SEO Project Insights: Consultdoc
Consultdoc are a small independent online doctors service, competing against national giants such as Boots, Lloyds, and Superdrug, and also free-of-charge competition from the NHS. Our challenge was to deliver rapid results via SEO, where PPC had previously failed.
The Brief
Past attempts to bring traffic to the website via Google Ads PPC had not produced a satisfactory return on investment (ROI). Spending £300 to £500 per month on ads had resulted in 1 or 2 £45 consultation bookings some months, and 0 bookings other months! Our client agreed to pause their PPC and invest in SEO instead, with a view to generating large numbers of online bookings each month.
2 Month SEO Contract
While the project was supposed to run for 3 months followed by a review, before continuing long term, in the end the client’s personal circumstances caused a change in business focus, and forced a pause in the campaign after just 2 months. However, this initial 2 month burst of SEO was sufficient to kick-start the SEO, and led to yields over the next few years!
Initial results:
- Month 1 – rank increase 200 places – page 1 keywords 5 – sales £45 (1 booking)
- Month 2 – rank increase 801 places – page 1 keywords 12 – sales £45 (1 booking)
- Month 3 – rank increase 184 places – page 1 keywords 11 – sales £225 (5 bookings)
- Month 4 – rank increase 407 places – page 1 keywords 11 – sales £900 (20 bookings)
Creative Content Creation
As our client was clearly a small fish in a big pond, a 2-person company up against national companies with 1000s of employees, we decided that the best initial blog strategy was a comparison blog post comparing the 3 biggest competitors against our client’s offering.
With over 49,000 searches per month in the UK for ‘Boots Online Doctor’ alone, and over 100,000 combined searches for various Boots, Lloyds, and Superdrug online doctor keywords, the potential traffic our client could attract by reviewing these 3 competitors was massive.
Within a few months, our blog post “A Comparison Of The Best Known Online Doctor Services” was ranking 5th on Google for the 49,000/month search term “Boots Online Doctors”, and our client reported multiple bookings monthly.
An examination of Search Console Data clearly shows the traffic-driving success of this 1 blog post, as shown:
Client Review
How We Delivered SEO Results So Quickly
This SEO project was on a tight budget, only allowing us to improve the technical SEO across the site, optimise 1 or 2 key pages, and write 1 blog post, within the short 2-month campaign.
Considering the short length of the campaign, and the massive marketing budgets of our client’s large competitors, the rapid results surprised even ourselves.
We attribute the success mainly to a careful use of our time resource, prioritising the highest impact activities first, along with a strategic choice of blog post that filled a content gap and drove massive amounts of engaged traffic to the site very quickly.
If you would like to speak to someone about your SEO needs, please contact us today and we’ll be happy to discuss and see how we can help.
If you are an in-house SEO expert, and would like to learn more about how to do SEO specifically for healthcare websites, please see our comprehensive guide to healthcare seo.
