From 63 clicks a day to 145, and into Google’s AI answers

What I walked into

The client is a cardiologist. Before me, his search was being run by a relative who was teaching themselves SEO as they went, fitting it around everything else they had on.

It had not been done badly, which is rarer than it sounds. The site was sound, the service pages existed, nothing was structurally broken in the way most sites I inherit are broken.

What it did not have was movement. Clicks sat flat, week after week, at a number that had stopped changing.

That is a harder brief than a wreck. When a site is broken you repair the break and the numbers answer you. When a site is merely stuck, nothing is wrong, so you have to work out what is missing.

Why I left the design alone

The site had been built in-house and they asked me to keep it. They were right to ask. It worked: the pages loaded, the phone number was where a worried person would look for it, and the booking path was not hiding.

I have rebuilt plenty of sites and I will tell an owner when theirs is the thing holding them back. This one was not. So the design stayed, I tidied a few things inside it, and every hour that would have gone into a rebuild went where it could actually produce.

The work was the words, and the links between them

Three things, in this order.

The service pages were rewritten. They read like a list of what the practice offers; they needed to read like answers to what someone types at eleven at night when their chest feels wrong. Same services, written for the person searching.

Then the blogs, to cover the questions the service pages could not carry without losing their job. Each one written to be useful on its own and to point somewhere useful next.

Then the internal linking, which is the part owners skip because it is invisible. Every page he had was doing its work alone. Connecting them properly told Google which pages mattered and gave the new work something established to stand on.

Underneath all three, the experience and credibility signals: who is treating you, what they are qualified in, why this page can be trusted on a medical question. Google is strict about that on health topics, and it should be.

It was slow, and then it was not

Nothing much happened for the first few weeks. That is normal on a site that is not broken, and it is the point where most owners conclude the work is not doing anything and go back to what they were doing before.

Then it moved, and it kept moving.

What the numbers did

His best day in the three months before I started was 63 clicks, on 23 June. Work started on the 27th.

Thirty one days in, on 28 July, he was at 106 clicks a day. That is a 68% rise inside the first month. Sixty seven days in, on 2 September, he was at 145.

From 63 to 145 is a 130% increase in clicks a day, in sixty seven days, with no advertising spend behind it.

I compare single days rather than quarter against quarter here on purpose. The work started in the last week of June, so any three month window straddles the start date and mixes the before into the after. Day against day is the honest read, and it is the one that makes the smaller claim.

The figure I find more interesting sits underneath those two. Impressions on the same pair of days went from 8,195 to 12,136, a rise of 48%. Clicks grew by 130% while impressions grew by 48%, which means the click through rate went from 0.77% to 1.19%. He is not only being shown more often. A meaningfully larger share of the same searches is now choosing him over whoever else is on the page.

Where his pages sit now

Twenty of his service and condition pages sit in the top three for the searches they were written for, and four of them sit at number one. These are the searches that carry intent: conditions, procedures and diagnostic tests, not people typing the practice name.

Several of those pages are now being cited inside Google’s AI answers, which is the part I would not have been able to promise him in June. When someone asks Google about a test he offers, his practice is quoted in the answer above the results. Being the source an AI summary draws from is a different kind of position from ranking first, and it is not one you buy.

The Google profile, through his quiet season

I have run his Google Business Profile since March, three months before the website work started. It returned 2,177 interactions between April and September.

Summer is the quiet stretch for this practice. Holding a profile level through the months when demand normally falls is worth more than a spike in a busy one, and it is the sort of thing that only shows up if you are watching the whole year rather than the last thirty days.

What I would do differently

I would have put call tracking in before I touched anything.

I can show you exactly what search did for this practice, on a specific day, from his own Search Console. I cannot show you what it turned into at the front desk, because nobody was measuring that when I arrived, and I did not insist on it early enough. The clinic is happy with where this has gone. I would rather be able to prove it in the currency that matters to a business, which is why that measurement is now the first week of every engagement.

This engagement ran on SEO, Content Marketing and Google Business Profile Optimization. Results are measured the way the guarantee defines them: calls, leads, and booked work. Your own market decides your own numbers.