Case study

Competing in a crowded market by serving the people nobody else was serving

A Florida physical therapy clinic in one of the most saturated local search markets in the US. Rather than fight for the obvious terms, we built out the one area where demand was real and competition was almost non-existent — and now the clinic ranks on page one for it.

30 placesaverage improvement in Google ranking position across the site

Average ranking position43.4 → 13.8up 30 places · first vs last 30 days

Monthly search visibility20.7k → 44k+112% · impressions per month

Page-one rankings11 pagesin the target niche

Federal claims cluster443 clicksfrom 96,670 impressions

The situation

Search "physical therapy near me" in South Florida and you are competing with every clinic within forty miles, several hospital networks, and a wall of directory sites. It is one of the hardest local markets there is. A small practice can spend years and a fortune fighting for those terms and never reach page one.

So we didn't. The clinic treats federal employees injured at work — people whose care is covered under the federal workers' compensation scheme, OWCP. It turns out those people spend a great deal of time searching for help with the paperwork: which form to file, how to complete it, what happens next. The searches exist in real volume. Almost nobody was answering them properly.

What we did

Built out the OWCP claims cluster. Detailed, genuinely useful guides to the specific forms injured federal workers have to deal with — the CA-17, the duty status report, the CA-2 — written to actually answer the question rather than to bait a click.
Connected the guides to the service. Someone researching a form is someone who needs a provider that accepts the scheme, so each guide leads naturally to the clinic's OWCP service pages.
Covered the surrounding questions. Vocational rehabilitation, medical documentation, federal versus state cover — the things people search once they're past the first form.

The results

Monthly search visibility

How often the site appeared in Google results each month.

Before the engagementDuring the engagement

Full calendar months, September 2025 to July 2026. Source: Google Search Console.

Visibility more than doubled, and the ranking improvement behind it is the largest I've recorded on any site. The average page moved from position 43 — page four, effectively invisible — to position 13.8.

The federal workers’ compensation cluster

Clicks earned by the OWCP guides and service pages, with their average Google position.

Fifty-one pages in this cluster now earn 443 clicks from 96,670 impressions a year. Eleven of them rank in Google’s top ten.

Page one for the forms injured federal workers are actually searching for.

The CA-17 guide sits at position 7 against 18,000 annual impressions. The duty status report guide sits at position 6. These are people with an active claim, looking for a provider — about as close to a qualified enquiry as search traffic gets.

Where the clinic ranks now

Search term	Position
duty status report	5.6
ca-17 form owcp	6.4
ca-17 form	7.0
ca-17 duty status report	7.4
ca 17 form	8.5
ca-17	9.0

What’s next

The niche strategy is working and there is more of it to build — the claims process has plenty of steps still uncovered. The bigger remaining opportunity is on the clinical side of the site, where a large group of older articles compete against each other for the same searches instead of pooling their strength. Consolidating them is the next phase, and on a site this size it typically produces a fast, visible gain.

All figures taken directly from Google Search Console, covering the 12 months to August 2026. Engagement began at the start of March 2026. The visibility chart shows total impressions; all click figures quoted are for the content cluster only and exclude branded searches and Google Business Profile traffic. Client anonymised.