The Client
The client was a growing private healthcare clinic group operating across the North of England. Following several acquisitions, the business had expanded across multiple locations and offered a range of specialist healthcare services. The care being delivered was impressive. The digital setup was not.
The business had legacy clinic websites, inconsistent branding, scattered URLs and limited organic search visibility. It had grown, but the website and SEO foundations had not grown with it. This project formed part of a wider digital transformation project, bringing the website, SEO, content, email and brand and marketing activity into one clearer growth strategy.
- 100%Delivered to agreed budget
- 67%Cost saving through consolidation
- 1Successful migration
- 245Indexed pages (from 1)
The Challenge
After acquiring several clinics, the business needed to bring its online presence together. There were legacy domains, old URLs, inconsistent service pages and a website structure that made local SEO harder than it needed to be. To put it plainly, it was all a bit messy.
The previous website had been built using a page builder, which had given the team flexibility but very little control. Over time, that meant pages started to look completely different from each other. Designs became inconsistent, layouts varied across the site and the brand had no clear digital identity.
There were also significant technical SEO issues. Google was struggling to index anything beyond the homepage, which meant the site had very limited organic visibility despite the business offering a wide range of services across multiple locations.
Potential patients needed to find the right clinic, the right service and the right information quickly. Google needed to understand how the locations, services and wider brand fitted together. And from a trust point of view, nobody wants to pay privately for healthcare from a business that looks disjointed online.
With this migration project, the priority needed to be to protect existing visibility, fix the technical issues, improve local rankings and create a stronger website foundation for future growth.
My role was to lead the development, design and SEO teams and to connect the WordPress website migration with the bigger marketing picture. The site needed to work for SEO, but it also needed to support enquiries, bookings, patient trust, brand consistency and commercial growth.
The Project
A WordPress website migration can go sideways very quickly when SEO is treated as something to “sort after launch”.
It still surprises me how many businesses think SEO can be bolted on afterwards. No thank you. That is how you end up with lost rankings, broken URLs and a very stressful spreadsheet.
The first step was to review the existing website structure, legacy clinic domains, service pages, local search visibility, indexing issues and current performance. From there, I supported the planning and delivery of a bespoke WordPress website build that brought the business’s digital presence into one clearer, stronger domain.
The new build was designed to give the brand more consistency without locking the team out of the website. Content editors still needed flexibility, but within a structure that protected the design, improved usability and stopped every page turning into its own little creative experiment.
The project included:
- Planning a new WordPress website structure
- Migrating legacy clinic content into one unified domain
- Mapping and redirecting old clinic URLs
- Creating a clearer service and location page structure
- Resolving technical SEO issues affecting indexing
- Moving away from an inconsistent page builder setup
- Creating a bespoke WordPress build with stronger design control
- Giving content editors flexibility within a more consistent framework
- Improving local SEO visibility for each clinic
- Creating and optimising service-led content
- Improving metadata, headings and on-page SEO
- Strengthening internal links between services and locations
- Improving calls-to-action and booking journeys
- Building a stronger content foundation for future SEO growth
This was not a “make it pretty and hope for the best” website project. Although it is pretty. Credit where it is due to the brilliant web designer I worked with. The project combined website planning, technical SEO, content marketing and commercial thinking to create a site that made more sense for patients, search engines, AI search, internal teams and the business.
“Hayley brought order and momentum to what had become a messy digital setup. She helped us create a clearer website, stronger local visibility and marketing systems, would highly recommend.”
Marketing Lead
The Results
The migration helped turn a messy digital setup into one stronger WordPress website with clearer structure, stronger local visibility and better organic performance. The bespoke WordPress build also gave the brand a much clearer digital identity. Pages looked and felt consistent, while content editors still had enough flexibility to update and manage key areas of the site without breaking the design. A small miracle, frankly.
Technical improvements also helped resolve the indexing issues that had been holding the site back. Before the migration, Google was struggling to index anything beyond the homepage. After the new website launched, indexed pages grew from 1 to 243 in eight months and SEO performance improved, with website traffic increasing by 163% year on year and organic search traffic up 141.4%.
Keyword visibility also improved significantly, with:
- 23 keywords reaching position one on Google
- 66 keywords ranking in the top three
- 114 keywords ranking in the top ten
The website conversion rate improved by 11.4%, helping more visitors take action once they landed on the site.
Another result that should not be overlooked was the impact internally. Clinicians and reception teams already had the reviews, reputation and repeat patients to show they were delivering first-class treatment. The new website finally reflected that.
The digital presence caught up with the quality of the care – lovely when that happens.
Why a WordPress Website Migration Needs SEO From Day One
I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it for years to come: website migrations are risky when SEO is brought in too late.
For this healthcare group, the WordPress website migration was business critical. It helped bring multiple clinic websites into one place, fix indexing issues, improve local visibility, strengthen organic rankings and make it easier for patients to find and book with the right clinic.
For growing healthcare businesses, agencies and service-led brands, a website migration is a chance to fix the foundations properly and avoid wasting budget on problems that could have been prevented in the first place. The same thinking applies to wider marketing support for small businesses. Good marketing starts with clear positioning, a website people can actually use and content that helps the right customers find you.
A new website should not mean starting from scratch with Google, losing enquiries or spending the next six months working out what broke.
That is why SEO needs to be part of the migration from the beginning. Not panic-added once traffic has dropped and everyone has suddenly remembered organic search exists.
If you’d like to discuss your organisation’s website project, contact me via the contact form or email hayley@hayleybonnick.com.