- In-housing
- SEO
About the client
EBOS Healthcare is a leading, ASX listed company that connects people to the world’s best health and wellness products. Sitting under the EBOS umbrella are multiple brands, including Vital Medical Services (VMS). VMS needed to refocus their website to ensure differentiation from competitor brands while creating an easy-to-use platform that was SEO friendly for their core audience of general practitioners.
Challenge
Consolidating domains and achieving organic growth to improve marketing and customer experience.
There were two key challenges that needed to be resolved so that EBOS’ overarching goals could be achieved – to move to a single point of sale (POS) for each brand, improving marketing performance and customer experience:
Growing their organic presence in a competitive landscape
The VMS brand needed an improved organic presence to meet and counter activity from competitors. Their goal was to increase activity through all levels of the conversion funnel to improve visibility and grow traffic and individual users, ultimately leading to an increase in conversion (and revenue).
The VMS website contains 11,000 products that can be purchased online, meaning there were more than 12,000 pages that needed to be considered as part of this project. More knowledge around customer journeys was also needed: What were customers searching for? How was the product mix changing with COVID-19? What were competitors doing that was working well? And what could VMS do to optimise their offering?
Consolidating competing domains into a streamlined offering
EBOS had multiple websites that consisted of many top-level domains with non-standard configurations which could have caused confusion for search engines. Their sites were competing on 22 per cent of keywords (cannibalising efforts to rank) and while 50 per cent were ranking for one site, they did not for the others.
The EBOS marketing team is large in size, so their requirements weren’t centred around additional headcount, instead, they knew they needed expertise that didn’t exist within their business. Their Corporate Marketing Manager, Moise Wakim knew that the right external agency could provide the strategic direction they needed to achieve their goals, “Working with In Marketing We Trust has allowed me to understand where gaps lie, meaning I could restructure and upskill my team to properly execute on strategy that will propel our business forward.”
Solution
Building an SEO roadmap and strategy to understand where to focus your efforts.
After undertaking detailed research, we created a comprehensive road map and strategic plan for EBOS that was rolled out piece by piece to allow the team at EBOS to restructure and upskill in order to be able to be hands-on with the implementation of the project and on a longer-term basis.
Optimising for organic search
An important part of the execution of this strategy involved setting up SEMRush to track keywords monthly search volume, relevance, and difficulty; so that we could create benchmarks and track VMS’ organic progress from month one.
We also advised the EBOS team to include more content on product pages as the word count was very low, which was not optimal for SEO. Taking an E-A-T approach (as outlined above) was one way that we were able to definitively provide information on how to do this in a way that was more search (and reader) friendly.
As the EBOS marketing team were undertaking the majority of the execution across this project, we advised on changes that might seem simple in principle, but can collectively have a big impact:
- Redirecting 404 product pages to the parent page to improve customer experience
- Optimising meta descriptions to gain better click-through from SERPs
- Ensuring H1s are optimised on each page as they impact rankings
- Improving site speed and page speed, as slower sites and pages lead to lower conversion and a poorer user experience (which also signals negatively to Google)
Consolidating web domains
Consolidating web domains can be a long and complicated process. We’ve started the process and will complete this project in 2021. We have completed a lot of the groundwork – we’ve performed a migration, consolidated two domains, and focused on getting the EBOS and VMS sites to a healthy state. Upcoming tasks include – reorganising pages to reduce duplication and indexation issues, implementing canonicals, and optimising on-page elements, just to name a few.
Moise highlights the importance of receiving expert advice regarding the consolidation and migration process, “We knew we needed extra support with migration as it requires a level of expertise beyond that of our internal marketing team’s skillset. And we’ve found In Marketing We Trust to be invaluable with their advice as we progress through this project.”
“In Marketing We Trust came to us with a number of solutions that were tailored to our individual business. We were able to work with them to create a strategy that could be implemented internally, and with their support. Their strategy focused on our specific needs, and allowed us to take a phased approach to implementation, which we’re on track to complete by the end of 2020.”
Results
A healthier, higher-ranking website leads to increased organic traffic and a better customer experience.
Website health and user experience
As we progressed through the project, VMS’ website health increased to 82 per cent (December 2020), up from 68 per cent in March 2020. As website health improves, so too does user experience with health factors such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, and a reduction in page errors meaning customers can find what they need more easily.
Improved SEO and organic traffic
During the period between January and November 2020, organic traffic increased 144 per cent, which was attributed to a rise in demand for the products combined with a large increase in the numbers of ranking keywords. Ranking keywords also increased exponentially, with a total increase of 3,322 ranking keywords during the period between December 2019 and November 2020. At the beginning of the period, there were 30 keywords ranking in the top three positions, but by the end of November 2020 there were 298 (an increase of 893 per cent).
increase in website health
increase in organic traffic YoY
more ranking keywords YoY
increase in keywords ranking in positions 1-3 on Google YoY
As Moise says, “It’s very important for companies that are undergoing a digital transformation to engage with a Google recommended top 10 agency, like In Marketing We Trust. We carry a large number of products that are available to purchase online, and that can change frequently, especially during flu season or times like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally, we knew we needed extra support with migration as it requires a level of expertise beyond that of our internal marketing team’s skillset. In Marketing We Trust have been instrumental in ensuring we didn’t lose any data or search authority during the process.
In Marketing We Trust has proven time and again how deep their expertise runs. Everyone I’ve spoken with has been a subject matter expert and manages our needs beyond our expectations.
Their ability to understand our business (and its complex parts), the industry, and our target audience put my mind at ease and ensured that the strategy we approved was something we were comfortable with and excited to roll out.”
Testimonials
Moise Wakim
Business Manager Primary Care Australia
In Marketing We Trust were recommended to us when we needed help untangling some very complex, content-heavy websites within our portfolio. Paul and the team had a solid approach to tackling our challenge and provided lots of solutions that made sense for our organisation. The st...
