It is possible to get more than a 500% increase in organic traffic to the medical center website in a year. Proven by SPRAVA

More and more private medical centers, clinics, and medical stations are opening in Ukraine. And not only in the capital, but also in regional centers. At such a pace, the niche of private medicine is becoming more and more competitive. If you want to promote your medical station or clinic, then read this case to the end.

The customer - the administration of "Med-Atlant" - turned to the SPRAVA agency in 2014. There were three tasks: to make the site fast, informative and up-to-date, to increase the number of applications for consultations at this medical center, and to do promotion in Google.

Site header from 2014

2019 website heade

About the project

This is a private clinic in Ivano-Frankivsk, where doctors receive residents of the regional center and the region. Patients are attracted by the fact that it is in this clinic that one can undergo a comprehensive examination, visit specialists from various fields, also there is a laboratory and a surgical department.

Site's home page

View site

What the customer wanted

In fact, the goals are familiar to everyone (you will recognize yourself for sure). If you achieve them, then the number of site visitors - potential customers, - will please you:

• increase in traffic to the website of the medical center;
• increase applications from the website;
• to appear in the TOP-5 for certain queries: "Medical Center Ivano-Frankivsk", "Gynecologist Ivano-Frankivsk", "Uzd Ivano-Frankivsk", "Pediatrician Ivano-Frankivsk".

How did we start work on the Med-Atlant MDC

The start was trite -we did the analysis of the site. SPRAVA specialists always analyze the web pages, fix the found errors and bugs, and only then begin to implement the optimization strategy and launch advertising activities.

During the audit our specialists:

• Conducted an SEO analysis of the website
• checked the state of the site's CMS (technical audit).

Then we took up semantics: we made up the semantic core of the site, focusing on the goals of the customer, and determined the strategic goals for the development of the project as a whole.

What did we have at the start:

• The technical condition of the web resource: the admin panel is old, there was no adaptive design for smartphones.
• Semantic core: 41 queries in total.
• Clinic landing pages: out of twenty-one pages (according to the site structure), only the main one worked.
• Promotion language: Ukrainian.
• Region: only Ivano-Frankivsk.
• 27th position on the main search query “medical center Ivano-Frankivsk”.
• Visitors per month: 328, 74% of them came from organic search.
• By device: 69% are PC users, 22% are smartphones and 9% are tablets.
• Bounce rate: 10,5%.
• Visitors age: 25-34 - 62%; 45-54 - 16%; 35-44 - 10.3%; 18-24 - 8.19%.

The site was made five years ago and was very outdated. Search engine requirements have changed. And without changes to the site and complex work, it was impossible to achieve the goals of the customer.

In order to break away from competitors, you need to be modern: in design, information content and relevance, completeness of texts and functionality.

Project analytics at the start of promotion

The nuances of website promotion in the field of medicine

First of all, the user must feel trust in the doctor, in the quality of services. He must be understood, comforted. Accurately informed. And only then he makes a decision in your favor.

Most often, patients are already aware of their problem and are consciously looking for solutions in the search engine. With modern overheating of the medical niche, patients CHOOSE. You must convince them that your clinic is exactly the place where qualified doctors will definitely help. The number one task of a clinic or medical center website is to inspire trust.

The relevant content of the site helps in this: complete, expert, answering all possible questions of the patient, in other words, exhaustive. The process of choosing a doctor is not spontaneous. This is a deep analytical work. You need to think about the criteria by which you choose a doctor, and make sure that the information on the site meets all these criteria.

What is difficult? Medical terminology, high prices, big competition. A good clinic owner will take care to explain everything on the site very precisely, but in simple words (simple explanation of the complex things). Particular emphasis should be placed on working out the advantages of your clinic. However, no guarantees or promises can be given. To confirm the expertise of doctors, you need to talk about their experience, describe each service accurately and talk in detail about the equipment that the clinic has.

It is especially difficult to create content for urology and gynecology pages. There may be difficulties in connecting an advertising campaign.

We know how to increase the level of trust in your medical center online

Specialists of the SPRAVA company have been working with the promotion of medical centers for many years. We have compiled a list of the essential components of a good medical site:

For the trust block you need:

• real photos of your medical institution - equipment, interior, parking;
• scans of certificates, licenses, diplomas;
• a detailed description of the work of doctors and medical staff of the medical center;
• Be sure to collect feedback. It's hard to do, but it's possible. It all depends on the desire and understanding of the importance of reviews, staff.

In August 2019:

• site users wrote a review 55 times;
• and 94 times they told about the experience of working with the medical center in their Google Maps account.

What does the "Write a review" form look like for our customer?

Check if there is a feature for collecting reviews on your site! See if you collect the following visitor data:

• name;
• date of review/visit to your medical center;
• assessment.

Try to include the response to the review. This functionality must be on the clinic website.

New visitors evaluate what the previous patient wrote and when he wrote it. A good review is a great argument in your favor to increase user loyalty.

Work with negativity looks like this

What to do if the feedback is negative?

Work with it. First, accept and consider it. Secondly, be sure to publish it..

Feedback on social networks

Now potential clients are also looking for reviews and information about your clinic on social networks. So make sure your page is informative.

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How we worked on the design and usability of the medical center website

SEO work on the site includes the study of the convenience of the site. See how the site looked like a year after the start of the medical center's cooperation with SPRAVA.

This is what the site looked like at the end of 2015

While working on the site we went through all the shortcomings according to the usability checklists, and also made changes based on an analysis of user behavior on the site.

All our efforts turned into traffic growth. In just one year we saw +516% organic traffic growth:

• in November 2014 there were 285 visits from the SE;
• and in November 2015 there were already 1,472 visits

This is how organic traffic dynamics looks like for the first year of cooperation with SPRAVA

And you know what? We liked that. We noticed that the share of mobile traffic began to grow steadily:

• in November 2014 it was 31% (smartphones + tablets);
• a year later, the mobile share reached 42 %.

Dynamics of traffic share changes for the first year of cooperation, by devices

The customer supported all our initiatives and listened to the recommendations

Just now you have read the basic principle of "performer-customer" teamwork. It is this work that has brought success to this project for the past five years.

Do you want the same? Contact SPRAVA :)

In 2016 (beginning of summer), the new site already had:

• excellent design;
• mobile adaptation;
• convenient, safe and fast CMS.

This decision is strategically correct. More on this later in the project analytics section.

Another very important decision is usability which would be ideal for completeness of the answer, technical optimization of the site layout and increase in loading speed indicators:

• As of December2018, we increased website conversion by 43% (we compared November 2018 with January 2019).

You see an increase in applications after the work done on usability and landing pages

View updated site

How did the work on optimizing the customer's web resource go?

We started working in 2014. The good thing was that the customer gave us full carte blanche to perform all optimization work right away.

For the first six months of work on the Med-Atlant MDC project we:

• worked out the full SC (semantic core);
• grouped search queries;
• developed and launched 20 landing pages;
• began to promote four new directions;
• optimized the site inside: meta tags, new headings, text optimization, relinking, removed 3XX, 4XX, 5XX errors and duplicates.

First SEO Results

On April 1, 2015, there were already 1,000 people a month on the clinic's website (an increase of +200%).

The results of SEO work with the site for the first six months

If we go back to the goals of the customer, then in six months already SEO-promotions got the site to the 6th position (+21) in Google search with the highest-priority HF query for this niche “medical center Ivano-Frankivsk”.

We made the site multilingual, in Russian and Ukrainian. “What is Russian in Ivano-Frankivsk for?” we were asked.

Since July 2015, we have compiled a list of queries in Russian. And we optimized the Russian-language version of the site according to the scheme: meta tags, headings H1-H6, texts, relinking.

Therefore, at the end of 2015, the main page of the Russian version of the customer's web resource entered the top five most popular pages.

Popular landing pages for the period 11.2014 - 12.2015

After 14 months of cooperation, our results were:

• The number of visitors per month has grown to 2,100:

Growth in the number of visitors to the site 11.2014 - 12.2015

This is 540% more than it was before cooperation with SPRAVA.

• The main query “medical center Ivano-Frankivsk” has already moved to the third position in the organic search results of Google from 21st place.

How SPRAVA is getting organic growth for five years

Obligatory things:

• we review the semantics several times a year;
• once a year we work out new 20-50 requests (expand clusters);
• and we are working on new directions in promotion (services and not only).

The customer's medical center is developing, adding new services, and the number of new doctors and specialists in various fields is growing.

If we take into account all the work, then by the end of 2017 the site had 5,987 users per month (+1825%):

Excellent dynamics of visitors growth in 11.2014 - 12.2015.

Since April 2017, contextual advertising has been connected to the project as an additional traffic channel.

And what about social networks?

The customer set up Facebook and YouTube accounts for the medical center in May 2015. Now the Facebook group is active (the customer supervises it separately).

Share of traffic from social networks

Specifics of connecting the PPC service for a clinic site with a wide range of services

Let's just say that there are certain difficulties. According to the rules of Google Ads, you can not create remarketing campaigns in medical topics.

Excerpts from the rules for placing ads in Google Ads

As a result of these restrictions, we saw that previously configured remarketing audiences were rejected by Google.

How we tried to make it at first

If difficulties are called a challenge, then we can tackle them

After that we worked like this:

• The customer provided additional information, ads in the search started only for those ads that passed moderation (see the document on the page).

The main reason for the rejection is the texts on the site in the section describing the services of urology, gynecological ultrasound. At the same time, gynecology is one of the priorities of the medical center. And we did not intend to remove materials from the site. Instead of this we:

• received from the moderators a list of pages that Google Ads does not allow;
• removed all links to these pages on the site (in all menus, relinking);
• deactivated these pages and waited two days for moderation in Google Ads;
• all created ads have been moderated;
• after which we activated all the pages back and submitted them for re-indexing, and thus not a single day for organic traffic was lost.

Look at the dynamics of search ad traffic

Connecting contextual advertising brought additional traffic. In the screenshot, the volume of contextual advertising for July 2019 is 30% of the total number of visitors.

Growth of traffic from Google Ads for the entire period of cooperation

What can be said about medical marketing

These are not final conclusions, but intermediate results, because we continue to work on the project.

What helped us promote the clinic website and achieve such impressive results:

• competent, expert content that has been optimized for targeted search queries;
• stable expansion of the range of services in the medical center. We created new pages, expanded the semantics of the site, increased the amount of cool content on the project;
• first, user experience analysis, and then logical work on usability;
• effective promotion strategy solutions – site adaptation for mobile, promotion of the Russian version in the region where the vast majority of residents communicate only in Ukrainian;
• setting up the contextual advertising with the solution of launch difficulties, without damage to SEO promotion;
• the customer, who from the very beginning worked with us and was focused on success, set goals in his business in terms of achieving results with the site.

The results of a private clinic website promotion

The statistics are relentless:

• Improving site loading speed indicators (the new design at the end of 2018 was made in a minimalist style, and all the work was done with a “clean” layout, which made it possible to get rid of code redundancy).
• Each redesign entails an increase in traffic. thus the work at the end of 2018 gave an increase in traffic since the site design was changed:

The impact of the redesign on the dynamics of traffic to the site

The average is 7,500 visits per month.

• Increased number of users from mobile devices. As of August 1, 2019 - 81% of site users (this graph clearly shows how correct and timely the decision to make an adaptive site was back in 2015 - at that time the share of smartphones was at the level of 32%).

Audience change over the entire period of project promotion, by device

• The bounce rate remained, as at the start, at 10.5% from organic search, which indicates that we did not worsen its quality by increasing traffic.
• The number of calls and applications from the site (booking an appointment) is steadily growing:

Dynamics of achieving goals on the site by visitors for the period 08.2017 to 07.2019.

Our work on the project continues, and we are already facing new tasks, the results of which we will definitely share. In the meantime, you can get acquainted with the opinion of the customer about our joint work on his project.

Customer feedback

/reviews/med-atlant