Making Traffic Worth It

Intent-Led SEO for Conversion Growth

Industry: Regulated health vertical (Germany)
Client: One of the top medical-cannabis platforms in the German market (anonymised, ~40 staff)
Role: SEO Consultant (ongoing since Feb 2025)
Case Study Publish Date: February 2026

Primary goal: increase commercial yield from organic search (more enquiries / conversions)
Secondary goal: future-proof pages for AI/LLM discovery and citation

At the project start (Feb-2025) the site showed a structural problem: the editorial corpus (~600 articles) produced a lot of exposure but delivered almost no commercial outcome. That content delivered impressions and clicks but did not funnel users to the pages that convert.

Key baseline at the start, in February 2025:

• Organic channel conversion rate: 0.05% (almost non-existent)
• Organic conversions share of total conversions: ~0.61%

Over the full reporting period (Feb-2025 → Jan-2026), organic search accounted for approximately 65% of total site traffic and ~2.5% CVR. 

Practical constraints:

• The site is large with around 9000 pages in total. Hence wholesale edits are not possible overnight. Changes had to be staged and measurable.
• Core technical SEO (Core Web Vitals, indexability, schema) was broadly sound. The lever for improvement was content strategy, intent alignment, internal linking and conversion UX.
• Paid advertising was not used as the regulated medical vertical does not allow for paid ads. All improvements are organic / editorial / technical.
• All solutions have to be compliant with German medical advertisment law

Short diagnosis: high exposure, almost zero commercial outcome.

Why:

1. Intent mismatch at scale. Editorial output was skewed to informational queries that generated impressions but low buyer intent. The pages users needed to convert either didn’t rank or were not discoverable from the articles that attracted attention.

2. Conversion leakage. When users reached potential conversion pages, CTAs and the path to inquiry were not aligned with the user’s decision state in a regulated purchase flow.

3. Topical noise & index bloat. Hundreds of low-value or overlapping articles diluted topical authority and created discoverability friction for transactional pages. 

4. Scale problem. With ~600 articles and a total of ~9000 pages, tactical one-offs are not sufficient. The work required a programmatic, phased approach.

Single metric that justified the work: organic CVR 0.05% (Feb-25 baseline), an unambiguously low conversion rate that demanded a staged, surgical strategy.

Make the traffic worth it via a phased approach:

• Phase 1: rapid stabilisation to stop immediate leakage and build a reliable conversion baseline.

• Phase 2: landing-page and intent optimisation to restructure and rewrite the pages that should be capturing high-intent users.

• Phase 3: programmatic readiness and editorial governance, preparing templates, clustering architecture and establishing publication rules so future content drives conversions.

• Phase 4: programmatic rollout focusing on launching localised transactional templates at scale and compounding the gains.

Goal: reduce leakage and establish a measurable baseline.

High-impact actions (executed immediately):

• Rewired editorial → commercial internal linking so articles route qualified visitors to conversion pages.
  Updated / Implemented ~3,000 internal links across ~600 articles.

• Simplified primary enquiry flow on key landing pages: shorter, clearer lead paragraphs, bullet benefits, clear eligibility cues and improved enquiry forms. 

• Pruned the worst thin pages (noindex/merge) to reduce index bloat and reallocate crawl equity to priority pages.

Outcome (end April 2025): organic conversions rose from 37 → ~150 (conversion rate ~0.22%) on ~73.8k clicks. The baseline improved enough to justify heavier interventions.

Goal: convert high-intent queries by rebuilding conversion pages and creating targeted long-tail transactional content.

Key interventions:

• Rebuilt primary transactional pages with concise expert leads, eligibility cues and explicit next steps.

• Example: Prescription sign-up page rebuilt and optimised for long-tail transactional queries. 

The above GSC data shows the impact on the get prescription landing page.
Clicks 74 → 849, impressions 23k → 61.2k; CTR 0.3% → 1.4%

• Replaced generic anchors with commercial anchor text in internal links to improve intent routing.

• Deployed compliant microcopy addressing legal/regulatory trust (physician pathway info), which reduced hesitation.

• Trimmed content. This is something many site owners are afraid of. "The content already exists, can we not just leave it?" Actually, removing low-value pages can reduce index bloat, improve crawl efficiency and sharpen a site’s topical focus. 

Outcome (end August 2025): conversions ~250 / month (71.3k clicks, CVR ~0.35%). Clicks modestly down vs prior peak due to trimming low value content, but conversion quality rising.

• Goal: move from tactical fixes to a repeatable programmatic system and editorial governance.

Strategic work:

• Finalised topic cluster architecture and editorial guidelines focusing on extractability (short lead answers, labelled lists, data blocks) so pages could be cited by LLMs. 

• Prepared localised page templates to be launched in Phase 4.

• Tightened publication rules: any new article must pass an “intent and sourceability” checklist.

• Continued selective pruning and consolidation to concentrate topical authority.

Outcome (end November 2025): organic conversions ~350 / month (59.6k clicks, CVR ~0.6%). A clear trend: fewer impressions but a steadily improving conversion mix.

The below GSC data screenshot shows an example of an article written according to the new guidelines (published end Sep 2025):

Goal: scale the proven template to capture long-tail local/regional transactional queries.

What we launched: re-released improved localised pages (programmatic templates) at beginning of December 2025.

Immediate results:

• Dec-2025: 771 conversions from 64.1k clicks (CVR 1.2%)

• Jan-2026: 1,032 conversions from 66.3k clicks (CVR 1.56%)

These pages captured long-tail transactional queries such as “find medical cannabis pharmacy [region]” and consistently produced high-intent clicks (small to medium volumes, high value).

AI relevance: selected localised pages and high-quality articles were subsequently increasingly surfaced in AI overviews / LLM results. 

Start (Feb-2025 baseline): organic CVR 0.05%, organic conversions ~37.

End (Jan-2026): organic CVR 1.56%, organic conversions 1,032 (organic now accounts for ~13.2% of all conversions vs ~0.61% at baseline).

12-month GSC snapshot (Feb-25 → Jan-26): 850k clicks, 28.3M impressions, avg CTR ~3%, avg position ~13.1. 
Website's organic traffic over 12 months:

Key interpretation: some metrics (raw clicks, impressions) fell after pruning. This looked negative in isolation. Overlaid with conversion data the effect is clear: fewer, much more valuable clicks.

Conversions from organic search per month:

AI relevance: optimised pages are increasingly surfacing in AI overviews / LLM results. 

AI citations over time: