Initial problems: what we had at the start
FamilyHealth.ua is the site of a multi-specialty medical clinic in a family-centre format: appointments across specialties, diagnostics and treatment, a focus on women's health, proctology and other sensitive topics.
The niche: medicine is YMYL (Your Money or Your Life), where Google judges expertise, trust and content quality most strictly. Growth comes harder, and any error hits visibility harder than in ordinary niches.
The project came with an existing volume of content but no systematic SEO: an important share of pages did nothing to attract patients, and technical errors held back visibility. The active work period began in February 2020.
The project's main challenge
The project's paradox: lots of content, the site 'looked alive', but organic wasn't realising its potential — held back by technical errors (pagination duplicates, 30x/40x, indexing) and the absence of a systematic SEO structure in a sensitive YMYL niche.
Strategy: where we placed our bets
Technical cleanup & indexing
Remove excess pages from search, restore important URLs, fix redirects and robots.txt, optimise images.
Structured core & meta
Distribute queries across services, diagnoses, symptoms, procedures; build a section tree and align meta and content to it.
Engagement & trust scenarios
So a patient arriving on an informational query moves toward booking: articles, FAQ, recovery stories, YouTube.
'Question–answer' cluster
A separate cluster of question-form queries for FAQs and articles addressing specific patient fears.
Work done
Month one — foundation: we built the semantic core across services, conditions, symptoms and procedures, monitored competitors and isolated the queries that distinguish the clinic rather than duplicate the market. We briefed the developer on the blog and schema (organisation, doctors, articles, FAQ, reviews) for rich snippets.
Based on a full technical audit we set developer tasks: pagination, fixing 30x/40x, blocking service sections from the index, robots.txt and sitemap work.
Organic dynamics: what changed in numbers
| Metric | Before (Feb 2020) | After (Mar 2021) |
|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | ~1,013 visits/mo | ~17,971 visits/mo (×17, +1,674%) |
| Queries in TOP-3 | 98 | 313 |
| Queries in TOP-10 | 82 | 438 |
| Growth type | — | mostly non-brand (new patients 'off the street') |
Source: Google Search Console / Serpstat for the FamilyHealth.ua domain, February 2020 — March 2021.
Over the first six months (Feb–Jul 2020) average organic traffic grew from ~1,013 to ~3,269 visits — that's +2,256 and about +223%, more than triple. TOP-3 queries went to 136 (from 98), TOP-10 to 201 (from 82). Within half a year the project reached steady growth on commercial and informational queries at once.
By March 2021 the dynamics were even clearer: traffic reached ~17,971 visits a month — a 17× rise versus the start. Crucially, it's mostly non-brand traffic — new patients who didn't know the clinic before.
Project team
The project was led by Nikolay Shmychkov — SEO strategy (deputy director, SEOquick). Full team and roles on the 'About' page.
What's next
A similar medical case: promotion of a dental clinic — the same YMYL + UX + Scholarship approach. Have a medical site? The concrete next step is a YMYL-criteria audit.