A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
Quillfeather Counselling · Online therapy platform · Manchester
+176% therapist-matching sign-ups from organic
Health & Wellness · Content Engine plan · 16 months · UK & Ireland
On the matter of trust,
Mental-health queries are YMYL territory; generic self-help content was being outranked by the NHS and charities, and sign-ups had plateaued.
Quillfeather Counselling matches people in Manchester and across the UK with registered therapists online. Someone searching at 2am for help with panic attacks is about as vulnerable as a searcher gets, and Google treats these as Your Money or Your Life queries: it asks who wrote the answer, who checked it, and whether it is safe. The blog could not answer any of those questions.
The result was a library of well-meaning articles ranking on page four, behind the NHS, Mind and the Samaritans, and a matching questionnaire that the organic audience rarely found.
What we found in the drawer,
Trust
No named reviewer, no registration body (BACP, UKCP, HCPC), no review date. For a YMYL query, that is the first thing quality raters and AI systems look for, and the NHS and Mind always have it.
Content
Average 420 words; six separate posts targeted “how to manage anxiety”. 61% of indexed URLs earned no clicks in twelve months.
Safety
Pages on low mood and self-harm-adjacent topics carried no route to Samaritans, 111 or 999. A safety failure first, and a strong negative quality signal too.
Technical
Author archives were noindexed, and lastReviewed dates existed only in the CMS. Machines could not see the expertise that did exist.
Sources
Only 7% of outbound references went to NICE guidance, the NHS or peer-reviewed research.
Funnel
Every article ended in the same “Book now” banner. Fewer than 0.4% of article readers ever reached the matching questionnaire.
What we proposed,
Built on our Content Engine plan: a steady, reviewed publishing cadence rather than a burst of volume. Nothing goes live until a registered clinician has signed it off.
Part one
Rewrite the core library to the standard a worried person deserves: accurate, sourced, kind, with a safe next step.
Part two
Every clinical page is reviewed by a registered therapist before it goes live, and again every twelve months.
Part three
Replace 214 scattered posts with condition hubs that cover a subject completely and route gently into matching.
Part four
Make each reviewed answer easy for AI systems to quote and attribute, so the brand appears where the click no longer happens.
The correspondence,
Month 1 of 16 · Diagnosis
Audit sealed
YMYL audit of 232 URLs; 214 thin self-help posts flagged for merge, rewrite or retirement.
Use the arrow keys to move between months. Changes are relative to the month before work began.
Sealed and delivered,
| Query | Cluster | Before | After | AI Overview |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| what happens in a first counselling session | First steps | Not top 100 | 2 | Cited |
| how to find a therapist manchester | Local matching | 41 | 3 | — |
| bacp registered counsellor online | Trust | 22 | 4 | — |
| cbt for anxiety online | Anxiety | 28 | 5 | Cited |
| couples counselling online uk | Relationships | 38 | 6 | — |
| online therapy uk | Head term | 34 | 7 | — |
| therapy for grief | Grief | 46 | 8 | Cited |
| signs of burnout at work | Workplace | 57 | 9 | Cited |
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Yours, when you are ready,
Careful, reviewed content for sensitive subjects, built on the Content Engine plan.