Situation
This highly regarded medical center has provided medical care for over 30 years. The center serves a primary population of 200,000 and an extended service area of over 500,000.
One of the center’s websites is devoted to weight loss surgery. The site offers a significant amount of educational information, including: a detailed glossary of terms, a weight loss surgery library, a weight table and information about surgical weight loss options. Additionally, the site offers a surgeon/hospital locator system and a message board.
This client operates in a competitive online market against a range of hospital, support group and informational websites. Therefore, their online marketing goals included increasing the search engine visibility of the website in an effort to be found within the search engine results before competing websites. Additionally, they were looking to increase the number of visitors that requested information on their website.
Challenges
The first challenge for the client was the original domain name they were using for the website. The domain was not intuitively related to the center's business and was difficult for users to remember.
The second challenge for the website was its internal linking structure. The site contained a significant amount of image links which stopped search engine spiders in their tracks because there was no text for them to follow. Additionally, the few text links within the site linked to different sections on the same page rather than linking to different pages and sections within the website so that spiders could easily access them. And finally, the website’s sitemap was an image with no text links. This prevented search engine spiders from utilizing that page to access all other pages of the site.
Solution
Per iProspect’s initial recommendations, the first change for the client was to develop a keyword-centric domain and shift the website from their old domain to a new domain.
Additionally, the iProspect SEM team ensured the rest of the site’s directories and page names contained relevant, targeted keywords. iProspect also recommended that all content be optimized and that the client implement internal static (text-based) linking and 404 trapping so that spiders could follow the links and index the entire site.
Finally, the iProspect team worked with the client to change their sitemap from a graphic to text so that the search engine spiders would be able to access that single page that, in turn, would allow access to the entire site.
Results
At baseline, just 35 keyword phrases were generating rankings for the website. Currently, there are 111 targeted keyword phrases generating top-30 rankings - a 217% increase.
Despite the challenge of changing domains, first place rankings have increased by 788%.
74% of the site's rankings are visible on the first page of search results.
Rankings in Google, the number one engine according to market share, have increased 550% for the website.
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