions on the best way to proceed.
The Issues We Solved.
Adept’s audit revealed several operational challenges as well as low-hanging fruit for recovering lost organic traffic.
The site had a significant amount of quality content—but much of it was difficult for users and search engines to find
Website content was being licensed out to a wide number of partner websites, contributing to major performance limitations as a result of content duplication
The audit surfaced many SEO issues, but resource limitations and approval processes meant issues had to be thoughtfully prioritized based on the expected level of impact