Case Study · Healthcare · Technical SEO
How a decade of old pages was holding back a Long Island healthcare practice
The practice's website wasn't too small. It was too big. Years of duplicate pages were competing with each other, and Google couldn't tell which ones mattered.
- Industry
- Healthcare
- Market
- Long Island, NY
- Scope
- Technical SEO · Site consolidation
Results at a glance
775 down to 346
The problem
This practice has had a website for over ten years, and over that time a lot of people added pages to it. Every new campaign, every blog push and every "let's target this town" idea left something behind. Nobody ever went back to clean up.
By the time we did a full audit, we found:
- Seven different pages all trying to rank for the same town. Some were blog posts, some were landing pages, and two had broken, web-address-style slugs. They were all competing for the same searches, so none of them won.
- Seven more pages all targeting the same "near me" search with slightly different wording.
- Town pages from 2015 and 2016 still live, sitting next to the newer pages that replaced them.
- An award page with the year 2023 in its address and three separate H1 headings.
- A broken redirect that had been sending visitors looking for the practice's county page to an unrelated blog article.
- 775 pages Google knew about but hadn't bothered to crawl. When a site has that many weak or duplicate pages, Google stops giving every page a fair look.
The practice didn't have a content problem. It had a clutter problem.
What we did
1. Picked one winner for every search.
For each group of competing pages, we pulled the Search Console data and kept the page Google already preferred. That wasn't always the best-looking page or the newest one. It was the page that ranked. Two examples:
| Search | Page we kept | Page we retired |
|---|---|---|
| Specialty search in a core town | Position 3.8, 1,108 impressions | Position 13.1, 0 clicks |
| Specialty search in the county | Position 4.9, 633 impressions | Position 23.1, 0 clicks |
If we had kept the newer, nicer-looking page in either case, the practice would have given up a page-one ranking.
2. Redirected everything else into the winner.
34 pages were retired and redirected to the page that now owns that search. Where a retired page had content worth keeping, we carried it over to the page we kept, so nothing useful was lost. Pages that served a genuinely different purpose, like a specific treatment in a specific town that already ranked well, were kept on purpose.
3. Fixed the redirect that was sending people to the wrong place.
The old county link now goes where visitors expect it to.
4. Sped up the site behind the scenes.
We added server-level caching, set the site to rebuild its cache automatically after updates, delayed non-essential scripts until a visitor interacts with the page, and removed a chat widget that had been loaded twice on every page.
5. Rewrote titles and descriptions on the pages that mattered most.
The worst example: one town page was ranking 5.7 on Google with more than 1,000 impressions and had earned exactly one click. Its meta description was 413 characters of repeated text, so Google was throwing it out and writing its own. We rewrote that page and 11 others with titles and descriptions built to get the click, each with the practice's phone number.
What changed
Google's backlog of pages it knew about but hadn't crawled dropped from 775 to 346, a 55% reduction. That means Google is now spending its time on the pages that matter instead of wading through duplicates.
Every search that used to be split across several pages now points at one page with all the authority behind it. The two examples above already ranked on page one, and now they don't have to compete with their own site.
Cleanup like this keeps paying off as Google re-crawls the site and settles on the consolidated pages, so we'll keep tracking it month by month.
What this means for your practice
If your website has been around for more than a few years, you probably have this problem and don't know it. Most practices do. Old blog posts, landing pages from a past agency, town pages someone built and forgot about: they all add up, and they all compete with each other.
You don't need more pages. You need the right pages, with nothing working against them.
Wondering how many of your own pages are competing with each other?
We'll run the same audit on your site and show you exactly what's holding it back.
Book a free consultation