Medical SEO Case Study – Month 3

Start a new medical website. Write one post per day. Do this for an entire year. Document your results. Don’t rely on your online persona or network, so that you don’t influence the results.

This was (and still is) my medical SEO experiment, which started “for real“, in February 2024. The irony of launching a year-long experiment one month after the year had started is not lost on me, but, hey, it’s better than starting in October, right?

Ready to see how our secret website is doing now that we are sitting on 61 posts?

Ranking Stats after 2 Months

Ahrefs Stats Comparison

Let’s remember how our stats looked 1 month before:

We all know that Ahrefs stats are estimates, so I’m not banking too much on them, but on the other hand, in these initial months, as I write ~30 articles/month,

I just want to see GROWTH in the number of ranked keywords. impressions (in Google Search Console) and if there are any indexation issues. We don’t expect too many pages to hit top3 rankings immediately, but they need to get indexed and ranked.

GSC Rankings and Comparisons

Since we started this experiment, the website is slowly accruing impressions and clicks. Not a huge deal, but March has been way better than February (if you look at the comparison) and I’m pretty excited to see our next 30 days into the experiment.

All the pages are getting indexed FAST, we are talking here maybe hours and my topical map is already showing some “trends”.

These initial comparisons are a goldmine of information at the moment, as I can now study my per page trends, see which of my topical map “nodes” are performing well, and look at performance based on new criteria:

• who is the author? We have 3 main authors on the website, one with a pretty strong social media presence and 2 who don’t really bother with it;
• hunting for featured snippets – some “QA” type of posts can rank for these as well, I’ll track to see which can gain the snippet;
• key takeaways, extra media (videos, new images) etc.

There are many tweaks I can make, once I get my initial rankings in. Not to mention that articles do need to “sit” a little, let’s not forget the website is very young, so it lacks the authority others have after being online for many years.

I do not post the perfect articles either, the most are properly researched and provide a comprehensive view on the subject, but I’m not obsessing about this either as we do have 30 posts/month on average to publish, plus my ongoing client work and family.

At such an early stage, what matters for me is to see overall trends and progress:

Our impressions are going up

For me, this is good news, since all the new content is getting indexed and ranked.

One of my first checks (even during my SEO audits) is to see if we don’t have any “crawled not indexed” or “discovered not indexed” pages.

I’ve audited websites with hundreds of blog posts published and 90% of them NOT even indexed, which is a huge roadblock, as you cannot rank something that doesn’t appear in the “database”.

Our Clicks Are Getting More Stable

As you can see in the snapshot below, when we started out, our best days got us 2 clicks the most, then we had a few with 3 or 4. In this report you see 2 days with 5 organic clicks and, as I write this report, we already have 2 days with 6 clicks.

I don’t pop the champagne yet, it’s not a huge milestone either, but, again, I am looking for progress, especially during this very rough algorithm update.

We didn’t only survive the carnage, we are actually growing steadily.

The GSC Achievements tab shows progress, as I write this, we have passed 60 clicks already. (I do let data sit for a few days since the Search Console doesn’t give me instant information. So, by the time I got some time to write this report, we’re on to 70 clicks)

OK, enough stats, let’s see what we did and how April looks like:

What I Did in March

Lauched a simple PR campaign

As I mentioned in the past report, we launched a press release. Nothing too fancy or huge, but it allowed us to acquire some backlinks. I haven’t started outreach yet, will probably wait for a few more months and then invest time and money in it.

The entire idea of the experiment is to try to keep it simple and easy to achieve even by aspiring bloggers or small businesses. While not all would be able to post daily, even 1-2 posts/week can make a difference if you have a good strategy in place.

Started Being More Active in Social Media

I am NOT a social media person, but this experiment has to look as real as possible and most small businesses or medical practices are trying to tackle this traffic source as well.

We have now a Pinterest account in place, we use LinkedIn to get in touch with people in our industry and FAILED to get a Twitter account.

This stupid captcha takes quite a white to solve (20 QUESTIONS to make sure you’re not a robot) and, after wasting minutes with it, I got a general error and the account didn’t get created.

I’ve been a Twitter user for many years, it’s the first time we are not going to bother with this anymore, I just don’t see myself going through this silly quest anymore.

And no, the project will not appear on my social media accounts either.

To waste as little time as possible, we use Social Pilot. Scheduled a daily post on LI and Pinterest. After a while, I’ll research the analytics and see what we can do with it.

For Pinterest we just use the featured image. As soon as we get some traction and I can clear out some time, we’ll use vertical images to entice clicks and saves. At the moment we keep it basic, as I want to be able to post the best content I can.

Digital PR

We also created an account on Connectively (the new HARO). Not too impressed with the pitch options we got there, hence the reason we’ll stick to the free plan for a while.

For quicker results, you can also use Featured. We have landed some nice links for other projects, but, at $200+ a month it’s not yet an expense a new blog can afford. As soon as I’m in the market to increase the Domain Rating, this is going to be one of my first choices.

Speed Improvements

The website is built on WordPress + Blocksy (NO Elementor or other builders), but I never spent too much time optimizing for speed. It used to have around 70/100 for mobile and desktop.

As speed is a direct ranking factor and each month should improve our website, in March I tinkered with WP Rocket a little and also did small redesign work, to get our speed over 90.

Mind Mapping Software Change

I used to rave about MindMeister, as a great mind-mapping option. Now I discovered Whimsical, which makes my topical maps even prettier (and the designer in me cannot resist it :)).

Whatever you choose, creating a topical map and then studying your ranking data for the main nodes is a clear way to get more traffic with less work.

Which takes us to the April to-do list:

What I’ll Do in April

I have to admit that posting daily (or trying to cover 30-31 articles in a month) with client work and family is not as easy as I’d have anticipated. But it’s a good new habit to keep and, of course, the core of my posting experiment.

A More Strategic Posting Schedule

The reason we have the topical map is to allow me to post in “chunks” and see how much of a topic I can cover and what it does to the website’s performances. I do post on multiple sub-topics, it is a medical website after all and it’s not very niche specific.

This month, as I have 60+ posts and some are getting past the 2-month mark, I can re-assess their performances and tweak them based on my new data.

Running a website means constant improvements, and from this month I can adjust past content, while also touching new subtopics and writing fresh articles.

Try Some Adsense Placements

We got the website into Adsense. While it’s way too early for it to earn decent revenue, being Adsense-approved, is a bonus. As soon as we can secure decent traffic, we’ll try to get into other better ad networks and test out some new revenue streams.

I have placed 3 Adsense units already to test out. The sped has not been affected, we are still over 93-95/100. I do not use the auto-ads option, they are a mood killer for our visitors.

I have created a fancy Looker Studio template to gather Analytics / GSC data, so next month we’ll have some sexier reports. Let me know if you’d like the template, I can send it your way.

That’s it … See you next month 😀