“When you invest in a website redesign, it’s in your best interest to make that investment pay off long-term. Geonetric’s digital marketing team helped us build a great foundation during implementation and go-live — and then went to work building on that foundation with a strategic focus in the months following launch. They not only ensure our site is optimized in every way possible, they provide the performance data I need to report to my CEO and prove that our digital efforts are delivering a positive return.”
Patrick Kane, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Communications, and Business Development
Cape Cod Healthcare
Cape Cod Healthcare (CCHC) in Hyannis, MA, understands that SEO is never done. The two-hospital health system worked with their agency Geonetric to launch a new, award-winning site in January of 2019. They took a strategic approach with their redesign, making decisions based on user research and usability testing. And those investments paid off with impressive year-over-year results in just the first 30 days after launch.
Recognizing that optimization requires consistent oversight and investment, CCHC partnered with Geonetric on a post-launch SEO retainer to ensure those initial numbers kept moving in a positive direction.
Support On Launch Day and Beyond
Site launches are busy days for Geonetric’s digital marketing team as they work through a launch list that includes resubmitting site maps to search engines and checking that robots.txt are functioning properly. When a site goes live, impressive investments have been made throughout implementation and launch to ensure the site immediately starts delivering results. But optimization isn’t a one-and-done project.
CCHC made a lot of changes with their new site, from integrating a content marketing hub to restructuring locations, and those changes required monitoring to ensure the users were engaging with the changes as expected. With CCHC’s 90-day post-launch SEO retainer, Geonetric’s digital marketing team was able to continuously monitor rankings and make immediate, continuous improvements, ensuring initial positive results continue to improve.
Focus on Delivering the Most SEO Value
After launch, the digital marketing team ran a site crawl and used the findings to create a roadmap for the next three months of focused SEO work. The team prioritized findings based on what would deliver the most value to CCHC in terms of both overall optimization and what tied to strategic goals, such as connecting site visitors with services and locations.
Some of the work was additional clean-up that needs to happen after a major site redesign, such as setting up appropriate redirects and ensuring there was no duplicate content. One area where the team was able to really make an impact was optimizing the site’s metadata — particularly using keyword research to write thoughtful meta descriptions and page titles.
Some examples of news descriptions included:
Urgent Care:
“Get the right type of treatment for your illness or injury. Learn whether urgent care or the emergency room may be the best choice for you.”
Heart Care:
“If you have a heart condition, turn to the expert interventional cardiologists at Cape Cod Healthcare in Hyannis and Falmouth, MA.”
The Geonetric team met with CCHC each month of the retainer, reporting performance on key site metrics and discussing goals and tactics for the next 30 days.
Build on Results
Since the retainer included monthly check-ins, the CCHC team was able to see how investments compounded month after month. At site launch, organic traffic from search engines was at an all-time high, with a little over 60,000 sessions. Each month of the retainer, organic sessions continued to improve over the previous month. At 30 days it was a 24% year-over-year increase, at 60 days it was at 25%, and they ended with a total 29% year-over-year increase over the three months.
Bounce rates have decreased since go-live as well, indicating users are continuing to find relevant content on the site and stay engaged. Desktop bounce rate decreased by 7% and mobile bounce rate by 14%.
The site continues to see success in keyword rankings as well. Since launch, there has been a 76% increase in the number of pages ranking in organic search, and a 52% increase in organic keywords the site ranks for, including phrases such as “primary care physicians cape cod” and “having a baby after breast cancer.”
Focused Optimization Efforts Protect and Enhance Rankings Post-launch
