Author
Luka Maras
Category
Website strategy |
Case study |
Web design
Date
August 10, 2021
Read time
20 minutes
In this article, you will see how to create a website that will reap success. You’ll have a behind the scenes look at how local SEO was used to generate organic traffic and CRO (conversion rate optimisation) to convert users into leads and customers. All shown through real-life examples.
The Fenix Polyclinic from Zagreb contacted us because they had a problem with acquiring new clients. They offer specialist medical services in the fields of dermatology, neurology, gynecology, cardiology, psychiatry, endocrinology, ultrasound checkups and more.
So far, their clients came to the clinic almost exclusively by word of mouth. Despite its high reputation, they were stuck.
Very few marketing efforts were done to change the situation. These were mostly offers on group discount websites and leaflets. They had an outdated website and didn’t know what to do.
You can be the best in the world at what you do, but if no one knows about you, it’s all in vain.
Before getting to work, you have to create an offer for your client. And to be able to create the offer, you have to know what are you going to create, and for who. This includes both your client and their clients (which we refer to as end clients). That’s why having a discovery meeting is indispensable. Skip it at your own peril!
So, we set up a discovery meeting with dr. Gall, the polyclinic’s director. We asked her all the questions from our website strategy template. This made it possible for us to see the complete picture of the polyclinic:
We have discovered that their team was composed of medical doctors, specialists who all had extensive experience in the trenches (public hospitals), ranging from 10-20 years.
They also met as a team, to discuss their clients’ health problems. Unlike other private clinics, at Fenix the client got an expert opinion and diagnosis based on the mutual conclusion of several different specialists.
Their experience and approach made for a huge differentiating factor.
We have made an extensive research of their competitors – other private clinics in Zagreb who offer the same services. We noticed several opportunities that could provide us with an advantage:
Other clinic’s websites had poor content: short, without clear explanations on what clients could expect, poorly formatted and definitely not optimised for search engines. That alone was the biggest factor that we were going to take advantage of. We used KWfinder for our research, among other tools:
This is a recent screenshot. Fenix ranks as #1 for the selected search term.
Moreover, we noticed that some websites haven’t had the prices of their services clearly marked. In most cases, there were on separate pages (like a pricing list) and not on each individual service page.
In this manner, they were forcing the users to make an additional click. This equals bad user experience!
And sure enough, people were searching for terms like “dermatology checkup price”. Another advantage. Yes, the devil is in the details.
The majority of competitors’ websites had one or several of the following design and UI/UX mistakes:
Some of these websites had beautiful graphics, photos and fonts but were poor in terms of usability.
Keep in mind that a beautifully designed website doesn’t necessarily convert visitors into leads and customers. First and foremost, a website must convert.
In addition to the above, they didn’t do well or were missing completely the following elements:
Add to that a bloated code which led to poor page loading times and the result is a huge negative impact on SEO performance of these websites. This gave us additional advantage.
At that time, our client’s website checked all the boxes in the lists above. It was a splendid example of a horrific website:
State-of-the-art content and website design. Especially the mobile version.
It was time to get to work and change this situation. And the first step is:
It doesn’t matter if it’s text, video, images, podcasts – these are all just different types of content. Burn this into your memory:
Content is the foundation and the most important element of every website period.
The most important pages on the website were the services pages. These are the ones which would target the most searched terms for each specific service: dermatology, ultrasound, gynecology checkup, etc.
We asked ourselves – how to create these service pages so that they inspire a deep sense of trust and show the doctors’ expertise?
The answer was – to write them as if we were asking about these services. We have put ourselves in the shoes of potential end clients. As people who have health problems and are searching for a clinic they can trust, feel safe at and know exactly what they’ll receive in return for their money.
Our line of thinking went like this: What if I have a skin problem? I feel pain in my abdomen. What should i do? Somebody told me about ultrasound. Where can I find reliable information about this?
So, for each service, we wrote down the following questions:
Each doctor answered these questions for their own specialty. Of course, we have made the content more readable, user-friendly and above all, understandable. Because sometimes they speak in very academic terms. We asked additional questions until we were satisfied with the answers – from a layman’s point of view.
Here’s the webpage for one of the services – gynecological checkup (click it to see the full version):
Here’s the breakdown of the most important elements on the page (these correspond to the green numbers in the image above).
The first three are located in the hero section:
“Ginekološki pregled u Zagrebu” means “Gynecological examination in Zagreb” in Croatian. Since the H1 heading is very important in terms of SEO, we have included the keywords that were frequently searched for.
We placed the words “in Zagreb” on purpose, because this is local SEO that we’re doing. A visitor from some other region will close the page, because they certainly don’t need to travel to Zagreb for a medical service that’s widely available throughout the country. That’s fine, because we’re targeting the Zagreb audience.
This short list immediately tells the visitor what she can expect:
Note that in Croatian “ginekologica” means a female specialist. This made a difference and also proved correct some of the assumptions that we have started with. More on that later, in the sections on Analytics and CRO (conversion rate optimisation).
We placed two CTA buttons inside the hero section. The reasons being:
The second CTA was placed there based on the results of our SEO research and UX assumptions:
Below the second heading (“Everything about the gynecological examination”), we placed a table of contents with links to each of the section. This allows for quick access to the desired section, especially on mobile devices:
The section’s headings correspond to the questions that we asked during content creation. Most of them have been written according to the results of our SEO research.
The main content on the page has been formatted to be easily readable scannable. We have used the following elements:
We have placed a portrait image of the doctor who will be doing the examination. This reinforces the trust of the page visitor, by seeing who’ll be providing the service. To the right of the image is a short bio.
As we mentioned before, this section has been SEO optimised. It is also styled differently, because this is very important for the clinic’s targeted audience. The prices in local currency have been bolded.
At the end of the page, there are two CTAs.
The first one says “Call us” and the second one “Book an appointment”. Both have icons that visually reinforce the action that will be produced by clicking on them.
We didn’t want to exclude any option – there are users who will call the clinic immediately and others will want to send an email. We assumed that there will be more users who’d want to call the clinic immediately. We have made this button stick out more. The one next to it doesn’t – because if you make everything prominent, nothing will be prominent.
To the right of the main content is the sidebar. Inside, we have placed a Google Maps iframe with the location of the polyclinic. On mobile devices, this content appears at the bottom of the page. So that the users can immediately see where it is.
On other service pages, here are also links to services that fall within the same specialisation as well as articles on health.
We have set two main goals:
Whoever calls the polyclinic or sends them an email is a lead.
Furthermore, we wanted to track if our assumptions were accurate. When you are doing conversion rate optimisation, you have to assume something to be able to test if it’s true or false.
So, we have set up tracking for the following events:
These last are the CTAs that can be found at the very top of each page:
In the purple pre-header bar:
We thought – why put the most important CTAs just at the bottom of each service page? These should be accessible from any page of the website, just in case someone decides to contact the clinic after they have surfed around the website.
Clicking on a CTA that will convert a user into a lead and, hopefully, customer is the most important action that we want her or him to take. That’s why the main CTAs must be easily accessible and very clear!
Lastly, we were going to track the following:
The bounce rate is built-in in Google Analytics. You can set up the scroll depth too, but Hotjar does it automatically and displays it visually in a very clear and nice way.
In January 2019, we have launched the redesigned website. It took Google about a month to index and rank the pages in its index.
Like we had assumed, the Fenix Polyclinic’s website outranked the competition for dozens of popular searches. It dominated (and still does) the search results for nearly all the services the clinic offers. This means that for relevant searches, it occupies one of the top 3 positions in Google SERPs (search engine result pages):
SERPwatcher screenshot showing the entire history of rankings for the targeted keywords.
Previously, the website had less than 200 visitors per month. In the space of 3 months, it had more than 500. 90% of all new users were coming from organic traffic.
We have launched the new website without all the service pages it has now. Because we didn’t want to wait. We wanted to rank as soon as possible. So we were adding new service pages along the way, and the organic traffic kept increasing.
By the end of the year, it reached 1,300 monthly users.
The website’s traffic growth as seen in Google Analytics.
Changes to Google’s core algorithm also impacted the website positively.
Traffic also arrived via these searches:
Our client told us that the waiting room was now full, every day. That was amazing to hear, but our work was far from over. We have proceeded to analyse the collected data, see if our assumptions were correct and looking to further improve the conversion rate.
We started analysing the data collected by Google Analytics and Hotjar. Compared to the previous year (2018), we noticed the following changes, in Google Analytics:
Hotjar also showed that the users were indeed interested in the prices. The CTA with the label “Examination price” in the hero section on all the service pages was one of the most clicked elements. Our assumption proved correct, for both desktop and mobile users:
Users were clicking more on the “call us” CTA than “set up an appointment” CTA. In the first version, both buttons looked the same, like this:
We changed them to this:
And, indeed, the clicks on the first CTA increased even more.
It’s not always possible to track every single conversion. For example, if a desktop user called the clinic by typing in the number that he saw on the website, we couldn’t know that.
Much like with organic traffic that was generated via searches that we hadn’t foreseen, there were surprises in the UI/UX area.
The “All services” page lists everything that the polyclinic offers. We have divided the services in sections based on specialisations. Each service has a heading, a small image of the service and a CTA. This was what the first version looked like:
By looking at Hotjar heatmaps, we have noticed that the users were clicking on the headings (black text above the images). We assumed that they would click on the images and CTAs, because they are easier to click (especially on smartphones). It turned out that they were clicking on the CTAs and headings, but almost no one was clicking on the images. So we changed the headings into active links too:
This may seem like a small detail, but it’s important. It adds to the overall user experience. People are nowadays lazy precisely because of the web and mobile technologies. They want everything instantly. So you absolutely should enable them to get to the information they want to read as quickly as possible.
On other websites, we have noticed that there was always a separate page with prices. Sure, we confirmed our assumption that we should absolutely include them on each service page. But there was no reason not to create a separate price list page. And this also proved to be correct. The link in the main menu which linked to it (“Cijene” in Croatian) was the most clicked item:
Also, the other websites didn’t link to the services listed in the price list. That was annoying. Why force your users to go back to the main menu to see a service page? Make it available for clicking right there. So that’s what we did:
Since this was a long page, we created quick links at the top, for users to be able to get to their desired section faster. Sure enough, they were clicking…
…especially on smartphones:
And what did you see at the beginning of this page? 😉
Much like the initial interview during the website strategy session, the feedback from the client is a gold mine of information. After some time, we have asked our client what their clients (end clients) said.
The gynecologist told us that they had an increase in younger clients. A young woman told her that she wouldn’t even consider their polyclinic if there wasn’t a female doctor doing the examination. Looking at the Hotjar mouse movement heatmap, we saw that the greatest interest was placed on the section that explains how the examination process looks like. The second most read was the one explaining how to prepare for the examination.
Before creating the service pages on heart related diseases, the specialist told us that most of their clients were older people. So we have put an image on the page that targets this specific audience. Not the usual stock photo with a smiling young person, but an older one.
Remember that each service or product page must target its specific audience.
Conversion rate optimisation is a an open-ended process. It should never stop.
We have noticed that there was a huge number of searches on Google related to high blood pressure. So we have suggested to our client that an article should be written about it. We did it with the help of their input and outranked major portals on it. It landed on first place in Google SERPs. The website traffic skyrocketed:
As you can see, useful, targeted, high-quality content can make an enormous difference. That’s why it’s better to have 3 amazing articles on your blog then dozens of short ones, who are just filler content.
We knew the audience loved it, because 50% of users read it until the end. And it’s a long one: 1,670 words.
There are going to be further improvements done, like rolling out other service pages, testing the UI, A/B testing the ads in the advertising campaign, and so on.
Sometimes this can get a little bit frustrating, because you’ll have to push your client to get feedback from them, to persuade them to make further changes which need more investment on their part… But once the results start showing up, you won’t need to convince them that much!
Never stop improving the conversion rate of your website. You can do this in a number of ways:
And many, many more.
Always keep in mind:
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