Chad DeBolt is the personality behind and founder of Surchability. He’s been heavily involved with online marketing, specifically SEO, for 16 years.
Most behavioral health organizations don’t have a traffic problem.
They have a wrong-traffic problem.
For years, the industry has been conditioned to celebrate vanity metrics: rising impressions, higher traffic, and blog posts that pull in readers who will never become patients.
It looks good on a dashboard. It doesn’t move census.
Eleanor Health learned that firsthand.
When they shifted away from top-of-funnel, fluff SEO and rebuilt their strategy around bottom-of-the-funnel, admission-driven keywords, everything changed:
All from focusing on the traffic that actually fills census.
Eleanor Health is a value-based, whole-person care provider operating across multiple states, committed to delivering evidence-based addiction and mental health services. Their clinical outcomes speak for themselves, but online, their organic performance wasn’t telling the same story.
That changed when they came back to us.
Eleanor Health wasn’t new to us.
Five years ago, we helped them build a strong organic foundation. To the point, in fact, where they no longer needed to rely on paid ads and LegitScript certification.
But when the previous leadership team shifted their entire growth strategy toward high-volume, low-quality insurance leads, our paths split.
Fast-forward to a few months ago.
A new leadership team stepped in with a very different mindset. They wanted control again, not over traffic, but over their own high-quality, self-generated pipeline. And they needed it quickly.
When they reached out, the story they shared was one we see across the behavioral health industry:
1. Vanity metrics were masking poor performance.
Their top-ranking content drove traffic, sure, but it was “fluff” content.
Educational at best.
Irrelevant at worst.
And none of it helped someone searching right now for addiction treatment in their city.
2. They were expanding nationally without local SEO support.
New markets were opening rapidly. Insurance partnerships were rolling out. But their site lacked the geographically focused, bottom-of-funnel pages needed to drive admissions in each state.
3. Their Google Business listings were about to be “thrown away.”
Instead of leveraging their large GMB footprint for local relevance, rankings, and calls, previous efforts had undervalued it entirely.
Individually, these issues are common. Together, they’re a recipe for wasted potential, especially for a multi-state provider with strong brand trust and outcomes.
So we reintroduced them to the signature Surchability method that has consistently driven results for behavioral health organizations for almost two decades:
A simple, systematic approach designed to eliminate fluff, sharpen intent, and turn organic search into a predictable admissions engine.
The 4P Framework isn’t a trick, a loophole, or some tactic to “fool” Google.
It’s the system we’ve refined over 19 years in the behavioral health and addiction treatment space, designed specifically for organizations that need real admissions, not more blog posts.
Here’s how we used it to rebuild Eleanor Health’s organic growth engine from the ground up.
The first step wasn’t adding anything.
It was removing everything that didn’t matter.
Eleanor Health’s site had accumulated years of top-of-the-funnel content that looked productive but distracted Google from what actually improves census. So we aggressively purged:
This instantly refocused Google’s attention on the pages that matter most, the ones tied directly to patient intent and local demand.
When you clean out the clutter, the right pages finally get the visibility they deserve.
After removing the fluff, we rebuilt their content strategy around bottom-of-the-funnel, geographically targeted keywords.
These weren’t broad “addiction symptoms” or “what is MAT” articles.
They were highly intentional pages tied to local search:
The kinds of searches someone makes when they’re ready to take action today.
For a multi-state provider like Eleanor Health, this instantly aligned their website with their expansion goals, giving each market a clear, conversion-focused path to admissions.
To amplify this new BOFU foundation, we focused on two forms of authority-building:
Local Sponsorship Links
These create geographic relevance in each target market, something behavioral health organizations desperately need but rarely invest in properly.
Digital PR
High-authority links from reputable publications signal trust, legitimacy, and real-world relevance.
Together, these links tell Google:
“This organization matters here, and people trust them.”
Most treatment centers try to “marry” leads right away.
But people searching for help, especially in behavioral health, often aren’t ready to commit the moment they land on your site. They need to be dated a little. They need confidence, clarity, and trust before they feel ready to take the next step.
So, we built systems that guide leads through that trust-building process:
This is the part almost every agency ignores, because it requires thinking beyond rankings and keywords.
But in behavioral health, admissions come from trust.
And trust comes from consistent, patient nurturing over time.
By closing that loop, Eleanor Health didn’t just get more traffic, they got more ready-to-enroll members.
Eleanor Health’s turnaround wasn’t luck.
It was the direct result of replacing vanity-driven SEO with a framework built for one thing: admissions.
After implementing the 4P Framework, their performance shifted dramatically:
These numbers matter because they translate into something every behavioral health leader cares about:
More calls.
More form fills.
More admissions.
More lives helped.
If your organization is tired of ranking for top-of-the-funnel fluff, and ready to generate real, measurable admissions from organic search…our 4P Framework can get you there.
