Finding patients who do not know what they have: how a specialist radiotherapy practice reached 2.22M search impressions.
Dupuytren’s UK delivers non-surgical radiotherapy for Dupuytren’s contracture, Ledderhose disease and Garrod’s pads through a national network of treatment centres. Pulse Digital Health was asked to make the practice findable at the point where a patient is still describing a symptom rather than naming a condition. In 16 months the site recorded 2,221,242 search impressions, 37,057 clicks from organic search and 268 pages earning visibility.
What We Did
01 . Client overview
The client
Dupuytren’s UK is a private specialist practice led by Dr Richard Shaffer, a Consultant Clinical Oncologist. It provides low-dose radiotherapy, without surgery, for Dupuytren’s contracture in the hand, Ledderhose disease in the foot and Garrod’s pads on the knuckles, delivered through a network of treatment centres across the country.
Consultation happens with Dr Shaffer at a small number of locations and treatment is then delivered at a centre closer to the patient, so the practice has to compete for attention nationally while delivering care locally. The search data matches what the practice hears in clinic. People look for a lump in the palm, a finger that will not straighten or a hard patch in the arch of the foot long before they look for a condition name.
At the start of the engagement the site recorded 15,382 search impressions and 264 clicks in its first full month, at an average position of around 18. That is the baseline everything below is measured against.
Sector
Private specialist healthcare in a category with very low public recognition. Demand has to be met at the symptom stage, because most people searching do not yet know the name of the condition they have.
Starting position
15,382 impressions and 264 clicks in the first full month of recorded data, at an average position of around 18. A small estate sitting on the second page for the terms it did appear on.
Remit
Grow organic visibility across the whole family of related conditions, build local visibility around each treatment centre, and hold every line of patient-facing copy to ASA, CAP and MHRA standards with clinician sign-off before publication.
02 . The challenge
The challenge
A rare condition does not behave like a competitive category. The hard part was never outranking rivals. It was reaching people who did not yet have the words to search for what they had, and doing it inside a set of constraints that ruled out most of the usual private healthcare playbook.
Patients search symptoms, not conditions
Almost nobody types the name of the condition first. They type what they can see and feel. The estate had to answer those descriptions properly before it could earn the right to mention a treatment at all.
A treatment outside the standard pathway
Radiotherapy for these conditions sits awkwardly between NHS provision, private medical insurance and self-funding. People give up at the point where they cannot work out whether they can access it, so funding and referral content had to be treated as conversion content rather than support material.
Regulated advertising, no shortcuts available
Everything patient-facing has to hold up against ASA, CAP and MHRA rules. No outcome promises, no efficacy claims, and patient stories framed only as one person’s experience. The usual persuasion tactics were off the table from day one.
Every word goes through the clinician
Dr Shaffer reviews and edits patient-facing copy personally and nothing publishes without his sign-off. That lifts the quality bar, and it also means the content programme had to be designed around a clinical review queue, not just a publishing calendar.
Worldwide interest, national delivery
The condition is searched everywhere and roughly two thirds of the site’s impressions come from outside the United Kingdom. Growth had to be read carefully so that international reading traffic was never mistaken for domestic patient demand.
A network of centres, not a clinic
Consultation happens at a handful of locations and treatment is delivered at many more, with new centres coming on stream during the engagement. Local visibility had to be built around a distributed network rather than a single address.
03 . Our strategy
Our strategy
Six strands, run as one programme rather than six separate projects. The order matters. Reach people at the symptom stage first, answer the access question second, and build everything else around both.
01
Write for the symptom, not the condition name — Content was mapped to what people type before they have a diagnosis, which is a description rather than a term. The page answering what the lumps in someone’s hands might be is now the largest single source of impressions on the site at 510,833, and the page on what makes the condition worse carries 4,375 clicks. Neither page exists in a plan led by keyword volume, because the volume sits on the condition name and the patients sit on the symptom.
02
Answer the access question before it becomes an exit — Funding is where enquiries die on a treatment that is not routinely commissioned. Cost, insurance, referral and NHS-availability content was written as conversion material rather than as an FAQ, in plain terms and without naming insurers. The site now averages position 2.8 on the main radiotherapy cost query for the condition and position 1.7 on its UK variant.
03
Build the whole family of conditions, not just the headline term — Dupuytren’s contracture is one presentation of a related group. Ledderhose disease in the foot, Garrod’s pads on the knuckles and the overlap with trigger finger were each given proper coverage rather than a paragraph on a parent page. Ledderhose terms alone account for 107,821 impressions and 987 clicks across 45 queries, and Garrod’s and knuckle pad terms bring in a further 35,994 impressions.
04
Use curiosity as a front door, and be honest about what it is — Two of the biggest pages on the site answer questions that have nothing to do with treatment: why the condition carries a Viking nickname, and which public figures have lived with it. Together they carry 8,963 clicks. This is awareness traffic rather than enquiry traffic and it is measured that way, but it is also how a lot of people first learn the name of the thing they have been ignoring in their hand.
05
Make clinical review a production system, not a bottleneck — Copy goes to Dr Shaffer with compliance points flagged inline and capped at two per document, rather than with clinical edits quietly applied on his behalf. Every new brief is checked against the whole live library first so nothing competes with a post already ranking. The estate has grown to 268 pages earning impressions, 106 of them in the top 10, including a page for each of the 16 treatment centres.
06
Treat AI answers as a channel of their own — Pages were built to be quotable: a direct answer near the top, plain headings, question and answer blocks added only where a visible block exists on the page, and medical schema on the priority templates. The site is now cited 793 times across AI platforms, drawn from 92 separate pages.
04 . The results
The result
Search, content and local visibility were built as one programme rather than three separate projects. Patients increasingly ask a model before they ask a search engine, so the work had to show up in both. That is why the numbers below compound rather than spike.
The Numbers
Monthly impressions and clicks
Google Search Console, web search, all countries. Impressions and clicks read on the left-hand scale, average position on the right. The first and last months of the period are partial.
