How I Helped a Brand New Hospital to Move Its Local Business Online

and generate 100% extra revenue on top of expenses in 5 months

This summer, I helped a private medical center establish its online presence. My client is an expert proctologist who has recently opened a private clinic in the city with around one million inhabitants.

I was working together with one developer to create and kick off the website in July 2020.

Here is a short case study with all the steps I followed to move a physical business online and valuable lessons learned from this project.

Conduct Competitor and Keyword Research

I used Ahrefs to examine the local search, check competitors’ websites, and conduct keyword research for the website.

Here is an excerpt from keyword research I’ve done for the client.

The research has revealed that the keyword monthly volumes and competition were low. A well-optimized website with a few backlinks could easily reach Google’s top ten results since the top competitors had low domain authority (DA).

To cover more relevant keywords, I’ve created the FAQ (frequently asked questions) section at the bottom of the landing page with the most popular informational queries.

As a marketer, I love using the FAQs section. It adds semantically related keywords to the website and gives users more information about the business.

Eventually, our website got to the second Google search result page in a few months.

Set Up Goals

When I asked the client which business goals he wanted to achieve, I got the following answer:

“Many governmental and private clinics have their own websites, thus I want a website as well.”

To establish the right expectations from the very beginning, I explained that having a website is not the ultimate goal. The website is just a tool to reach a wider audience, become a thought leader in a particular topic, and make more sales online.

We did not know how many requests we could get out of roughly 300 monthly searches. However, we set up a goal to measure conversion rate, understand users' behavior, and decide what to improve as a next step.

Once you know which goals you want to achieve, you can develop great website architecture and a proper user flow.

Create a Business Website

The client wanted to have full control over the website and make changes at any time on his own. The WordPress solution was not an option since it requires some basic coding knowledge to set up and manage the website.

We had to find a website builder that is easy to understand and use.

As a marketer who has worked with and reviewed many website building tools, I’ve suggested Wix.

A yearly fee is €150, but we’ve got a 50% one-time discount and purchased the yearly plan for €75. Here is what we’ve got for this price:

• A website drag and drop builder.
• The basic SEO optimizing toolkit (for meta titles, descriptions, and URLs).
• The customer relationship management system (CRM).
• The basic data tracking tools.
• 10GB of data storage.
• A custom domain name with free hosting for a year.

The website was created within a few days, including copywriting, SEO optimization, CRM, and data tracking systems.

As a marketer, I’ve had some concerns regarding the Wix website performance on search. However, with the right on-site optimization, the website reached Google’s second search results page without dedicated link-building activities. Besides, the client could easily make changes to the layout at any time.

Define How You Will Measure Your Website Performance

A website is a tool that is supposed to serve your business goals. Otherwise, there is no point in spending time and money on its maintenance.

While creating the website architecture and analyzing the users’ flow, think about how you want to measure your business performance and what you might need for it.

In my example, the website had a contact form, a “Make a call” button, and a sticky “Make an appointment” button.

Upon the contact form submission, users were redirected to the thank you page. This way, we could measure how many people prefer reaching out through the website and where they come from (paid advertising, organic, etc.)

By clicking on a “Make a call” button, users could directly dial a hospital’s phone number. It’s tricky to measure the buttons’ effectiveness since users can check the phone number on the website or elsewhere and make a call later.

I set up click-to-call tracking and Hotjar website recording to understand how users interact with a call button and if any adjustments were needed.

It turned out that most clients used their mobile phones to navigate the website and make calls.

Apply These Effective Strategies to Attract the First Clients

There are millions of Google search results, but users rarely check anything beyond the first page. Thus, it is vital to promote your business if you want to reach your customers.

If you target local keywords, the top rankings might not help to get clients. Users will most likely be caught by the paid advertising, local maps, and a few organic results at the absolute top.

Thus, we had to do something to bring the first customers. We could not wait long since the business was already open and was waiting for the first patients.

Here is what I did to promote the clinic’s website.

1. Set up a Google My Business account

I recommend having Google My Business to everyone who’s running a local company. It ensures anyone looking for your service online will find it on Google Maps too!

Once users stumble upon your listing, it shows how to visit your local branch, whether you have a web or physical address, when your business is open, and how to get in touch with you.

The account also shows you basic website analytics, and the queries people used to find your business, allowing you to fine-tune your paid advertising strategies.

Note, it took me two attempts and four months to verify the Google My Business account. The process is currently delayed due to the pandemic. Keep it in mind if you plan to create your local listing soon.

Once you set up the account, Google provides you with a $50 coupon on paid advertising. I used this opportunity to promote the website and it works quite well these days.

Here are a few tips if you would like to set up Google Ads and promote a local business.

2. Run local Google Ads with a 10/10 quality score

Online ads’ only purpose is to get the right people to click and the wrong people to keep scrolling.

As a marketer who worked with B2B advertisement, I know how difficult it might be to optimize the ads, target the right audience, and not lose the monthly budget in a day.

Here is a master check-list to set up Google Ads for a local business:

1. Make sure to narrow down the location targeting your city.

2. Link Google Ads with Google Analytics to import the goals, track the data, and optimize your ads’ performance.

3. Start with the “maximize clicks” bidding strategy to accumulate statistics and switch to the “maximize conversions” once you’ve got at least 30–50 conversions within a month.

4. Set up your daily ad budget to prevent Google Ads from overspending.

5. Use all keyword match types, especially if your target keywords have a low volume.

• Exact match keyword type: [proctologist consultation online]
• Phrase match keyword type: “proctologist consultation online.”
• Broad match keyword type: +proctologist +consultation +online

6. Do not forget to add negative keywords, preventing your ads from showing under irrelevant search queries. Some negative keyword examples include free, how-to, photo, video, forum, etc.

7. Set up two texts and one responsive ad to cover more headline variations. It helps to attract more users on-site and improve the ads Quality Score, which affects your price per click.

8. Use callout, site links, structured snippet, call and address ad extensions. The right extensions help to make your ads visible and improve your click-through rate (CTR). In one experiment, I increased my Google Ads CTR by 33% by using the right ad extensions.

9. Check the stats every day, add more negative keywords to the list, make adjustments once every 1–2 weeks, and see Google Ads recommendations for better optimization.

What Was Achieved

The website is live, and its conversion rate varies from 2. 56% to 5%, depending on the service.

I managed to achieve a 9/10 and 10/10 keyword quality score for two different ad groups by applying the tips mentioned above.

You will need to optimize your ads to achieve a better score and reduce the pay-per-click.

The ads’ CTR varies from 19.67% to 22.62% these days.

In November 2020, the company’s revenue exceeded the total expenses by 100%.

With 73.85% of traffic coming from paid advertising and the latest revenue numbers, the ads seem to work well.

Here is my main lesson learned from this project:

Start small! Start with a landing page. There is no need for advanced functionality and fancy design to convert users into customers.

Grab my SEO writing guide to learn how I create blog posts that hit the Google front page.

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