SUCCESS STORIES

Psychwire: Turning Search Volume Into Qualified Clinicians

Psychwire didn't come to StudioHawk chasing bigger traffic numbers. They came because the traffic they had was starting to lose its edge: more visitors, but fewer of the right ones.

Psychwire sits in an unusual spot: part eCommerce, part professional education, selling accredited education to both individual therapists and the organisations that employ them. On a fully custom CMS, in a niche where every word of content has to hold up to a clinical audience. Here's how a quality-first SEO strategy turned that complexity into compounding growth.

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85%

Increase in AI referral traffic YoY

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28%

Increase in organic clicks YoY

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157%

Increase in top 3 keyword rankings

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Psychwire is an Australian online learning platform curating accredited continuing education courses across evidence-based therapy modalities, taught by world-leading clinicians such and built exclusively for mental health professionals advancing their clinical practice.

The challenge was never demand; it was precision. After noticing a decline in the quality of users landing on the site, the goal wasn't raw traffic growth. It was making sure the right clinicians were finding them, targeting 20% YoY organic growth built on quality, not volume.

The Need

Under a plateaued foundation of "good enough" SEO, the real opportunity was hiding in the overlap between two audiences searching in the same language for very different reasons. The key challenges:

A fully custom CMS with limited technical flexibility. Unlike clients on Shopify or WordPress, every technical recommendation had to be built around the constraints of a bespoke platform.
A sensitive, professional niche. Every piece of content and every recommendation needed to be grounded in evidence and credible to an audience of qualified clinicians. Nothing generic, nothing superficial.
Overlapping B2C and B2B audiences. Individual therapists and organisational buyers often search using identical keywords, so the keyword architecture and content mapping needed careful intent differentiation to avoid confusing either users or search engines.
A plateau in foundational SEO. The basics were already in place. Moving the needle meant genuinely creative thinking across content, technical and off-site strategy, not another round of the same fixes.
A lean, focused scope. With 13 hours a month across strategy, content and technical work, and Psychwire's team handling all implementation, every recommendation had to be prioritised for maximum impact.

The Plan

With foundational SEO already in place and two overlapping audiences to, the opportunity wasn't in doing more; it was in doing it with more precision. So we built a strategy around a clear organising principle: match search intent to the right destination, every time, then build authority and future-facing visibility on top.

That started with mapping exactly where commercial intent should route to course pages and where informational intent should route to educational content, so B2C and B2B searchers each landed somewhere built for them. From there, we layered in a content engine to own the research phase, technical work suited to a custom build, and E-E-A-T signals to strengthen how Psychwire's experts show up in both traditional and AI-driven search.

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Keyword architecture and competitive gap analysis

A full competitive audit to map untapped opportunities, with a strict rule applied throughout: commercial intent to course pages, informational intent to educational and Q&A content.

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Hub-and-spoke content strategy

Long-tail informational content built to capture the research phase, where competitors held a significant advantage, plus a separate B2B keyword cluster kept entirely distinct from B2C content.

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Technical SEO tailored to a custom CMS

Structured data implementation, metadata updates across course and expert pages, canonicalisation and internal linking audits, a cannibalisation audit, and two full technical re-crawls.

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E-E-A-T and authority signals

Expert profile pages audited and optimised with improved metadata and internal linking, alongside a Wikidata profile to strengthen entity signals.

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AI visibility tracking

Peec.AI set up to monitor how and where Psychwire is being cited in AI-generated answers.

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Off-site and emerging channels

A Reddit SEO strategy to build presence in relevant therapy and continuing education communities, working toward AMA sessions with Psychwire's expert clinicians.

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Lean reporting and management

Monthly reporting to keep a tightly scoped 13-hour engagement focused on the highest-impact work.

The Execution

With intent mapped and priorities set, the real work began: giving individual clinicians, organisational buyers and search engines themselves exactly what they needed, without any of the three tripping over one another. Every deliverable had to hold up to a professional, evidence-led audience while working within the constraints of a fully custom CMS.

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Intent-Based Keyword Architecture

Ran a full competitive gap analysis to map untapped keyword opportunities, then applied one governing rule site-wide: commercial intent to course pages, informational intent to educational and Q&A content, resolving the B2C/B2B overlap at the root.

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Clinician-Focused Content Expansion

Built a hub-and-spoke content strategy targeting long-tail, research-phase queries across therapy modality clusters, from CBT and DBT to EMDR and Schema Therapy, the exact segment where competitors held the advantage. A separate B2B keyword cluster was developed and kept entirely distinct, covering staff training and bulk licensing for organisational buyers.

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Technical SEO for a Custom CMS

Delivered structured data implementation, metadata updates across course and expert pages, canonicalisation and internal linking audits, and a cannibalisation audit, every recommendation scoped to what a bespoke platform could actually support and verified across two full technical re-crawls.

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E-E-A-T & Authority Signals

Audited and optimised expert profile pages with sharper metadata and internal linking, and initiated a Wikidata profile to strengthen entity signals for Psychwire and its clinician authors, building the credibility markers a professional, evidence-led audience expects.

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AI Visibility & Community-Led Off-Site

Set up Peec.AI to monitor how Psychwire is cited in AI-generated answers, and established a Reddit SEO strategy with a structured plan toward AMA sessions with Psychwire's world-leading clinicians, an early move into community-driven visibility and discovery.

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This Q&A with Dr. Jonice Webb on childhood emotional neglect is one of the clearest wins from Psychwire's content strategy, a page built to answer exactly what a clinician is searching for, anchored by a named expert to strengthen E-E-A-T.

Since launch it's grown from 258 to 1,417 clicks, a 449% increase, and it's now one of the pages carrying Psychwire's growth in AI-referral traffic.

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Two audiences, one set of keywords.

The hardest part of this campaign wasn't finding keyword opportunities, it was resolving which audience each one actually belonged to. A disciplined commercial-versus-informational routing rule kept B2C and B2B content from cannibalising each other, letting both audiences find their own path through the site.

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Building credibility content for clinicians

With every recommendation, we had to think like the audience we were writing for. Generic SEO content wouldn't hold up to a readership of qualified mental health professionals, so content strategy leaned on evidence-based framing and genuine clinical relevance throughout.

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Working within a custom CMS

Every technical recommendation had to be scoped to what a bespoke platform could support, and with the client's team handling all implementation, prioritisation mattered as much as the recommendations themselves.

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Moving past a plateau

The foundational SEO was already solid, which meant there was no easy technical fix left to chase. Growth had to come from genuinely new thinking, in content depth, off-site strategy and forward-looking channels like AI citation visibility, not incremental cleanup.

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Doing more with 13 hours a month

A tightly scoped engagement across strategy, content briefing and technical auditing meant every hour had to be spent on the highest-leverage work, from keyword architecture to Reddit and AMA planning.

The Results

Broad-based improvement: 796 of 1,340 tracked queries improved in average position, and clicks in Psychwire's largest market, the US, grew 50%, proof the quality-first strategy lifted performance across the board, not just at the top.

Showing up in AI search: AI referral traffic grew 85.35% year-on-year, with Peec.AI tracking and a growing entity profile helping the site show up more often in AI-generated answers, not just traditional search.

28%

Increase organic clicks

Clicks grew from 112,516 to 144,886 in Google Search Console.

92%

Increase search impressions YoY

Impressions rose from 6,905,041 to 13,307,857.

157%

Top 3 keyword rankings

Rankings grew from 136 to 350.

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New tracked keywords

Total tracked rankings grew from 5,890 to 7,999.

449%

Emotional neglect Q&A clicks

One research-phase page grew from 258 to 1,417 clicks.

85%

AI referral traffic YoY

The site now appears more often in AI-generated answers, drawing steady AI-driven traffic.

The Conclusion

Psychwire's SEO campaign shows what's possible when strategy is built around audience quality, not just traffic volume.

Through a combination of precise keyword architecture across a complex B2C and B2B audience, clinician-focused content strategy targeting the full research funnel, technical SEO tailored to a custom CMS, and forward-looking AI visibility and community-building foundations, StudioHawk helped Psychwire cut through a crowded professional education market, more than double its Top 3 rankings, and grow organic visibility across key markets in under 12 months.

85%

Increase in AI referral traffic YoY

Helping a clinician education platform reach the right audience, not just more of it.

Psychwire: Turning Search Volume Into Qualified Clinicians

The Need

The Plan

The Execution

The Challenges Overcome

The Results

The Conclusion

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