Dr Richard Zoumalan

(PROBLEM)

Online results in need of a facelift

Dr Zoumalan had always relied on referrals for much of his business and wanted to increase inquires for high-ticket surgeries.

Wanting a powerful online presence to solidify his brand as a high calibre surgeon, Dr Zoumalan built a new website and engaged multiple digital agencies in the past. Not much changed. In fact, the original site ended up being penalised by Google. This resulted in organic traffic to his website falling dramatically and the cost per lead became astronomical.

The good doctor wanted to rectify all this, with a focus of dramatically increasing online inquiries while decreasing his CPL by using organic and paid search as a primary strategy.

He again built another website with another provider, yet rankings, traffic and inquiries did not change:

(DIAGNOSIS)

Our digital diagnosis

In April 2015, we put Dr Zoumalan’s online presence under the microscope with a penalty audit & technical audit, identifying thousands of errors that had been ignored or missed. These discoveries included:

Red flag for potential algorithmic penalty on the site from past SEO campaigns triggering a detailed penalty audit
Nonspecific duplicate Title Tags not designed to drive action by users nor provide relevant information to search engines about the content of the pages of the site
Slow page loads due to bloated code
Significant amounts of thin content pages that added little value to users
Incorrect implementation of redirects
Previous SEO campaigns were over optimising the home page for a wide variety of terms, including service-specific terms. Therefore not getting the rankings that they should have, based on domain authority

Detailed link profile audit and assessment, and creating a plan of action to clean up past indiscretions.
Missing Meta Descriptions leading to random, sometimes irrelevant snippets appearing in the search results pages
Out of date sitemap, pointing Google and other search engines to dead pages
Inefficient site architecture causing crawlability problems for search engines
Google Ads Search was being executed poorly, with loose ad groups and little to no testing.
No use of Google’s display network to augment offline branding efforts

(APPROACH)

Our surgical procedure

Beginning in May 2015 we performed a compressive overhaul to reshape the doctor’s online presence. Our actions included:

SEO

A penalty & content audit to take care of any thin or duplicate content.
A penalty recovery plan implemented that included rebalancing anchor text optimisation.
Regular technical audits with feedback from Google’s and our own in-house tools.
Deep keyword research was conducted by analysing the business and key high-value services and its contribution to overall long-term revenue. A highly focused keyword strategy that correlated directly to key service revenue drivers was created.
Mapping of keywords themes, and its associated short and long tail terms to the most relevant pages based on the sites historical profile and authority distribution on the page
Once a baseline was created on the current site, building a new website that was more SEO friendly and conversion focused was put on the table.

A penalty & content audit to take care of any thin or duplicate content.
A penalty recovery plan implemented that included rebalancing anchor text optimisation.
Regular technical audits with feedback from Google’s and our own in-house tools.
Deep keyword research was conducted by analysing the business and key high-value services and its contribution to overall long-term revenue. A highly focused keyword strategy that correlated directly to key service revenue drivers was created.
Mapping of keywords themes, and its associated short and long tail terms to the most relevant pages based on the sites historical profile and authority distribution on the page
Once a baseline was created on the current site, building a new website that was more SEO friendly and conversion focused was put on the table.

Google Ads

Created completely new campaigns by service area
Within each campaign created highly focused, tight ad groups and detailed tracking to learn what worked for him and didn’t
Created many A/B split test batteries, and in some cases, implemented a 9 way Taguchi ad test per ad group (multivariate & multivariable)
Added many new negative keywords to stop waste in spend
Identified through extensive analysis keywords that had proven to be highly valuable, and focused budget and efforts on those terms

Created completely new campaigns by service area
Within each campaign created highly focused, tight ad groups and detailed tracking to learn what worked for him and didn’t
Created many A/B split test batteries, and in some cases, implemented a 9 way Taguchi ad test per ad group (multivariate & multivariable)
Added many new negative keywords to stop waste in spend
Identified through extensive analysis keywords that had proven to be highly valuable, and focused budget and efforts on those terms