“Medtronic truly considers iProspect to be a partner.
We know the iProspect SEM team is constantly working on
our behalf to ensure the success of our websites. We truly
appreciate their expertise and efforts.”
Brett Benson Online Marketing Manager
Situation
Founded in 1949, Medtronic offers medical products, therapies and services that enhance or extend the lives of millions of people. Since developing the first wearable external cardiac pacemaker in 1957, and manufacturing the first reliable long-term implantable pacing system in 1960, Medtronic has become the world's leading producer of medical technology and manufacturer of medical devices.
Their website, www.medtronic.com, an important component of Medtronic’s online marketing efforts, was not performing as well as the company would have liked. They wanted to expand their online reach and attract more search engine users seeking information and resources on chronic heart disease. Additionally, Medtronic noticed that more and more of their competitors were investing in pay-per-click search advertising and realized they needed to do likewise or lose the online marketing battle to their competitors.
Challenges
The lack of spider-friendly content, and their use of JavaScript navigation, made the Medtronic Website virtually invisible to search engines. Search engine spiders attempting to index the content would hit the home page and immediately stop because they were unable to follow the navigation to any of the site’s internal pages. In addition, many of the site’s URLs were dynamically generated, which also posed challenges to the spiders.
The size and architecture of the site also created problems. The site was separated into sub-sections that were unrelated in terms of the technology they utilized, as well as in their design and layout. They appeared as if they were separate websites, though they resided under a common Medtronic domain. These sections had been created by ten independent divisions of the company. As a result, each section had unique navigational challenges that make it hard for spiders to access the content, and the nature of the business made it hard for the client to make sweeping changes to the site, as each business unit has input into their site section.
Solution
Medtronic’s situation required that iProspect use a number of specialized “off-site” tactics to increase the visibility of the website (ones that did not alter the website’s structure). This was because the client preferred that the structure of the ten different site divisions not be reworked.
iProspect began the Medtronic campaign by researching and learning related medical product keywords, as well as the behavior of users that search for information about medical problems, products and services in search engines. Subsequently, the team developed customized meta tags for various pages within the Medtronic Website and made manual submissions to the major search properties.
iProspect also implemented an aggressive search directory strategy for Medtronic. This process included a thorough analysis of related medical directory categories, the development of keyword-rich titles and page descriptions for each listing, and manual submissions for review by search directory editors.
Subsequently, the iProspect team resubmitted existing site content through trusted data feeds. Through this “off-site” strategy, URLs, meta data and body copy that would not have been reached by search engine spiders on the Medtronic Website as it had been designed, were uploaded to a repository where search engines could crawl and then index the information easily.
Finally, iProspect team was able to increase the amount of relevant content endorsement™ from external websites to the Medtronic Website in order to help drive additional qualified traffic from other relevant sites.
Results
The number of search referrals to the Medtronic Website has more than doubled since the start of the SEM campaign with iProspect. Search referrals from the three top search properties according to market share, Google, Yahoo! and MSN, have increased 364%.
The number of targeted keywords generating rankings for the Medtronic Website has increased by 62%.
Rankings in position one have increased by 64%.
Medtronic has surpassed all of its competitors in terms of overall visibility, outranking its closest competitor by a margin of more than 3 to 1 on non-branded keyword phrases.
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