NHS Direct: Callers make the switch
The challenge
NHS Direct operates a multi-channel health information and advice service over the phone, via a website and through digital TV. They had an objective to provide their information to more people, particularly through their lower cost channels, and so needed to boost traffic to their website and increase their visibility in the digital space.
Healthcare is a competitive environment in search engines with generalist and specialist medical information sites vying for visibility in the top search engine positions.
Our strategy
We worked out a strategy to help them improve their online presence in search engines when people search for health and medical information. Key to this was improving the Natural Visibility in search engine rankings for NHS Direct Search Engine Optimisation on the site. We selected high volume keywords for targeting in order to meet yearly traffic targets and increased breadth of visibility across the whole site and deep content within the site. We also optimised existing and new content, making search engine listings more attractive to click-through. Pages titles and meta descriptions displayed were made unique, descriptive and much more attractive to potential visitors to the NHS Direct site.
The results
Their record website traffic has been the subject of some press activity over the year.
"Visits to the NHS Direct website have been steadily climbing in the last quarter and last month they reached 2.35 million, up from 1.89 million in July and 2.29 million in August. The number of September visits is 17.5% higher than the 2 million monthly target and up 24.3% since July 2007."
Medical News Today
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon