How Absolute Digital Media built the two-tier local architecture that took an award-winning care operator’s homes to position one across England and Wales.
Absolute Digital Media's SEO campaign for Hallmark Care Homes delivered +230% organic traffic (2,926 to 9,666 monthly sessions), 15 homes at position one for their own names, 186 keywords in the top three (from 129) and 376 keywords in positions four to ten (from 267).
Hallmark Care Homes is an award-winning UK provider of residential, nursing, dementia and respite care, operating homes across England and Wales. The business competes on care quality, and its reputation reflects that.
Search is where that reputation reaches the family. Care is chosen under time pressure, usually by an adult child rather than the person moving in, and usually within a tightly defined geography. Nobody searches for a care home nationally. They search for a care home in Cardiff, or in Tunbridge Wells, or near their mother’s current address, and the decision is made from a shortlist assembled in a handful of searches. That makes care home marketing a local search problem wearing a national brand’s clothing: the estate has to rank home by home, not once.
Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, UK database. Growth held across the full period rather than spiking and receding, with current traffic at 8,728 monthly sessions. From the client’s analytics: new users from organic search up 39%, total organic sessions up 32%.
Integrated Agency of the Year - SilverEuropean Agency Awards 2026
Best Use of Search B2C (PPC) Small (The Swallow Co.)European Search Awards 2026
Standout B2C Ecommerce Website of the Year (Stelrad)UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026
Best Integrated Paid Media CampaignUK Paid Media Awards 2026
Best New Business CampaignUK Agency Awards 2025
Best Use Of Search (Retail/Ecommerce) - SEOUK Search Awards 2024Integrated Agency of the Year - SilverEuropean Agency Awards 2026Best Use of Search B2C (PPC) Small (The Swallow Co.)European Search Awards 2026Standout B2C Ecommerce Website of the Year (Stelrad)UK Digital Excellence Awards 2026Best Integrated Paid Media CampaignUK Paid Media Awards 2026Best New Business CampaignUK Agency Awards 2025Best Use Of Search (Retail/Ecommerce) - SEOUK Search Awards 2024 
The strategy was set and led by Evi Dunphy. The site needed a two-tier location structure, county-level hub pages sitting above individual home pages, so that a family searching regionally and a family searching for a named home each landed on a page built to answer them. The rejected alternative was rewriting the existing pages in place. It would have produced better content inside a structure that could not support it, with regional searches left nowhere to land and the individual home pages competing with each other rather than with the market. The rebuilt structure, county hub to individual home, is why care homes london and care homes cardiff have somewhere to rank alongside every named home in the estate. Those URLs did not exist in the rankings before the restructure.
Every care home page was rewritten with content specific to that home and its area, written to E-E-A-T standards and to the accuracy standard of an inspection-rated sector. This is the expensive option and it is the only one that works. A template with the town name swapped in produces pages identical in substance, and it gives the family, who is trying to work out what this home is like, nothing to choose on. Writing each home individually meant writing about the building, the local area, the specific care offered and the people delivering it, all of it accurate to the regulated services each home delivers. In a category where the reader is making a decision about their parent, the specificity is the persuasion, and in a regulated sector the specificity is also the compliance.
The standard keyword prioritisation model ranks opportunities by volume and difficulty. This campaign ranked them by commercial value instead, focusing effort on the locations with available capacity. A first-place ranking for a home with capacity fills it, and the model requires live operational data from the client rather than a keyword tool, which is why the campaign was run alongside the marketing department rather than delivered to it.
Keyword and location targeting was aligned between the SEO campaign and the paid media team, working from the same live availability data. The rejected alternative is the default in most agencies and most in-house teams: the channels run separately, bid against each other on the same terms, and report separately on results that overlap. Coordinating the target list meant paid spend went to locations where organic could not reach quickly enough, and organic effort went where paid was expensive, rather than both chasing the same twenty terms.
Crawlability, indexation and metadata came first, in the knowledge that this phase shows nothing in a monthly report. It is the most commonly deferred work in SEO and the most commonly regretted, because every content improvement that follows it is capped by it.
Evi Dunphy set the campaign on architecture before content, capacity before volume, and one target list across SEO and paid. Those calls turned a national brand’s site into a local search estate that ranks home by home, and they required running the campaign alongside Hallmark’s marketing department, on the operator’s live availability data, rather than delivering reports to it. The measure is 15 homes at position one and regional hubs on page one for county terms that had nowhere to rank before.
Alex Stott rewrote every care home page individually: the building, the local area, the specific care offered and the people delivering it, written to E-E-A-T standards and accurate to the regulated services each home delivers under CQC and CIW oversight. No template, no variables. The specificity is what distinguishes one home from another for the family reading it, and it is what search engines needed to stop resolving the estate’s pages against each other.
Jack Hawtin ran outreach to a local-relevance standard, supporting each home’s visibility in its own geography rather than pursuing sitewide authority, consistent with a campaign won on structure and content. Every home’s local footing, its presence and consistency across the local search ecosystem, backs the rankings the estate now holds: 15 homes at position one for their own names, from Cardiff to Suffolk.
Ben Austin ran the technical remediation first: crawlability, indexation and metadata across the estate, cleared before a word of the new content was written. The phase shows nothing in a monthly report, and it is the reason everything after it worked, because pages that cannot be reached cannot rank regardless of how good the care they describe is. The two-tier architecture was implemented on that clean technical base.
Lewis Esson is Head of SEO at Absolute Digital Media, leading a team of seven across organic strategy for gambling, lending, adult and regulated ecommerce brands. He joined ADM as…
Shofiur Rahman is Head of Technical at Absolute Digital Media, leading the team responsible for everything the agency builds and runs: client websites, internal applications, infrastructure, AI systems and the…
Alex is Head of Content at Absolute Digital Media, overseeing content production and ideation for regulated-sector clients in iGaming, finance, and healthcare. He specialises in creating content that performs reliably…
Jack Hawtin leads the outreach team at Absolute Digital Media, running link building and outreach strategy mainly for iGaming clients, alongside adult industry brands, interior design, and a smaller portfolio…
Organic traffic grew from 2,926 to a peak of 9,666 monthly sessions, up 230%, Ahrefs Site Explorer, UK database. The growth was continuous rather than a spike, climbing across the full engagement and holding at 8,728 monthly sessions since, which in a YMYL category subject to repeated quality updates is the harder achievement.
Keywords in the top three rose from 129 to 186, and positions four to ten from 267 to 376. From the client’s analytics, new users from organic search rose 39% and total organic sessions 32%.
| Page | Lead keyword | Volume | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| London hub | care homes london | 800 | 3 |
| Cardiff hub | care homes cardiff | 300 | 2 |
| East Sussex hub | care homes in sussex | 150 | 2 |
| Midford Manor, Somerset | midford manor care home | 350 | 1 |
| Willingdon Park Manor, East Sussex | willingdon park manor | 300 | 1 |
| Angmering Grange, West Sussex | angmering grange | 350 | 1 |
| Ty Enfys, Cardiff | ty enfys | 400 | 1 |
| Hutton View, Essex | hutton view care home | 350 | 1 |
| Henley Manor, Oxfordshire | henley manor care home | 300 | 1 |
| Banstead Manor, Surrey | banstead manor care home | 250 | 1 |
| Careers site | hallmark care homes jobs | 250 | 1 |
Source: Ahrefs Site Explorer, UK. Fifteen individual home pages hold position one for their own names, across counties from Cardiff to Suffolk. Care homes london at position three is the standout: a generic, non-branded, high-competition term contested by every national operator and every care directory in the country, held on page one by a single operator's regional hub. The careers site ranks first for recruitment searches, and staffing is the binding constraint on capacity across the entire care sector, so an operator that can fill roles organically is solving the constraint that limits how many beds it can open.
Through a tiered structure. Regional hub pages capture searches for an area, individual location pages capture searches for a named site, and each is written specifically rather than generated from a template. Hallmark’s regional hubs rank second and third for “care homes cardiff” and “care homes london” while 15 individual homes hold position one for their own names.
Because the template is the natural way to build a location page and it produces near-identical pages describing different sites in the same words. Search engines resolve that competition by ranking none of them well. Individually written location content is the only reliable fix.
Both, coordinated against one target list. On this account SEO and PPC worked from the same live availability data, so paid covered locations organic could not reach quickly and organic covered locations where paid was expensive. Run separately, the two channels bid against each other and report overlapping results.
With a page built for that specific intent rather than a national services page or an individual home page trying to serve it. Regional searches and named-site searches are different queries and need different pages. The London hub page holds position three on a term contested by every national operator and every care directory.
The evidence here says structure decides it. Hallmark’s organic traffic more than tripled to a peak of 9,666 monthly sessions on the strength of the two-tier architecture, unique location content and technical health. Multi-site local visibility is won on those rather than on authority acquisition.
By available capacity rather than by search volume. A first-place ranking for a full home produces enquiries that cannot convert. This means the SEO campaign has to work from the operator’s live occupancy data, which changes how closely the agency and the internal team need to work.
It can, and it addresses the sector’s binding constraint. Staffing limits how much capacity an operator can actually open. Hallmark’s careers site ranks first for its recruitment searches, which reduces reliance on paid job advertising and agency placement fees.
By writing to the standard of an inspection-rated sector. Care in England is regulated by the Care Quality Commission and in Wales by Care Inspectorate Wales, and marketing content has to describe the regulated services a home actually delivers, accurately and specifically. Content written to that standard also does the E-E-A-T work, because accuracy and specificity are what the quality systems assess.
If you operate multiple sites and your location pages are built from a template, the ceiling is structural rather than budgetary. Hallmark’s estate ranks home by home because the architecture was built to let it.
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