A clinic invisible to Google, fixed under the agency's brand.

The challenge

An agency brought me in because a clinic's organic traffic had fallen by about 70% and nobody knew why. The cause was a firewall bought through the hosting provider years earlier. It had been orphaned and locked, and it showed a "verifying your request" screen to every visitor, including Googlebot and AI crawlers. To search engines, the site was a blank checkpoint.

The agency needed the problem found and fixed quietly, without me ever speaking to the clinic, and with every update in its own reporting template.

The 10 fixes

• Removed the firewall: DNS pointed straight to the origin server, with its own SSL certificate.
• 310 product-tag archives set to noindex to stop thin pages competing with real ones.
• 5 broken internal links fixed, and 16 links to an expired old domain redirected or removed.
• Unique titles and meta descriptions with the location on every key page.
• MedicalClinic and Physician schema.
• Unified name, address and phone across listings, with a duplicate Yelp profile merged.
• Images reduced from 5.85 MB to about 0.56 MB.
• robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in.
• GA4 conversion tracking, which had been reporting $0.

First results

A few weeks after the fixes, the average position moved from 13.5 to about 9, click-through rate rose from 2.9% to 3.29%, and the site started appearing in Google's AI results, with 948 impressions in 28 days. SEO is a lagging indicator, so these are early signals, not the final picture.

For the first time, conversions are measured: new-patient clicks, calls and form submissions.

What comes next

• Push the terms already on page one into the top 3.
• Pages for nearby cities the clinic really serves.
• Show real patient reviews on the website.
• Turn service pages into pages that book appointments.
• Core Web Vitals.

What it means for your agency

This is the white label model working as intended. The agency kept the relationship and the credit, the clinic never heard my name, and every update went out in the agency's template. A client at risk of cancelling became a client with a visible recovery story and a plan for the next quarter, which is exactly what protects your margin and your retention.

Services used in this case

Client names and domains are confidential. Figures come from the client's own Search Console, GA4 or Semrush. Past results do not guarantee future rankings.