About the project
The client is a medical spa in the United States offering premium treatments. Despite the quality of its services, the website had poor visibility in Google. A dashboard snapshot from the project shows 83 organic visits, 212 ranking keywords and an Authority Score of 18. I handled the SEO as the only SEO specialist at a digital marketing agency.
The challenge
Poor visibility usually points to content or links. Here, the first checks found something more basic: Google was not receiving the right signals from the pages at all.
SEO titles and descriptions missing from the HTML
Two SEO plugins, Rank Math and Yoast SEO, were active at the same time. The conflict meant the titles and meta descriptions written for the pages did not appear in the HTML source that Google reads.
Canonical tags pointing to the wrong place
Some canonical tags referenced the wrong URL, and others pointed to a local development domain instead of the live site. In effect, the site was telling Google that its real pages lived somewhere else.
Service pages that could not rank
Together, these issues stopped Google from properly crawling, indexing and ranking the service pages.
What I did
Full audit
I audited the technical, on-page and local SEO factors, and built an SEO implementation tracking sheet to organize every change and follow its progress.
One SEO plugin
I deactivated Rank Math and kept Yoast SEO as the single source of SEO settings. The titles and meta descriptions appeared in the HTML again.
Canonicals corrected
I fixed every canonical tag so that each page points to its own live URL.
Keyword research from scratch
I redid the keyword research for the services and locations, so the new titles and descriptions would target what people actually search for.
New titles, descriptions and headings
I wrote new titles, meta descriptions and heading structures for the service and location pages, and they went live after the client approved them.
Image optimization
I converted the images to WebP, which makes pages lighter and faster, and added descriptive alt text so Google understands what each image shows.
Local SEO strategy
I wrote a local SEO strategy covering on-page optimization, local citations, link building and content.
Screenshots
What a similar business can take from this
- Never run two SEO plugins at once. They overwrite each other's output, and the result can be pages with no title or description at all.
- Check canonical tags after any move from a staging or development site. Canonicals that still point to the old domain are a common and costly leftover.
- Fix the signals before writing more content. New pages will not help while Google receives the wrong URL or no title for the pages you already have. Here, traffic and clicks started rising within weeks of the fixes, without a single new page.