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Cardinal Treatment Center offers comprehensive residential and outpatient recovery programs in Southern Ohio.
My buddy, Elliot Drake, spoke with Michael, the owner, about his need to generate more leads and clients.
Elliot shared the overview with me, and we discussed the best SEO and digital marketing strategies to help Michael attract more patients.
Looking at their site, I can already tell it doesn’t rank in anything.
The site has a domain rating of zero, meaning the backlinks pass no juice.
Let’s examine their keywords.
They’re branded, but the keyword difficulty is low. There seems to be some random Russian content, likely from someone trying to buy links, which makes no sense.
It appears the website has been hacked, so it lacks SEO. The URL includes strange tags and other irrelevant elements.
Many of their pages are likely spammy.
This situation often arises when WordPress plugins are not updated. Bots scan for vulnerabilities and exploit them, generating low-quality pages that aim to rank for terms like “slot machines.”
There are numerous spam pages here, filled with Russian slot casino content.
If there’s one issue indicating that their site has been hacked and is vulnerable, how likely is it that there are at least ten other problems we can uncover?
Pretty high. For that reason, we need first to lock down this site.
So, they have location service pages.
Normally these pages should be listed in order of priority based on how much power they have.
After checking Portsmouth, I noticed that it looks like an AI-generated page because of its content.
There’s no EEAT which is a fundamental principle.
I wrote an article about this—about how I love to eat. Google changed the rules from E-A-T; they added an E, so it’s E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust.
Google wants to see that you actually have real experience in all your content. For example, below is a real picture of me, Matthew Janusek, and his family having dinner. It’s a real experience.
Google introduced EEAT because people were using AI to generate spammy pages.
We can also use ChatGPT to analyze how the location pages perform in terms of EEAT.
For example, I can write the instructions below and copy-paste the full-page text in ChatGPT.
How does this page for Cardinal Treatment Center rate on EEAT? Of course, we want more patients. Michael, the owner, reached out for help with SEO, digital, social, etc, since all his patients come from court referrals. No digital game, so Elliot Drake and I are taking him on as a client under Elliot’s new agency. This is a location page. Rate it harshly and mention what PAA we include or not, also rated 1 to 10.
PAA is People Also Ask.
Since Cardinal Treatment Center is a drug rehab, we can find some of its PAA by going to Google search and typing in “drug rehab portsmouth ohio.”
We can see a list of search results at the top, followed by some PAA for drug rehab, such as:
- How many days do you get in rehab?
- How does rehab for drug addicts work?
- How many times go to rehab?
Cardinal Treatment Center can rank on a keyword by answering the above questions, the PAA.
They can also satisfy EEAT by telling stories when answering the PAA, which adds real experience. For example, they can tell a story about a patient as long as it doesn’t affect privacy.
As I said, AI can help us analyze the EEAT and PAA, write our proposal, and more, but we still need expertise when using it.
You can’t just be an idiot and use the AI. You have to actually understand the thing yourself.
After pasting the full page text in ChatGPT, we get part of the response below.
So whenever it gives you the above numbers, it’s actually worse than the number it gives you because it’s being polite. So, giving us a two is basically a zero, and a five is lower than that.
So, we don’t answer any of these questions, and there’s nothing here.
We don’t show our credentials. We don’t show our staff. We don’t show anything about our properties. We don’t show patient storage.
What Next for Cardinal Treatment Center?
- Fix Website Security: Address security vulnerabilities immediately. The site appears hacked with spammy, irrelevant content, which needs to be removed to prevent further damage.
- Improve Content & Authenticity: Revise AI-generated and thin content on location pages. Include real patient stories and credentials to meet Google’s EEAT guidelines and build trust.
- Optimize for People Also Ask (PAA): Answer common rehab-related questions (e.g., “How many days do you get in rehab?”) on relevant pages to improve visibility in Google’s PAA section.
- Build Quality Backlinks: Focus on acquiring high-quality, relevant backlinks to improve domain authority. Avoid low-quality or spammy links.
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Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.