Organic clicks up 160% in six months
In the final six months, organic clicks grew 160%, almost all of it non-brand, and 92% of clicks landed on pages the team wrote and optimised.
- Published
- 7 min read
Project at a glance
- Industry
- Cosmetic and restorative dentistry, medical travel
- Audience
- Patients in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the wider Gulf
- Site language
- Arabic
- Engagement
- Strategy, keyword research, briefs, writing, on-page, internal linking, links
- Team
- An SEO specialist and a content writer
- Measured period
- April 2023 to August 2024, 16 months of Search Console data
- Stack
- Search Console, Semrush, WordPress with Yoast, Tag Manager, Asana
- Headline result
- Clicks +160%, impressions +149% in six months
Case study contents
Snapshot
A dental clinic selling veneers, crowns, implants and smile makeovers to Gulf patients had an Arabic site that search engines barely surfaced: about eight organic clicks a day. During the engagement, an Arabic content and SEO programme built and optimised more than 220 articles and the service pages. Monthly organic clicks reached 16,067, and the last six months alone brought 75,949 clicks, up from 29,227.
About the client
A cosmetic and restorative dental clinic that treats patients who travel from the Gulf for zirconia and E.max crowns, veneers, implants, whitening and full smile makeovers. Its patients research online before they travel: they compare prices, read reviews and look for before and after cases. That makes organic search in Arabic the first place a future patient meets the clinic.
The starting point
When the Search Console record opens in late April 2023, the site was earning almost nothing from search:
- 270 organic clicks in May 2023, the first full month on record, from 15,890 impressions
- 7.9 clicks a day across the first 30 days
- 28 URLs excluded from Google’s index by a noindex tag (coverage report, 1 May 2023)
- An average ranking position of about 23 in May 2023, far below page one (calculated from the daily export)
The service pages had their own problems, recorded in a June 2023 review: slow on mobile, a call-to-action button that did not work on most pages, missing pricing charts, and seven services with no page at all.
The challenge
Business. Gulf patients choose a clinic abroad after researching online, comparing prices and reading reviews. A clinic that does not appear for their questions about crowns, implants or whitening is not on the shortlist when they decide. Search was not yet a channel for the clinic. The organic programme had to be built from the ground up, starting at about eight clicks a day.
Technical. Pages were excluded from the index, mobile speed was low, and medical schema (clinic, dentist, procedure) still had to be planned.
Delivery. Service pages depended on design and development work outside the SEO team, and before and after images were missing for 16 services.
What we found
The audit ran on a 116-item SEO checklist covering setup, performance, technical, content, on-page, off-page and local. Keyword research was built per treatment, more than 40 clusters from implants and veneers to gum treatment and dentures, from Search Console, Google’s keyword tools, autocomplete and competitors.
One finding shaped the plan: the site already ranked for many queries at positions 11 to 29, close enough to page one to move with on-page work. The audit also confirmed the technical issues above: pages blocked by noindex and slow mobile pages.
Strategy and why us
The clinic chose the team for its experience writing medical content in Arabic.
The plan, written in August 2023, put existing pages first: audit what the site already ranks for, improve under-performing pages before adding new ones, and target the 11 to 29 band as quick wins. Around that sat a silo structure linking informational articles to service pages, a medical schema plan, and guest posts pointing to commercial pages.
| Phase | Focus |
|---|---|
| Phase 1, to early 2024 | New articles at about five a week across the treatment clusters |
| Phase 2, February to August 2024 | Two to three new articles a week, plus regular optimisation of the top pages, branded visuals and patient stories |
Execution
Every article went through the same six steps, one Asana task each from brief to publish.
- Keyword research
- Brief
- Writing
- On-page
- Publish
- Optimise
Each challenge had a matching piece of work. Only work recorded as done is listed here.
| Challenge | What was done |
|---|---|
| No answers to patients’ questions | 223 articles written and published, each from a brief with a main keyword, secondary keywords, headings and questions |
| Weak on-page signals | On-page completed on 202 articles: headings, titles, meta descriptions, URLs, formatting; images on 203; internal links on 100; categories on 109 |
| Missing commercial layer | 15 service pages published with on-page work by June 2023, from Hollywood smile and veneers to All-on-4, dentures, crowns and bridges |
| Weak foundations | Tag Manager, Analytics, Search Console, Yoast, sitemap, robots.txt, HTTPS and canonical setup completed |
Mobile speed and the broken button were diagnosed, documented and escalated to the site’s developer. The record does not show them fixed.
Results
Search Console, web search, previous six months (25 August 2023 to 24 February 2024) against the last six months (25 February to 24 August 2024):
Organic clicks
+159.9%
- Before
- 29,227
- After
- 75,949
Impressions
+148.6%
- Before
- 1,367,876
- After
- 3,401,112
Average position
8.2
2.3 places higher
- Before
- 10.5
- After
- 8.2
Click-through rate
2.23%
+0.09 points
- Before
- 2.14%
- After
- 2.23%
Clicks from Gulf countries
+121.8%
- Before
- 8,709
- After
- 19,320
Across the full record, monthly clicks went from 270 in May 2023 to 16,067 in July 2024, and daily clicks from about 8 to about 526. Over 16 months the site earned 106,993 organic clicks from 4.88 million impressions. Mobile carried 95.7% of clicks.
One number moved the wrong way. Gulf clicks more than doubled, but clicks from all other countries grew faster (+176.0%), so the Gulf’s share of clicks fell from 29.8% to 25.4%.
What drove the change
The growth sat on the pages the team worked on. The 195 logged articles that appear in Search Console took 91.9% of all page clicks in the last six months, and their clicks rose 149%.
Most of the gain came from improving pages that already existed. Pages with no clicks in the previous six months contributed 10,030 clicks; pages that already had clicks added about 37,000 more. That matches the phase 2 shift toward optimisation.
The gains were concentrated by topic. Five of the seven pages with the largest gains covered zirconia crowns, while the generic “Hollywood smile” query slipped slightly, from 301 to 286 clicks.
Brand demand did not explain it: brand searches made up 1.7% of identifiable query clicks and did not grow.
Two cautions. The step changes in April and late August 2024 coincide with Google core updates, and the articles carry no individual publish dates. The data supports a relationship between the work and the growth; it does not establish causality.
Business impact
The record stops at search traffic. No enquiry, booking or revenue data was available for this period, so the case makes no claim about patients won.
What the data does show: the clinic went from about eight organic clicks a day to 3.4 million impressions and 75,949 clicks in six months. A quarter of those clicks came from the Gulf markets the clinic serves.
What was delivered
- 223 published Arabic articles across treatment clusters
- On-page optimisation of 202 articles
- 15 service pages with on-page work
- Keyword research across more than 40 treatment clusters
- A 116-item technical and content checklist, with the foundation items completed
- An internal linking map from articles to service pages
Tech stack
The programme ran on a small, standard toolset. Each tool below appears in the project’s own working files.
| Tool | What it was used for |
|---|---|
| Google Search Console | Performance tracking, query and page analysis, index coverage checks, and finding quick-win pages at positions 11 to 29 |
| Semrush | Competitor keyword and backlink research, keyword difficulty and search volume |
| Google Keyword Planner | Search volume for treatment keywords in Gulf markets |
| WordPress with Yoast SEO | Publishing, titles, meta descriptions, sitemap and canonical setup |
| Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics | Tracking setup on the site |
| Asana | One task per article, from brief to publish, for the SEO specialist and the writer |
Key lessons
- Optimising what already ranks pays more than publishing more. About 37,000 of the added clicks came from existing pages, against about 10,000 from new ones.
- One cluster can lead. Zirconia questions outgrew the generic “Hollywood smile” query by a wide margin.
- Arabic content travels. Informational articles in Arabic draw readers from Egypt to Morocco. A clinic that only serves the Gulf needs market-specific commercial pages to keep its share.
- Track enquiries from day one. Without them, 75,949 clicks cannot be turned into a patient count.
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Does your clinic get traffic that never turns into bookings?
If your clinic serves patients from the Gulf, we can start by mapping where your organic clicks come from and which questions you are missing. Should we look at your Search Console data together?