01The crisis
In April 2024, the hospital launched a fully revamped website. The redesign looked better — but it went live without an SEO migration plan. URLs changed, and no redirects were set up.
The result was immediate and brutal:
- Every previously indexed page turned into a broken link — Google was sending patients to 404 pages.
- Organic traffic collapsed to roughly 700 visits per month, on a site that had previously peaked above 5,000.
- Only 362 keywords still ranked — just 6 of them in Google's top 3. Years of accumulated rankings were gone.
- Patient enquiries and calls — the hospital's lifeline — dropped sharply.
The site had already been losing ground before the revamp; the botched migration pushed it to its lowest point in years. The client was, understandably, alarmed.
02The diagnosis
A full audit showed the damage was layered, not just the redirects:
- Indexation damage — hundreds of indexed URLs returning 404s, burning both rankings and crawl trust.
- Technical debt in the new build — internal broken links, unoptimized images, missing alt text, neglected on-page fundamentals.
- Content erosion — pages that had earned rankings pre-revamp had been thinned out or restructured, losing the substance Google had rewarded.
- No content architecture — pages existed in isolation, with no topical structure signalling expertise in the treatments the hospital actually wanted patients for.
03What we did
Stop the bleeding — the redirect rescue
I had the team compile every URL Google had indexed before the revamp, then mapped and implemented 301 redirects for all of them to their new equivalents — reconnecting the site's accumulated authority to the new URLs. Over 200 of those redirects are still live in the site's crawl today.
Technical and on-page cleanup
We systematically fixed broken internal links, optimized and compressed images, added missing alt text, and cleaned up on-page fundamentals across the site. The site now scores 99/100 for technical health in Ahrefs, with zero broken links — on a 500+ page medical website.
Rebuild content around a pillar–cluster architecture
Instead of restoring content randomly, I worked with the client to identify the treatment areas with the strongest medical expertise and highest conversion value. We rebuilt topic by topic, in priority order: the core treatment page strengthened into a comprehensive pillar page, supporting cluster pages covering sub-topics and patient questions, and blog content feeding internal links into each cluster. We completed the cycle for the two highest-priority treatment areas first, then repeated it down the list. Rankings compounded as each cluster matured.
Conversion-focused homepage redesign
About 18 months into the recovery, with rankings restored, the homepage became the next bottleneck. I designed a new homepage aligned to the brand and to what converting patients needed to see, and led its development and launch. Traffic and enquiries stepped up again after the relaunch.
04The results
Traffic and rankings (April 2024 → April 2026, Semrush, India):
Search performance (Google Search Console, last 16 months): over 41,000 clicks and 3 million impressions, with #1 rankings for competitive treatment keywords — including a neurological-condition treatment query at position 1.0 — and rankings in multiple languages, with visibility across India, the US, UAE, UK and Saudi Arabia.
Bonus: the rebuilt site is now cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode — the subject of case study №2.
Data sources: Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, Semrush, Ahrefs. Screenshots available on request.
05What this case shows
- Diagnosing and recovering a failed website migration — one of the highest-stakes problems in SEO
- A pillar–cluster content strategy prioritized by business value, not vanity keywords
- Technical SEO executed to a 99/100 health score on a 500+ page medical site
- Leading and training a team through a long recovery under client pressure
- Connecting SEO to what matters: patient enquiries, not just traffic