18 Nov Client Case Study – SEO Improvements for Move Physiotherapy Cornwall

The Business

Move is an independent physiotherapy clinic based in Truro. Like many small companies they built their website themselves. They had progressed from a Squarespace website to a WordPress website but hadn’t given SEO much thought.

Eager to stand out from the competition and display their modern twist on Physiotherapy. Move decided to take a creative approach when naming some of their treatments.

As their business grew, they also felt that some of the content they had created on their website was no longer relevant and when moving platforms some content wasn’t moved across.

The Problem

The language you use on your website should be clear and concise. Move Physiotherapy Cornwall were using terms such as ‘soft tissue therapy’ to describe their treatments. Whilst it sounds lovely, potential customers were not typing this into search engines and were therefore not finding their business online.

As your business grows, it’s understandable to want to update your site with relevant content. However, when you delete a webpage or blog post, it doesn’t disappear from the internet right away. This means that these non-existent pages can still show up in search engine results for some time. Ultimately directing potential customers to an error message instead of your site.

The graph above shows Organic traffic for the Move website. With traffic steadily in decline from October 2019.

The Strategy

When I began working with this client, I started with some extensive keyword research. In order to understand the terms that their ideal customers were using to find businesses like theirs.

In particular the massage industry can sometimes be associated with adult terms. Which Move Physiotherapy were keen to steer clear of. I worked on finding keywords that were both professional and being used by their audience.

Next, I evaluated the content that had been removed, decided on what was still relevant, and what could be refreshed and reintroduced to the site.

I updated their navigation structure to ensure that important content wasn’t hidden and restructured some of the pages to improve conversion.

The Results

Since supporting Move Physiotherapy with their site, they’ve seen a massive spike in organic traffic leading to increased visibility and leads.

I monitored 15 keywords, only 4 were ranking on the first page of Google search results towards the bottom of the results. Now, 12 months later, 8 of the monitored keywords are appearing on the first page, 4 of which are in position 1 – 3. 60% of the monitored keywords are now seeing vast improvements in their ranking position.

In October 2021 the average ranking position was 38th, and 12 months later this increased to an average position of 15th.

There has been a 280% improvement in organic traffic to the website comparing year on year.

Some keyword highlights –

‘Cornwall Physiotherapy’ from page 2, position 18 in October 2021, to position 5 in October 2022

‘Physiotherapy Truro’ from position 8 in October 2021, to position 2 in October 2022.

‘Cornwall Physio’ from position 8 in October 2021, to position 3 in October 2022.

From a thorough SEO audit we found a few areas that would produce fast results and quick wins. SEO can often take time to see results and require months of building backlinks and content. However, making sure that the building blocks are in place from the beginning can be the best tool for getting results.

The Conclusion

• SEO services don’t have to be huge expensive projects with big agencies, and small, simple changes can have positive results.

• The language you use is important, and well-optimised content will connect potential customers to your site.

• Deleting content without redirects in place can lead to error pages, broken links, and a nightmare for your search engine ranking.