MediQuick
MediQuick was founded in 2019. The company was the brainchild of two pharmacists, Thandi Ngcobo and Dr. James Patel, who, to the best of my knowledge, decided to take action because they were fed up with seeing people face difficulty accessing basic healthcare.
Cape Town was where MediQuick initially began its operations; however, the intention was never to serve only one city. MediQuick wanted to serve as many people in South Africa as possible, whether those people were based in a city centre or in a township that would not often be visited by a courier.
The business model is, when broken down, fairly simple. Customers are provided prescription medications, general over-the-counter products, virtual consultations, and unexpectedly down-to-earth health advice, all from the comfort of their own home. Once MediQuick was launched it was kind of ‘patently obvious’.
Now, somewhere along the way, the vision began to solidify. MediQuick zeroed in on communities that, historically, had not been the recipients of the best healthcare services. This saw MediQuick becoming, by 2024, more than ‘just another online pharmacy’. The business was treating 21 different conditions, providing 206 treatments and had amassed over 4,200 positive customer reviews. You do not accidentally accumulate 4,200 positive customer reviews.
Pull out the microscope for a second. South Africa’s eHealth industry reached R12 billion in 2024 and the demand for digital pharmacy services kept on growing. Consumers were looking for convenience, transparency, and honesty in a service, all at the same time.
At around this time MediQuick joined forces with EcoSEO. MediQuick wanted to be found. There are few things in business more frustrating than having an excellent product or service that consumers simply don’t know exists. MediQuick had done all the hard yards, they just needed to be seen. A boom in organic traffic and a healthier footprint in the healthcare industry was the result. The rest is story is the story below.
Lead Time: 6 Months
Sector: Healthcare Services
Target Type: B2C
Demographic: Adults aged 18–55 seeking convenient access to medications and health advice.
Website Goal: Increase organic traffic and establish authority as a trusted South African online pharmacy.
Services: Schema Markup Implementation, Content Strategy, On-Page SEO, Backlink Acquisition
634%
Organic Growth
The Challenge
By the end of 2024, MediQuick was the kind of reputation you can’t fake. Five years’ worth of real-world service, real patients, and real, solid reviews. It’s the kind of pedigree you usually have to fight tooth and nail for.
But when we took a look at the website’s performance metrics, things just didn’t look right. MediQuick was averaging 8,200 visits a month, which is okay, but not for a platform of their stature. Especially one with that kind of proven track record.
Even more perplexing, though, was how primed they were to really hit it out of the park. The mission was there. The service was there.
The customer confidence was there… it all was. Yet when someone searched “online pharmacy South Africa” or “buy medication online,” MediQuick might as well have not existed. Not just low-value, generic terms, either.
These were highly specific, high-intent searches – the kinds of terms people Google when they need help yesterday. And MediQuick was nowhere to be found when it counted.
Once we went under the hood, more issues started coming to light:
They weren’t ranking for relevant health service terms they should have. In fact, their schema markup was nonexistent or improperly implemented, meaning their search result listings weren’t standing out in ways Google favors.
They lacked sufficient backlinks to compete with legacy healthcare sites either, which in that vertical, is a crucial component of authority.
And to top it all off, a sizable portion of their meta titles, descriptions, and some content on the site was long past its prime.
When that’s the case, Google has a more difficult time parsing what those pages are actually about.
Enter Thandi and James, about that time – end of May 2024. They were sick of “band-aids” and “quick fixes,” they wanted to build it right.
To build MediQuick into the number one go-to platform South Africans think of when they need online prescription services, instead of the one they accidentally find on page three of their search results.
Schema Markup & User Intent Optimization
Standing Out: Rich Snippets for Success
One of the initial steps that we took was to dig into Semrush and identify every single high-intent keyword phrase that users actually use when they’re feeling super desperate to get their meds.
They were keyword phrases such as “buy antibiotics online South Africa”, as if these people needed any explanation of what they were typing and they certainly did not have time to lose. You could practically hear them wailing.
In an effort to help MediQuick display properly in the SERPs, we used Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper to apply schema. Nothing fancy or overblown but rather the right elements in a meaningful way: Product, MedicalCondition, Organization.
Structuring things like this made it far easier for Google to understand each page and therefore display the right things, such as price, treatments, and company information in the search results. When you get the results that you want in SERPs, they actually look like a helpful SERP.
A few weeks later, Google Search Console was displaying something new. Approximately 4,900 keywords were triggering rich snippets, and the CTR? Up 11.3%! Wowzers. That’s a lot of eyeballs. In other words, people were stopping. People were seeing MediQuick. People were clicking through.
User Intent (Understanding what users actually want to know)
Keywords tell only part of the user intent story. So we dug deeper. I spent some time digging through the Google Search Console and came across a group of repetitive questions. Those interminable “People Also Ask” boxes that are quite often the actual user intent.
So instead of searches like “buy antibiotics online South Africa”, they had some questions like, “How to safely purchase medication online in South Africa?”. You know, stuff like that. Functional questions. Questions that can be typed out at 3am when someone isn’t feeling well.
We used Semrush’s Content Template tool for inspiration but we did not simply throw in place-holder answers to questions (actually, I did write one that was pretty damn good). We wrote real FAQ content for the home page, the treatment pages, and the product listings so that Thandi and James’ authentic voices could shine through. If users see the real faces of the experts, they trust the advice being given. And when they trust, they buy.
The results were almost immediate. Google Analytics reported that users were spending almost 15% more time on the pages where we included FAQs, more specifically, 14.79% longer. That’s a lot of time spent. I like to think that it’s time spent doing more than just scrolling. I like to think it’s time spent reading, actually understanding, and getting what they needed.
Content Optimisation & Backlinks
Refreshing Old Content
The one thing I have realised with medical content is that it ages really quickly. New treatments, new guidelines, and suddenly a page that you thought was rock solid six months ago suddenly has started to look a little stale.
So we fired up Ahrefs’ Content Explorer and ran through MediQuick’s content to see what pages were starting to slip or look dated.
Whenever we found anything that needed a little spruce, we refreshed the treatment guides and product reviews, added a “last updated” date, and more importantly implemented a process that nobody would be forgotten again.
Once we published those changes, we used Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool to prompt Google to see that the pages had been updated. Easy stuff but works like a charm.
Acquiring Targeted Backlinks
Trust me, backlinks are not given enough love and attention — particularly in the medical niche where authority is about half the battle.
So with the help of Ahrefs’ Link Intersect Tool we identified what South African healthcare sites were earning links that MediQuick was not, and we ended up with an unexpectedly handy list of opportunities.
We reached out to medical blogs, local health forums, a couple of wellness sites and the brand made a ton of sense with these.
A few emails and phone calls later, we had acquired 19 high-quality backlinks through guest posts and partnerships with pharmacies across South Africa. Not spammy link opportunities but real, relevant links from websites people were already visiting and trusting.
Tuning On-Page SEO with Meta Titles & Descriptions
Once we ran MediQuick’s pages through Semrush’s On-Page SEO Checker it was immediately apparent what the problem was: most of the meta titles and descriptions either were too generic or were plain old. You could see that somebody had written them once and then just left them there to rot.
So we rewrote them. Shorter titles, better keyword targeting, descriptions that actually reflected what someone was going to find on the page.
Once we made those changes live, Google Analytics reported a 15% increase in click-through rate on those updated pages. Always nice when the numbers back up the effort.
The Results
Results started to manifest within 6 months of our SEO campaign for MediQuick. MediQuick was gaining monthly organic visitors from 8.2K to 60K page visits.
Yes, that is an increase of 634%. Pretty eye-popping results and numbers that are sure to make you sit up and take notice.
MediQuick’s ranking began to increase to 11.2K keywords, with 750 ranking within the top 3. This was a noteworthy achievement, considering the high competition within the online pharmacy industry.
MediQuick began to display rich snippets in 4.9K keywords allowing the pages more real estate in the search engine results. As far as domain authority, 19 high-quality backlinks saw the domain authority increase from 25 to 33, a solid indication that Google recognized MediQuick as a reputable source of information.
Users were beginning to engage with MediQuick’s site. Google Analytics showed a 28% increase in time-on-page for pages with updated FAQ content. Users were not just clicking in but scrolling, reading, and staying on MediQuick’s website.
Pages like our comprehensive treatment guide “Managing Diabetes with Online Pharmacy Services” began to receive 2.4K page visits per month due to improved FAQs and meta tags. Social signals also began to grow.
MediQuick was able to accumulate 6K followers on Instagram, 9.6K on Facebook and 3.8K on X.com (formerly Twitter) allowing MediQuick to reach a larger audience than before.
Technical Tools:
Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs andGoogle Search Console
SEO Services
Schema Markup Implementation, Content Strategy, On-Page SEO, Backlink Acquisition
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