Case study
Two years in which their competitor’s share fell from 17% to 7%
Psychology practice in Madrid · Sustained visibility with an advertising budget of one hundred euros
I’m going to tell you about a case that doesn’t involve any spectacular figures, and that’s precisely why I find it useful.
A psychology practice in Madrid, offering both face-to-face and online consultations, was competing in a highly competitive local market. In April 2018, its visibility stood at 23 per cent, whilst that of its main competitor was 17 per cent – a six-point lead.
By May 2020, two years later, their visibility stood at 24 per cent and their competitor’s at 7 per cent. A seventeen-point lead.
Let me explain 🙂 the client’s visibility barely rose by one point. What turned the tables was that the rival’s visibility plummeted, and maintaining one’s position takes more effort than it seems. Let’s begin:
2 → 8
keywords ranked No. 1
23% vs 7%
visibility compared to the competitor
86% → 72%
bounce rate for paid traffic
216
prioritised content opportunities
1. The starting point
The first available data set is from April 2018, based on a panel of 64 keywords tracked across four search engines, with simultaneous monitoring of the main competitor.
The picture for that month:
- 23% overall visibility, compared to the competitor’s 17%.
- In desktop searches in Spain: 2 keywords in first place and 21 in the Top 10, with 25 of the 64 outside the top fifty positions.
- On mobile: 1 keyword in first place and 26 in the top 10.
- No active paid campaigns.
2. What we did
There’s one detail about this project that I particularly like: the advertising budget was one hundred euros. One hundred. You can’t buy market share with that, so we had to be very precise.
The work was spread over two years:
- Two geo-targeted campaigns — the city centre and the practice’s district — each with a daily budget of €7.50 and daily optimisation based on very specific negative keywords: searches for social security, free therapy and districts where the practice wasn’t located were excluded.
- A change in scheduling that transformed the results: the campaigns switched from running in the morning to running from 1 pm to 8 pm, after we realised that high-quality engagement was occurring during the afternoon slot.
- Nine keyword studies between 2019 and 2022, with 216 opportunities prioritised by volume and long-tail lists of over three thousand terms, covering the practice’s core areas: anxiety, relationships, child and adolescent counselling, bereavement, phobias, disorders and health.
- Complete website redesign: four architectural versions, a redirect plan, fifteen pieces of corporate copy drafted — from the homepage to the service pages and clinical categories — and an in-house photo shoot.
- Weekly competitor report tracking average ranking against three rivals in the same local market.
3. The results
| Metrics (panel of 64 keywords) | April 2018 | March 2020 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overall client visibility | 23% | 17% | Rank tracker |
| Competitor visibility | 17% | 8-9% | Rank tracker |
| Keywords in position 1 (desktop) | 2 | 8 | Rank tracker |
| Client visibility (May 2020) | - | 24% | Rank tracker |
| Competitor visibility (May 2020) | - | 7% | Rank tracker |
Based on the standardised set of 64 keywords, which is the only comparable segment across the entire series. The lead over the competitor has increased from 6 to 17 percentage points.
| Advertising (budget ~€100) | November 2018 | February 2019 | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks · main campaign | 87 | 71 | Google Ads |
| Impressions · main campaign | 2.548 | 2.074 | Google Ads |
| CTR · main campaign | 3,41% | 3,42% | Google Ads |
| Clicks · district campaign | 8 | 27 | Google Ads |
| CTR · district campaign | 4,44% | 2,95% | Google Ads |
| Bounce rate for paid traffic | 86% | 72% | Analytics · measured |
The district campaign triples its clicks after expanding the location and changing the time slot. The bounce rate drops by fourteen points: the same budget brings in visitors who stay on the site.
4. The methodological note, which in this case is significant
In April 2020, the monitoring panel expanded from 64 to 188 keywords. Subsequent reports show a jump from ‘17 in the Top 10’ to ‘86 in the Top 10’, which looks spectacular but isn’t: almost three times as many terms are being measured.
That is why, in this case, only the figures for the comparable period are published. It is clear that the 86 figure would look much better on a slide, and that is exactly why it is not included here.
I recommend checking this point whenever you see a sudden jump in a rankings dashboard: ask how many keywords were being tracked before and how many now. Half of the industry’s ‘miracles’ can be explained this way.
To sum up: what can you do with a hundred euros?
Basically, learn. With a hundred euros a month, you can’t buy traffic, but you can find out at what time people get in touch, which keywords attract curious visitors and which attract serious prospects, and whether the problem lies with the advert or the landing page.
Here are three things I’d suggest. Firstly, if your budget is small, spend it on learning rather than on reach: a €100 campaign with a well-defined negative keyword list is worth more than €1,000 spent blindly. Secondly, check the bounce rate of your paid traffic, as this is the quickest indicator of whether you’re attracting the wrong audience. And thirdly, monitor your competitor on the same dashboard as you: there are years when winning simply means not falling behind.
Remember, in the end it’s all about staying in the race when everyone else is slowing down 😉
