Case Study · Medical Dermatology · Enterprise SEO
55+ locations across California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Two years of data. One result: organic search now delivers more new patients than every paid ad campaign combined — at a fraction of the cost.
Growth in Organic New Patient Appointments
Appointments In The Door. Not Leads.
New Patient Appointments From Organic Search
2024–2025 combined
Equivalent Google Ads Value Delivered
At the network’s own paid CPC rate
More New Patients From SEO Than Paid Ads
Every single month of 2025+
A Network Growing Faster Than Its Digital Presence
Skin and Cancer Institute was expanding fast; new locations, new markets, new states. But their digital presence wasn’t keeping pace. With 55+ locations across California, Nevada, and Arizona, a website that needed serious structural work, and no clear strategy for capturing the millions of patients searching for dermatology care online every month, SCI needed more than basic SEO.
They needed an enterprise-level partner who understood the complexity of multi-location medical search — and could build a system that scaled with them.
Each location needed its own local SEO strategy, optimized pages, and accurate citations — none of which existed at scale.
Patients searching for dermatologists in their city weren't finding SCI. Competitors with weaker clinical reputations were outranking them.
Every new patient acquisition was running through paid Google Ads at $347+ per click. There was no organic foundation and no compounding asset being built.
Enterprise SEO Built for a Network of This Scale
PowerUp Media built and executed a comprehensive organic search strategy from the ground up — covering every layer of what multi-location medical SEO requires.
Individual location pages optimized for every market SCI operates in. Each page built to rank for the exact searches patients in that city are making — from "dermatologist near me" to condition-specific treatment searches.
A deep library of medically relevant content targeting the exact conditions and treatments patients search for — from acne and psoriasis to Mohs surgery and skin cancer treatment. Content that ranks, educates, and converts.
Ongoing crawl health monitoring, Core Web Vitals management, schema markup implementation, and internal linking architecture — keeping a complex multi-location site performing at the level Google rewards.
As search behavior shifts toward AI-generated answers, we restructured SCI's content to appear in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT recommendations, and other AI-driven discovery tools. SCI stays visible as the search landscape changes.
Consistent backlink acquisition and citation management across all markets, strengthening domain authority and protecting rankings through every algorithm update.
The Results
In the time we’ve worked together, SCI went from roughly 4,982 confirmed organic new patient appointments per year to over 15,240 — an increase of more than 10,000 new patients annually driven entirely by organic search.
At an average patient value of $400, that represents over $4 million in directly trackable organic revenue. And that number doesn’t include assisted conversions, brand lift, phone bookings, or patients who found SCI through search and converted offline.
But the number that tells the full story is this: at the network’s own paid Google Ads rate of $347.68 per new patient appointment, the organic new patient volume generated in 2025 alone would have cost an additional $7.1 million in ad spend to replicate.
Organic search is now SCI’s single most profitable patient acquisition channel — delivering qualified patients at a fraction of the cost of paid advertising.
"Organic search is now SCI's single most profitable patient acquisition channel"
SEO vs. Paid Ads
In 2025, SCI spent $836,522 on Google Ads. Those campaigns generated 2,406 new patient appointment triggers — at an average cost of $347.68 each.
Organic SEO generated 20,425 new patient appointments that same year. No cost per click. No budget to pause. No turning off.
For every single new patient that came through a paid ad, organic search delivered 8.5. Every month. Without exception.
Organic New Patient Appointments (2025)
89.5% of all new patient appointments
Full year Google Ads budget
What it would cost to replace SEO with paid
Location Spotlights
These aren’t network-wide averages. These are individual clinic locations — the kind of practice you might operate — and what organic SEO delivered for each one specifically.
Centennial was the highest-volume organic location in the entire SCI network for two consecutive years. It generated 3,553 new patient appointments through organic search — supported by just $16,406 in paid ads. Locations that spent $40,000–$52,000 in paid ads didn’t come close.
This is the compounding effect of SEO in real data. Year one built the foundation. Year two multiplied the return 34×. The asset grew without any change to the investment.
In April 2025, more than 4 out of every 5 new patients at this location found the clinic through organic Google search. No ads. No outreach. Three consecutive months above 80%.
For two consecutive years, organic search drove nearly 1 in 2 new patient appointments at this location — with zero paid advertising in either year. Consistent, predictable, recurring volume month after month.
Lancaster barely existed organically in 2024. By mid-2025, organic search was delivering a consistent stream of new patients every month — built entirely without paid advertising.
Zero organic presence prior to October 2025. Within 90 days, organic search was generating 61 new patient appointments per month. Momentum was still accelerating at year end.
Why SEO Compounds
In late 2024, SCI’s paid Google Ads campaigns were paused for approximately four months. Paid new patient appointment volume fell to near zero within days.
Organic SEO kept producing 1,695 to 2,238 new patient appointments per month — without interruption, without a budget, and without anyone touching a campaign.
That is the difference between renting patients and owning them.
What We Built
This isn’t a projection. The 50-new-patient guarantee is backed by two years of real data across 52 clinic locations. We know what SEO does for medical practices at every stage — new locations, established clinics, and multi-location networks.
If you’re spending money on paid ads and have no organic foundation, you’re paying for patients you could own.
No commitment. No pitch deck. Just a real conversation about your market and what organic search can do for it.
All new patient appointment figures sourced from Google Analytics 4 via custom GA4 event tracking. Data represents new patient appointment booking triggers across the Skin and Cancer Institute network, 2024–2025. Paid ad spend and CPC data sourced from Google Ads campaign reporting.
