Healthcare · Cairo, Egypt · Bilingual EN / AR rebuild
6,844 leads. Fifty-one qualified. Zero converted.
That was the pipeline when I opened it — and every single lead was unassigned. The demand was never the problem. Everything built after that point followed from this one screen.
What I own on this account
Not one channel. The whole marketing function, plus the team that runs it.
Marketing direction
Strategy, positioning and the yearly plan for the whole group — what to say, to whom, in which market.
Team leadership
Supervising the marketing team and the agencies: briefs, standards, review and accountability.
The website
Built and rebuilt end to end — architecture, content, bilingual structure, speed and technical SEO.
Paid advertising, every platform
Meta, Google, TikTok and Snapchat — structure, creative direction, budget allocation and optimisation.
Social media
Full ownership of the channels: content plan, publishing, community and response standards.
Design & brand
Art direction across every asset — campaign creative, the site, print and in-clinic material.
Measurement
Pixel, server-side conversions, analytics and CRM — reconciled so a booking traces back to a campaign.
Business development
Partnerships, referral routes and new service lines — growth that does not come from the ad account.
The situation
The Egyptian arm of the same clinic group — and the harder half of the job. A large Arabic-first audience, a bilingual website, and a social presence with real reach: over a million monthly views and a following in the tens of thousands.
By every vanity measure it was working. Reach was up, engagement was up, conversations were being started.
Then I opened the leads pipeline. 6,844 people had raised their hand. Fifty-one had been qualified. None had converted. Every one of them was unassigned — not lost to a competitor, simply never picked up.
What the audit found
None of this was visible in an ad account.
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01
6,844 raised hands, and not one had an owner
The pipeline was full and unattended. This single finding reframed the whole engagement: the clinic did not have a demand problem that more advertising could solve, it had a handling problem that more advertising would have made worse and more expensive.
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02
27 of 57 Arabic pages told Google they were English
The structured data on those pages — the machine-readable summary search engines actually read — was written entirely in English, declaring an English language and English content, on pages whose visible text was Arabic. The site was competing for Arabic search while formally identifying itself as an English one.
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03
Every Arabic diagram label was clipping to a three-letter stub
810 labels across 13 Arabic pages rendered as truncated fragments. The text was present and correct in the code, so every automated content audit passed it. It was only visible by looking at the rendered page — which is exactly why it had survived so long.
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04
The homepage weighed 19.3 megabytes
On the mobile connections most of this audience actually uses, that is not a slow page — it is a page a meaningful share of visitors never wait for. Paid traffic was being sent to it.
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05
86% of the "growing" reach was paid
The monthly view count that read as brand momentum was overwhelmingly bought. Organic reach was a small fraction of it, which meant the audience growth would stop the day the budget did.
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06
A single-location Cairo clinic was advertising across MENA
Only about 59% of the audience was in Egypt at all. The rest were in countries the clinic cannot serve — real people, real engagement, zero possibility of an appointment. That is not a targeting inefficiency, it is a share of the budget that could never return anything.
The channel split
What was built
Rebuilt the site as two real languages
54 pages plus 33 practitioner profiles, English and Arabic, cross-linked correctly — not one site with the words swapped, but two versions each structured for its own market and its own search behaviour.
Fixed the machine-readable layer
Structured data rewritten per language, so Arabic pages identify as Arabic, and the physician, clinic and procedure information matches what the page actually says.
Found and eliminated the rendering bug site-wide
All 810 broken labels corrected across every Arabic page. Because the defect was a pattern rather than a page, it was fixed at the pattern level and re-verified by looking at the rendered result — twice, in both directions.
Cut the homepage from 19.3MB to 3.2MB
A six-fold reduction, aimed squarely at the mobile connections this audience actually browses on.
Rebuilt the key pages with original diagrams
Each clinical page got its own explanatory graphics rather than the same template restyled — every diagram checked at phone width, in Arabic, before publishing.
Put one measurement standard across both countries
Egypt and the UAE now report on the same event definitions, so group-level numbers mean the same thing in both places.
Where it landed
Figures are drawn from work carried out on this engagement. Where an outcome cannot be stated as a verified number it is described qualitatively rather than estimated.
The channels I run
Live properties — the website, the paid accounts and every social channel.
Measured at the time of the audit, June 2026.
If you sell in Arabic, read this part twice
Three of the six findings above existed only because Arabic was treated as translated English rather than as its own build. They are extremely common, and none of them show up in a normal marketing report.
- Your Arabic site is the English one with the text replaced and the layout untouched.
- You rank in English and cannot work out why the Arabic pages never appear.
- Your leads sit in a system nobody owns, and nobody can say what happened to last quarter's.
- You are buying reach in countries you cannot actually serve.
- Your reach chart goes up and your bookings chart does not.
- Nobody has opened your site on a mid-range phone on mobile data and waited.
Want to know what an audit would find in yours?
Tell me what you are spending and what you are getting. I will tell you where the gap is — before any engagement and at no charge. If it turns out you do not need me, I will say that too.
The services behind this work
Still reading? Then something here landed.
The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Describe what you are spending and what you are getting back, and I will tell you where the gap is.