Private Health Care
Tangible results within 3 months in SEO on a highly competitive market?
SEO is a long-term game, however, some progress shall be already showcased within a couple months. That’s obviously a motivating factor to keep fine-tuning the engines. Typically after a flat growth rate, traction peaks up and a more steady and steeper increase rewards the initial investments.
Let’s see some promising SEO signs at a 3-month-long test project in the private health care sector.
Problem Statement
Private health care industry players need to combat each other and also the public health care sector (where services are often completely free of charge). Competition is fierce online as well as offline but still online is often an untapped opportunity as larger players are a bit more rigid on the digital transformation.
Even though private health care may seem to be a simple, really lucrative business, profitability rate is influenced by many factors that all must be very well played to generate positive return on investment. Such factors are: reasonable capacity load (rooms, equipments, treatments, etc.), availability at the doctors’ and other professionals’ end precisely and timely matched with incoming patients. 100% match rate at all these factors is not possible but the higher, the merrier since any lost, unmatched opportunity is gone forever. As a simple example: if a potential patient does not get a doctor (the doctor may be on holiday) or there is no examination room available, then the service cannot be provided to the patient and vice versa, meaning no money in the bank.
Surprisingly, this highly complex setup of the health care system leaves a relatively slim room for a still acceptable CPO – Cost Per Order (reservations for medical treatment) that may underline to also investment into non-paid channels. “
Industry: private health care
Employee: 250+
Partnership with Markestic: 2022 - ongoing
Solution
We started our partnership on 2 ends:
- introducing enhanced ecommerce tracking to tightly monitor the number of reservations not only as integers but also as dynamic values (what service to which doctor at what monetary value, etc. get booked).
- optimising paid ads – mainly Google Search Ads and Facebook Ads as there are quite some channel-level limitations due to the sensitivity of the health care industry.
After some months, we reached to a reasonable and profitable CPO – Cost Per Order level where paid traffic got maxed out. Thus we opened up to new channel ideas that might require more patience and time to show results and pay off.
We agreed on testing out SEO for 3 months to see if any visible results could be generated before giving it a full green light and more investment may be committed.
Some technical SEO clean-up happened first then the most lucrative service lines (e.g: mammography, surgery, orthopedy) started to be boosted with dedicated content creation in long-form content format and SEO-focused landing page optimisation as well as relevant link-building for the selected pages.
On one hand, the primary goal was to start to rank on keywords related to these service lines. On the other hand, to indirectly gain better ranks and increased organic traffic overall to the whole website.
Results
Within 3 months from March 2023 to Jun 2023, for the selected keywords, tangible uplift happened in the organic ranks.
Some examples for ranks:
- Mammography (search volume: 4400 / month): from position 20 to 10
- Surgery (search volume: 1600 / month): from 24 to 12
- Orthopedy (search volume: 5400): from 36 to 15.
* the smaller the number, the better since Number 1 means first organic position in the search result page. You are at the top.
In 3 months, these results can be considered quite a good start at such a competitive market.
In the meantime, compared to 2022, the whole website already ranks for 188% more keywords (9883 keywords in Jun 2023 compared to 3434 keywords still in 2022).
Better ranking doesn’t instantly imply identical jump in the organic traffic since just a few number of internet users scroll down and reach to position 15 (15th results on the search page) but obviously more than to position 36.
This is the common evolution of any SEO project. To put in numbers, by June 2023, the organic traffic already grew by 48% year on year, and we are confident it will scale even further and quicker.
No surprise, our Partner decided to continue the SEO project, and now we are focusing on other service lines and the overall SEO performance of the website.
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