Evolocity took over managing the SEO (from a large SEO agency) in 2017. The Veterinarian clinic is an established business with a significant market share, but its online search visibility was unsatisfactory, which resulted in a low number of online bookings.
After implementing the steps described below, we achieved an 8x increase in traffic and a 6x increase in conversions in 12 months for this business.
The following case study will teach you step by step how to implement meaningful SEO improvements that will achieve similar incredible results for your business!
Project Goals
The goals of this project were to increase:
Conversions- which bring in revenue for the business (in the form of online client bookings)
Traffic- which is a general indication of the visibility of the website and may lead to conversions
Challenges
Questionable links– there were some links pointing to the site that were questionable. There was significant forum comment SPAM as well as what appeared to be low quality Private Blog Network (PBN) links.
Incorrect keyword targeting– many of the keywords that the site was ranking for were “vanity” keywords, such as “Best Vet Sydney” and so forth. Although these keywords can be important, it was important to evaluate all keywords closely to ensure they matched the search intent of the target audience.
With this in mind, it was time to begin our keyword research.
Keyword research
After analysing the main keywords that have been targeted previously, it’s important to work on researching & selecting more relevant queries.
We started by launching SEMRush and navigated to the Keyword gap analysis module.
Now it was time to evaluate the keywords used by their competitors and we needed to evaluate the ground to make up.
Difficulty- Keywords should be filtered by difficulty (<50 in the SEMRush KD score), so it’s possible to rank for these keywords.
Search Volume- Choose keywords with an average search volume >100 searches/mth, as these are more likely to bring in significant traffic to your website.
Search Intent- When researching, aim for keywords that are at the middle or bottom of the “funnel”. Those are keywords that have a significant transactional intent.
Examples in this case include: “Vet near me” and “Rabbit desexing cost Sydney”
The next step was to check the top performing keywords of the competitors that were bringing in substantial organic traffic and those that also had high potential.
We used SEMRush and navigated to Domain Overview -> Organic research
We recorded these keywords for the future of our SEO campaign.
Website Audit
For Website Audits, pick your favourite crawler. We use Website Auditor from Link Assistant & Screaming Frog for our audits.
We searched for issues that were listed as errors (or high priority issues) and resolved these first.
- In this case, the following issues were identified:
- Important pages were not indexed
- Pages had missing titles and meta descriptions
- Too many redirects were present on some pages
- Robots.txt and sitemap.xml weren’t optimally configured
Internal Page Authority
We used Website Auditor to check the page authority/strength of any critical pages on the website. Stronger pages will generally rank higher, as they have a higher authority flow from backlinks.
For any pages that had a weak Page Rank (or Page Authority), we start working on building internal links to boost the flow of authority to these pages. We focused on your website pages were of are high priority (ie those that drove traffic or conversions).
Keyword mapping
The keywords that we selected as part of keyword research, were then mapped/assigned to the corresponding page of your website.
It’s essential that keywords are mapped to their destination “landing” pages. This helped to keep things organised as the project grew and ensured the correct keywords rank for the desired pages.
Content optimisation
Once we assigned the keywords to their corresponding pages, we needed to ensure the pages were optimised for their mapped keywords.
We use Website Auditor for this, but Surfer SEO and SEMRush Content Analyzer are also good options.
We started by sorting the website pages by (decreasing) authority and began optimising those pages with the highest Page Authority (or conversions/traffic) first.
As a starting point, we initially focused on:
- Page titles/H tags/descriptions (which also result in higher click through rates)
- ALT tags to broaden the images being indexed
- Avoid duplicate content
- Adding structured data
In Website Auditor, we aimed for an optimisation score of at least 85%, which is usually enough to rank for your selected keywords.
Content Creation
Rather than guessing the topics to create content around, we started by researching topics that were successful for other websites, in terms of backlinks and social shares.
We used SEMRush’s Topic Research module for content marketing and as mentioned, we selected topics that had achieved significant shares:
It’s important that subject matter experts write long-form, in depth content on the selected topics, ideally in the first person. Our goal should be to outperform existing content in Google in terms of completeness and updated information.
We created content guidelines for the vets, to make it clear the topic they should focus on, who the competitors are, and what keywords to include.
For this, we also used Website Auditor’s Content Editor module. It makes it easy to generate content guidelines based on the keywords selected, as per below:
Backlink Analysis
Backlinks are still an important factor for websites, and as such, it’s important to conduct a backlink gap/authority analysis against your competitor’s websites. We used a combination of SEMRush, URL Profiler and Link Assistan’s SEO Spyglass tool for this task.
First, we checked the website’s backlinks and closely investigated any suspicious links.
Any toxic or potentially toxic links were investigated. The next step was to perform link intersection research, to find websites that are linking to the competitors’ websites, but not the clients.
We entered the competitor’s websites and let the tool run and gather links from all websites. Any backlink analysis tool will work for this task, but the below output is from Link Assistant’s SEO Spyglass.
Each backlink prospect was then evaluated for it’s strength or authority (Moz Domain Authority), Majestic’s Trust Flow and Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow (which lists the niche of the links pointing to the prospects).
It’s a good idea to remove link prospects that have a Trust Flow <10 and those from sites from irrelevant niches, as we only want high quality, relevant backlinks to point to your website.
The output of referring domains from link intersection should then be further analysed by tools that can effectively analyse the Topical Trust Flow. We recommend using URLProfiler for this task (that contains Majestic’s metrics). SEMRush also contains niche specific data, it’s just not as rich as Majestic’s
The next step was to implement a link building campaign for the website, such as writing guest posts and forming collaborations with complementary websites in order to increase the quality of the backlinks that point to the website.
Results
Immediate
Local search results are often fast to increase, so we target these first (where applicable) to see a dramatic improvement in ranking for “near me” searches in Google Maps.
Medium-term
SEO takes time to see results. After six to twelve months, you should start to see significant results from your SEO campaign.
On this website, within twelve months of taking over SEO, organic traffic had increased more than 8x, with this increased traffic resulting in a 6x increase in online appointment bookings.
“David has been working with my practice for more than 2 years. He offers a personal service and has an in-depth knowledge of how SEO works and has given our business great advice on improving traffic and conversions. We switched from a large SEO Agency after we felt we weren’t getting the attention or value we expected and have never looked back!”
Dr Sam- Director