Case study
Page one from a domain rating of 5
CommonHealth Recovery is an outpatient addiction treatment and behavioral health provider in Frankfort, Kentucky. It competes for search visibility in a category where paid advertising is gated behind certification — and it does it from almost no domain authority.
- 5
- domain rating
- 47
- keywords ranking
- 6
- in the top three
- $360
- monthly equivalent ad spend
Why a domain rating of 5 is the story
Domain rating is a 0–100 measure of how strong a site's backlink profile is. Five is close to the floor. Conventional wisdom says a site like that does not rank against established providers, hospital systems and national directories.
It ranks #6 for central kentucky addiction treatment, a keyword Ahrefs scores at difficulty 34. That is the number worth looking at. The brand terms and the zero-difficulty local searches are comparatively easy; holding a position on a difficulty-34 term from a domain rating of 5 is the part that is genuinely hard, and it is what the rest of the work was in service of.
Two things on that chart are worth sitting with. The site in first place has a domain rating of zero — it wins because its name is the search. And CommonHealth, at five, sits above a national directory at seventy and a university health system at eighty-seven.
We are not claiming authority does not matter. It matters a great deal on broad commercial terms. What this page shows is that on a specific regional search, relevance and structure can outweigh it — which is the only reason a small provider has a route in at all.
Where it ranks today
- commonhealth recovery#2150/mo
- suboxone clinics in ky#350/mo
- dui classes frankfort ky#430/mo
- suboxone clinics in kentucky#450/mo
- suboxone clinic frankfort ky#570/mo
- behavioral health frankfort ky#560/mo
- suboxone clinics in georgetown ky#530/mo
- central kentucky addiction treatment#640/moKD 34
- methadone clinic frankfort ky#750/mo
- iop kentucky#850/mo
Source: Ahrefs, US, 16 August 2026. Ten of 47 ranking keywords shown.
The pattern worth noticing is that the wins are spread across six different pages, not concentrated on the homepage. Level-of-care pages, the DUI page and the Georgetown article each earn their own positions. That is what a working content structure looks like from the outside.
What we did
- 1Level-of-care pages, one per service. MAT, IOP, outpatient counseling, targeted case management, addiction psychiatry and DUI programming each got their own page. People search for the specific thing they need — or the thing a court has ordered — and a single combined services page ranks for none of them.
- 2Geography that reflects the actual catchment. The provider serves Franklin, Anderson, Woodford, Scott, Shelby, Owen and Henry counties. Search behaviour follows town names, not county lines, so the pages target the places people name when they search.
- 3Answer the question a court asked. DUI programming is a different search intent from addiction treatment — someone with a court requirement is looking for a compliant provider and a schedule, not a philosophy of care. It gets its own page and it earns its own rankings.
- 4Earn the terms that paid search cannot buy. Addiction treatment advertising is gated behind LegitScript certification. Organic is not, which makes search visibility disproportionately valuable in this vertical compared with almost any other.
What that visibility is worth
| Measure | Today | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Domain rating | 5 | Near the bottom of the authority scale |
| Keywords ranking | 47 | Up from a site with no search strategy |
| Top-three positions | 6 | Where the clicks concentrate |
| Monthly organic traffic | 101 | Small numbers, high intent |
| Equivalent ad spend | $360/mo | What buying the same visibility would cost |
A hundred visitors a month is not a large number, and we are not going to dress it up as one. What matters is who they are: someone searching suboxone clinic frankfort ky is not browsing. The equivalent ad value — $360 a month at the cost-per-click these terms carry — is the honest way to price that attention, and several of the individual keywords run $5 to $14 a click.
In a vertical where you cannot advertise at all without certification, that visibility is not just cheaper than paid. For many providers it is the only channel available.
What we'd tell you honestly
Forty-seven keywords is a foothold, not a finished job. Thirty-six of them sit between positions four and ten, which is exactly where incremental work pays best — moving a position-six term to position three is worth more than adding twenty new position-fifty terms.
There is also cleanup outstanding. The site still ranks for what does nlu stand for on an off-topic page, which does nothing for a treatment provider and slightly muddies what the domain is about to a search engine. Small, unglamorous, worth fixing.
We would rather say that here than let a case study imply the work is done.
Your numbers, pulled the same way
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