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Case Study: Sleep Clinic Search Marketing

ByAaron Charlton, PhD

Situation: I have worked for an awesome sleep medicine practice with 3 clinics in one major metropolitan area for nearly 3 years. One of the clinics was brand new and opened up after about 5 months of working for them.

Results so far: I’m pleased to say that although they already ranked well when we started, we were able to make massive improvements to their organic search ranking and traffic–especially at the local level where it really counts. Our approach was a combination of local SEO to get them ranking well for “near me” searches and an informational content campaign to massively grow their website’s authority in a short period.

Improvements in Local Organic Search Traffic

This was the most important benchmark for our work from the beginning. We knew they needed to rank better for things like “sleep study near me” in order to grow their practice with search marketing. Note in the chart below that there has been a 52.5% increase in local organic search traffic (Google, Bing, yahoo, DuckDuck Go and ecosia.org in less than 3 years.

Chart 1: Organic Search Engine Traffic to Practice’s Website from The State Where They Operate

Data are pulled from Google Analytics. Start date was August 1, 2023. Chart goes through May 2026.

Increased Overall Organic Search Traffic

Although out-of-state website traffic is unlikely to yield a lot of new patients locally, increasing overall web traffic helps to increase the overall authority of the website making it much easier to rank for “near me” searches as well.

Chart 2: Total Organic Search Engine Traffic to Practice’s Website

Data are pulled from Google Analytics. Start date was August 1, 2023. Chart goes through May 2026.

Note the 404% lift in organic traffic in less than 3 years with Charlton Digital search marketing systems.

Increased Website Authority

Increases in traffic were not only due to the site having more content. The site also massively grew in authority (inbound links and media mentions) during our time working on it.

Note below in data from MOZ that the website now ranks for 688% as many keywords as it did when we started in 2023. Additionally the Domain Authority of the website, according to MOZ, has gone from 25 to 36 during this time. Because this metric is on a logarithmic scale, it requires 3-5x more link equity (sites linking in to the target site) to achieve the 44% bump in DA score. That’s a HUGE improvement in authority for this website!

Chart 3: Domain Authority in November of 2023

Data from Moz

Chart 4: Domain Authority In June 2026

Data from MOZ

Ads Got Turned Off Due to Success of Organic Search Campaign

Prior to our organic search marketing efforts really taking hold, we were forced to run a lot of Google ads to keep the patient volume flowing. Once we had achieved solid organic rankings we were able to completely turn off the Google Ads, saving the practice $2k/month.

Chart 5: Ads Turned Off in March 2025

Data from Google Analytics

Our Process

This doesn’t have every detail of what we’ve done but it gives a broad overview of key points:

  • Media Outreach. In the beginning we did a lot of media outreach to build the website’s authority by getting cited by journalists in local and industry media outlets. We got about 1 media hit per month for the first year.
  • Informational Content. We generated, revised and optimized a lot of informational ‘sleep health’ content for the website over throughout the entire 3-year period. This helped us to massively build the website’s authority with Google, AI and other search engines. We also organized and categorized the site’s content better to make it more searchable for Google and AI bots. And we made sure that these informational pages linked back to the local sales pages (see below) in order to pass as much Google juice on to the local pages as possible.
  • Local optimization. We submitted to directories, and keyword-optimized sales pages (location and service pages) so that they would rank higher for local search queries.
  • Review automation. We implemented our proprietary system to solicit as many 5-star Google and Yelp reviews as possible from happy patients.

A few things I have in my toolbag to help with this process:

  1. I have a 20-year track record of successful search marketing
  2. I also have a science background, allowing me to better interpret the medical literature
  3. I have a medical blogger in the Philippines
  4. I have a part-time medical editor who has a PhD in Occupational Therapy

I feel like having all of these resources really enhances our ability to do content marketing for medical practices.

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