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Situation
Gordon Vet Hospital (GVH) is an independently owned hospital that has been serving the North Shore for more than 40 years.
In early 2015, GVH decided to seek for external help from a professional SEO agency who could improve the online presence of the practice.
Following a recommendation from one of Result Driven SEO’s existing clients GVH conducted a thorough interview and background check before commissioning Result Driven SEO to work on their website.
The Results
Since commencing the campaign with GVH (March 2015) we have managed to achieve these results;
- the web traffic to GVH’s website had increased 265.76% compared to the year before starting SEO
- 146% increase in number of new patients
- Top page 1 ranking for 11 suburbs keywords and national keywords: Pymble Vet, Killara vet, St Ives Vet, Lindfield Vet, West Lindfield Vet, North Ryde Vet, Upper North Shore Vet, Turramurra Vet, Ku Ring Gai Vet, Gordon Vet and hyper-competitive keywords such as “tick treatments for dogs”, “paralysis tick treatment for dogs”, “tick prevention for dogs”, “tick treatment for cats”
Figure 1: Traffic growth graph over the last 12 months compared to the previous period before starting SEO
Figure 2: Organic traffic growth in 2nd year compared to 1st year
Technique 1: Online Marketing Strategy to set the directions for activities and tactics
This is a critically important session that allowed us to give GVH a clear direction for their online marketing activities, resources and to establish a clear pathway to reach their business goals.
We sat down with GVH, and gained some fundamental information about the practice: target clients, key services, their niches, differences, strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities from the market, and we used this information to devise a custom online marketing strategy for GVH.
Technique 2: Research on What Strong Competitors Do and How They Do Well
Our competitor research is designed to gain a clear understanding of who are our clients strongest competitors- what are their competitive advantages, value propositions, and online marketing activities. We specifically identify;
- Where do these competitors advertise?
- How is their advertising working?
- Which are their biggest website traffic referral sources?
- SEO Strategy: what keywords are they targeting, where do they build links, where do they promote their websites?
Gaining an insight into what competitors do and how they do it gives our team and our client directions on how to surpass them.
Technique 3: Highlight GVH’s Value Proposition and Key Differences from Other Vets
After conducting extensive research on the industry and GVH’s biggest competitors, and also after interviewing GVH themselves, we were able to identify GVH’s biggest strengths and value proposition, their key points of difference compared to their competitors.
We then highlighted these key selling points on the website home page and all subpages to ensure that their target prospects would be able to view them easily from wherever they landed on the website.
Technique 4: Comprehensive Keyword Research For All Targeted Suburbs, Services and Blog Content
We extensively researched appropriate keywords for all of the service pages on the website and for all targeted suburbs. We also conducted comprehensive long-tail keyword research to find out which search terms that users used to find information related to GVH’s main services.
This comprehensive keyword research enabled us to devise a strategy to help GVH target all the important suburbs in Sydney.
The keyword research not only covered short-tail, but also long-tail keywords for blog content development.
Figure 4: New website showcases best-selling points for GVH
Technique 5: Build a New Website to Increase Conversion Rate and Brand Perception
We decided to rebuild GVH’s website as part of our SEO premium package to enhance the look, functionality, and user experience and conversion optimisation. The website was now well optimised for both desktop and mobile devices.
According to our experience, no matter how much traffic you drive to the website, if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t work.
Figure 5: GVH’s old website with stock image, lacking value proposition, warm welcome from the image based video
Figure 6: Modern, User Friendly and Conversion Focus Mobile, Tablet and Desktop website after the redesign
Technique 6: Build More Local Vet and Service Pages
We gradually built more pages for GVH by adding all the suburb veterinary pages with unique content.
A website with 100 pages has greater traffic than a 10-page website, simply because it offers more topics that users can search for.
We applied this strategy on GVH’s local suburb service pages.
Technique 7: Implement SEO On-site Best Practices
We implemented best practice for on-page optimisation adhering to Google and other search engine webmaster guidelines;
- Rewrite benefits-driven copy that places users at the centre. Our goal is to create a website that users can quickly find the information they need more easily.
- Ensuring Proper Indexation: Through the use of sitemaps, pagination, no-indexing tags and the reconciliation of all duplicate content, we were able to ensure the proper indexation of GVH’s website.
- Individually crafted, uniquely written Meta Titles, Meta Descriptions, and Heading tags for all pages. By optimising the site’s title tags, meta description tags, heading tags and content to include targeted keywords, we were able to increase the search traffic.
- Improve the website’s load times for proper SEO on both desktop and mobile devices. This is one of the key elements to increase the website ranking performance.
- “No Follow” for unimportant links
- Add image ALT tags to all images
- Other technical SEO setups
Technique 8: Gain Local Reviews – Greatest SEO Weapon
As part of our local SEO works, we assisted GVH to outreach to their current and future clients asking for real testimonials for the website and to actively leave reviews on GVH’ Google Plus Local account.
We understand that Businesses with large volumes of positive reviews started ranking higher than those with few or negative reviews.
This helped GVH to have;
- Increased search rankings: the more positive reviews that you have, the higher you’re going to rank.
- Increased referral traffic: GVH continue to gain referral traffic not only from Google Plus Local but Gumtree.com and other local review sites as well.
- Greater brand authority: When people read great reviews about the GVH brand, they’ll be more likely to start with a great impression of GVH’s practice, and more likely to spread the word to their friends and family.
- Gained critical feedback opportunities: Sometimes doing business isn’t perfect. In both positive and negative reviews of GVH’s operation, GVH finds critical pieces of feedback that they can learn from and use to make their practice even better.
Figure 7: GVH has gained massive good number of positive reviews on their Google Plus Local profile
Figure 8: Authentic reviews help GVH convert visitors to leads better
Technique 9: Engage, Nurture Existing Clients and Prospects Through Email Marketing
Email marketing has been underutilised by most veterinary practices. We looked at GVH’s current newsletter template and proposed the following solutions;
- Redesign the newsletter template, reducing clutter and removing unnecessary details on the newsletter
- Personalise the newsletters with relevant Email Subjects and Content
- Introduced some email list building tactics via website and paid Facebook and Google Advertising
As a result, the email open rate has increased from 20% to 45%
Technique 10 : Acquire New Customers through Special Offers Using Google Ads Channel
Figure 9: Utilised Google Ads to promote GVH’s special offer and acquire new clients
Figure 10: High performing Google Ads campaign with incredibly high Click through Rate (CTR) of 10.43% and Conversion Rate of 29.14%
Technique 11 : Drive Community Engagement through Blogging
After reviewing our research on Gordon Vet Hospital’s target audience, their market persona, content voice and matching it to our extensive long-tail keyword research we proposed a content plan designed to promote Gordon Vet as the recognised industry leader. Through this analysis we uncovered additional opportunities for long tail search traffic.
By using visitor surveys and analytical reports, we were able develop content topics that GVH’s audience were interested in. This allowed us to better connect with existing audience members and generate more leads.
Increase Blog Engagement
To help increase engagement we taught Gordon Vet Hospital how to fine tune their writing style to help encourage more commentary and questions from their visitors.
This content plan also covered the most popular topics that users would search for and we proposed a varied type of content to engage the readership and increase social sharing, including;
- Informative articles
- FAQs
- Infographics
- Useful guides
Figure 11: High quality medical infographic content for lead generation
Technique 12 : Build High Quality Links
Incoming links from other websites are a very important component of search engine optimisation. Poor quality links not only won’t increase your traffic or ranking, but they can also damage your domain and potentially attract a penalty from Google, or other search engines, if the site linked to has violated any webmaster guidelines.
We take link building very seriously and we make sure that all the sites that we place links on are well screened before any placement. Some of the link building we did included;
- Outreach to relevant blogs to feature GVH’s content and to gain quality back links to the website.
- Listing of the website on medical, health and local directories
- Submission infographics, videos, and relevant marketing material to submission sites
Figure 12: Best Care for Your Pets When You Move Your Home Infographic
Conversion Tracking Setup
We set up conversion tracking: click tracking, mobile phone tracking and call tracking for the campaign.
We implemented A/B testing models and identified which elements worked better and we constantly tweaked the landing page elements to lift the conversion rate higher.
Technique 13 : Increase Website Conversion Rate
We are constantly making changes on the website and landing pages based on our conversion optimisation activities, including;
- A/B Testing
- Click Map
- Heat Map
- Event Tracking
Figure 13: We set up heat map and click map on most important pages to track user’s behaviour and improve conversion of the landing pages
Boosting Conversions by Over 146 %
Our split testing, combined with our user survey results enabled us to develop a more efficient means of directing visitors to the products that they were most interested in. The result? A 146% increase in conversions!
Outstanding Results
We started seeing obvious improvement within 2-3 months of the new website going live.
We managed to create these results after the second year (compared to 1st year);
- the organic web traffic to GVH’s website had increased 73%
- 146 % increase in number of leads
Great to see ranking improving. Thanks for ongoing help and guidance.
Dr Scott Lackenby
Gordon Vet Hospital
