About Phonak
Founded in 1947 and represented in more than 100 countries around the world, Phonak has been committed to developing, producing and distributing cutting-edge hearing solutions for over 70 years.
Executive Summary
Prior to working with SiteVisibility, Phonak hadn’t focused on SEO in the UK market. As such, we were the first agency to work with them on their UK site.
Over a 9 month period between 1st July 2016 to 31st March 2017, we helped Phonak with an on-site optimisation project that focused on key service and product pages.
The aim of the project was to increase organic traffic to the site and the work undertaken resulted in an uplift in organic traffic of 128% YoY over this 9 month period.
What Were the Challenges?
One of the key challenges facing Phonak was the lack of resource in-house available to optimise and create content. Quite simply, they needed support.
Before working with us, Phonak’s UK site displayed content that had been copied directly from the global version of their site. This was a strategy that had been rolled out across all countries and Phonak’s brand guidelines had stated that American spellings should be used. Although content on the site had been optimised, it had been done so for the global market rather than the UK.
This was far from ideal and presented us with some key issues:
- The site was written using American spellings like color that would be unfamiliar to UK users
- Terms like “hearing device” (aimed at the global market) were used rather than “hearing aids” (localised for UK)
- All international versions of the site contained the same content, potentially causing content duplication issues
- None of the content on site had been optimised for UK search
- Technical and unusual terms were also being used in the copy that the average customer in the UK wouldn’t be familiar with or search for
As such, the key challenge for us was to improve Phonak’s organic visibility through better on-site optimisation and copywriting aimed at the UK market.
How Did SiteVisibility Help?
Over the first 3 months, we undertook both content and technical audits to identify the performance, health and key issues with the UK Phonak site.
Once the audits were completed, and key issues were prioritised, it was decided that the biggest SEO opportunity was the re-writing and optimisation of the content on the service and product pages.
Keyword Opportunity Finder
Once on-site content was identified, the first step we undertook was to use our proprietary tool, the Keyword Opportunity Finder (KOF) to identify the most valuable keyword opportunities. The KOF compares 10 competitors and looks at the keywords they are currently ranking for, their positions in the SERPS, the pages that are ranking and the search volume. Using the KOF along with manual keyword research and reviews of the site, we were able to choose appropriate keywords to target.
We identified that the term ‘Hearing Aid’ was not present anywhere on the hearing aid page. Using the KOF we saw that it had a monthly search volume of 2,900 searches and that competitors were also using the term. This was an immediate and obvious opportunity for Phonak and so we started by optimising this page first.
The approach of manually reviewing key landing pages and then using the KOF to do further analysis was then taken on every category and product page across the site.
Our Approach
In order to prioritise which pages on the site to work on, we considered a combination of factors. We looked at pages that were missing obvious keywords, their respective search volumes and competitor usage. Once the priority pages were identified, it was then a matter of establishing a method of delivery with Phonak.
As the work was undertaken alongside other technical SEO recommendations found during the audit, a delivery plan was agreed with Phonak that included the optimisation of both copy and meta data of 16 pages over a 6-month period.
The Results
To measure the performance of the new optimised copy we made sure that upon uploading the content to Phonak’s site we annotated Google Analytics to make sure we could easily track performance from the dates content was uploaded.
As a result of the on-site optimisation of copy on the Phonak site, there was a significant increase in organic traffic.
For the period 1st July 2016 to 31st March 2017, there was an increase in organic traffic year on year from 29,235 to 66,672. An uplift of 128%.
If you’d like to find out how we can help you with your on-site optimisation, please get in touch using the form below. We’d love to help: