Case study
MM Hospital, Namakkal: taking a hospital's digital estate back, then launching a surgical robot
A five month engagement with a multispeciality hospital in Namakkal, covering the recovery of a digital estate held by a previous agency, the launch of a robotic joint replacement service, a search and local programme across the hospital's specialities, and Tamil language campaigns for three community medical camps.
The engagement at a glance
- Client
- MM Hospital, Namakkal, a multispeciality hospital
- Contact
- Dr. Sivakumar, Director and Orthopaedic Surgeon
- Market
- Namakkal district, Tamil Nadu
- Engagement
- August 2024 to January 2025, concluded
- Scope
- Digital estate migration, launch campaign, SEO, local search, paid social
- Reporting
- Four written SEO reports, plus one report per ad campaign
The starting position
What we were handed
Three problems, and only one of them was about search. The engagement file opens with a migration report rather than a keyword list, because the hospital did not control its own website when the work started.
The previous agency held the estate
The domain, the hosting, the Facebook Page, the LinkedIn Page, the YouTube channel, Google Analytics, Search Console and the Google Business Profile were all under a previous agency's control. The hospital's own contact address was a Gmail account. A hospital that cannot log in to its own Business Profile cannot correct its own emergency hours.
Eight other hospitals shared the name
Some form of the MM Hospital name is used by institutions in Chennai, Kerala, Jammu and Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, Somanur and Dharapuram, among others. Searches for those hospitals were arriving at this one, which means the traffic looked fine in a report and was worth nothing to a hospital in Namakkal.
The site had accumulated real technical debt
Thirty six plugins carrying pending updates, overlapping SEO and caching plugins competing with each other, more than 140 spam comments in the database, and no schema on any of the medical service pages. None of this was exotic. It was simply nobody's job.
The work
Four phases, in the order they happened
The order is the argument. Nothing was optimised before the hospital owned it, and nothing was written before there was an audit and a measurement setup to judge it against.
August 2024
Phase one: recovering the estate
Before anything could be optimised, the hospital had to own the thing being optimised. This phase moved every asset into accounts the hospital and this agency control, and removed the previous agency's access.
- Domain transferred, WHOIS updated and nameservers moved under management
- New hosting purchased and configured, files migrated from the previous agency's backup, then the WordPress site tested end to end
- Facebook Page and LinkedIn Page ownership transferred, and previous agency members removed
- YouTube channel moved out of the previous agency's account, with publishing access verified as revoked
- Google Analytics, Search Console and the Business Profile transferred to the hospital's own official address
- A professional mailbox on the hospital's own domain set up to replace the Gmail account, and the platform accounts moved onto it
- Thirty six plugins updated, unused themes removed, and more than 140 spam comments cleared
- Continuous malware protection deployed, daily backups enabled at the host, and Cloudflare put in front of the site
September to October 2024
Phase two: launching the robotic joint replacement service
Dr. Sivakumar had trained on and bought a surgical robot, and was, in his own words on video, unsure whether patients would come to a tier two town for it rather than travel to a city. The launch was the answer to that question, and he separated it into three parts before handing it over: the content of the launch, the audio visual, and what the public would take away from the day.
- Launch content written and produced for all three parts he specified
- A seven city awareness campaign for the robotic service, run on paid social
- Creative built for the new speciality and reused across the service pages and the Business Profile
- The new service given its own page and internal links from the orthopaedic and joint replacement pages
September 2024 to January 2025
Phase three: the search programme
Five months of technical and content work, reported to the hospital on four dates. The order matters: the audit and the measurement came before the content, so there was something to judge the content against.
- A full technical SEO audit completed before any optimisation work began
- Keyword research and clustering across the hospital's specialities, delivered as its own document
- Rank tracking configured across 78 target keywords, checked three times a week
- The SEO plugin consolidated onto one tool, with the competing caching and optimisation plugins removed
- A single caching layer configured properly in place of the three overlapping ones
- Meta titles, meta descriptions and H1s rewritten across the site
- Schema markup implemented for the medical services
- XML sitemaps created for pages, posts, images and video
- Image compression and alt text using the medical terms patients actually search
- Internal linking built between related treatments, so a stroke page and a neurology page stop competing
- Service page content written and expanded across orthopaedics and spine, emergency and trauma, dialysis, general surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, neurology and stroke, cardiology, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, anaesthesia, intensive care, diagnostics, pharmacy and ambulance services
- Google Business Profile rebuilt: categories, description, department level service listings, emergency and visiting hours, and current photography
September to October 2024
Phase four: Tamil language campaigns for three medical camps
Three free joint examination camps, each in a different town, each needing its own creative and its own catchment. The campaigns ran in Tamil because that is the language the audience reads, and the copy led with the word free because that was the point of the camp.
- A camp at Avoor on 15 September 2024, promoted to that camp's own catchment
- A camp at Kangayam on 22 September 2024, promoted across the town
- A camp at the hospital itself on Trichy Main Road on 13 October 2024
- Creative produced in Tamil for each camp, carrying the date, the time, the venue and a number to call to confirm entry
- A Facebook event created for each camp, with the venue written in Tamil so it could be read by somebody deciding whether to travel
- Targeting set per camp rather than once for the account, so a camp in one town was not advertised to another
- A written report on each campaign delivered to the hospital within three days of the camp
Dated record
Every date, and the document it comes from
A timeline nobody can check is a story. Each row below is dated from a delivery document in the engagement file, named in the right hand column.
| Date | What happened | Source document |
|---|---|---|
| 31 August 2024 | Migration completed and the finished report delivered | Website migration report |
| 15 September 2024 | Free joint examination camp at Avoor, campaign reported on 18 September | Camp advertising report |
| 20 September 2024 | First SEO report: audit findings, the name confusion diagnosis and the initial fixes | Bi-monthly SEO report |
| 22 September 2024 | Free joint examination camp at Kangayam, campaign reported on 25 September | Camp advertising report |
| 3 October 2024 | Second SEO report, and the seven city robotic awareness campaign | Monthly SEO report and campaign record |
| 13 October 2024 | Free joint examination camp at the hospital, campaign reported on 14 October | Camp advertising report |
| 21 November 2024 | Third SEO report, covering October to November | Monthly SEO report |
| 2 January 2025 | Fourth SEO report, covering November to December | Monthly SEO report |
| January 2025 | Final partnership report delivered and the engagement concluded | Final SEO partnership report |
| 6 June 2025 | Dr. Sivakumar publishes his own video testimonial about the launch | The hospital's testimonial, recorded on video |
Ownership
What the hospital owns now
This is the part of the engagement that survives it. Every asset below is registered to the hospital rather than to us, which is why the engagement concluding in January 2025 cost them nothing structural.
- The domain, with WHOIS in order
- The hosting account and the website files on it
- The professional mailbox on their own domain
- The Facebook Page, LinkedIn Page and YouTube channel
- Google Analytics, Search Console and the Google Business Profile, on the hospital's own address
- Every report delivered during the engagement, including the audit and the keyword clustering
We also handed over recommendations that sat outside the engagement, including reducing the plugin count and a further round of media and code optimisation, so the next person working on the site starts with a list rather than a guess.
The client's view
What the client said about it, in his own words
Dr. Sivakumar recorded a testimonial about the launch himself and published it in June 2025. It is in Tamil. He describes being unsure whether a tier two town would draw patients for robotic surgery, deciding that performance without marketing would not be enough, and choosing us on the strength of the documented process we showed him. The quote below is the part about the launch itself.
I thought my ideas were just clay, but they gave it a great shape. They gave me a launch program that could be etched in everyone's minds and hearts. … This launch itself has laid a big path for my success.
Clients
Brands we work on
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- The problem as you see it, in your words first
- Where marketing is leaking: traffic, enquiries, follow-up or closing
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