Scotttish Health Council

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CIVIC was tasked with optimising the Scottish Health Council (SHC) website, requiring the implementation of a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

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Background

The Scottish Health Council was established in April 2005 to promote Patient Focus and Public Involvement in the NHS in Scotland. By ensuring that NHS Boards listen and take account of people's views we can achieve a mutual NHS, where the NHS works in partnership with patients, carers, and the public.

SEO is the single biggest opportunity in online marketing. At CIVIC we have delivered SEO campaigns for many of our clients and have extensive experience in this area.

The brief

Scottish Health Council was looking to increase their visibility in major search engines and approached us in late 2009 to deliver an SEO strategy which would improve their search engine rankings.

Our approach

We implemented a number of techniques to address their requirements, including:

Index coverage — we ensured that as many as possible of the relevant pages from their site were included within the main search engines
On-page optimisation — we carried out extensive research into keyword search terms used by the key audiences and recommended tier 1 and 2 key phrases for the site. We then edited the copy of the site to include these key phrases and provided guidance to the client in writing for search engines
Page markup — the markup tags give the page a well-defined structure that is understood by website browsers. To improve the traffic from search engines, we ensured that the key phrases appeared in the page
Link building — gaining the right links into the right place can also be valuable in referring visitors directly from other sites. We recommended using reciprocal linking to improve traffic from other sites and identified link partners.
Social bookmarking — involves web users sharing their links under different categories or tags. It can have SEO benefits since links are created from these homepages to your pages. We recommended including prompts to visitors to bookmark pages using standard tools such as AddThis.

Using Google Analytics we continually follow the metrics for the site, ensuring any changes are made to improve the site as needed. Statistics are analysed and produced monthly alongside progress reports.

Results and effectiveness

The results of the SEO campaign saw an increase in the total organic traffic to the site, placed the website on the first page rankings in Google for tier one keywords, and ensured prominent universal search listings in the main search engines.