For Once Traffic is a Good Thing

Any site redesign should seek to improve the user experience. We wanted to make Surescripts site intuitive for both new and existing users. This required redesigning and optimizing key pages to reflect updated product architecture and naming conventions. We also had to mitigate the risk of losing organic search traction as much as possible—a common occurrence when a site is “recovering” from mass change. 

The Approach

Our approach to SEO consisted of four main parts:

Initial Keyword Research

• Pulled a list of search terms Surescripts was currently ranking for, as well as a list of its top organic landing pages in Google Analytics. We then combined this data to help us infer which search terms were likely driving the most organic traffic to the site (i.e. valuable terms we didn’t want to lose traction on), and which ones had opportunities to drive more traffic to the site (i.e. terms that needed some nurturing). 
• Used an array of keyword tools and competitive insights to explore terms that aligned to each new page to be written (i.e. pages lacking historical keyword data).

Competitor Content Research:

• Referenced previous keywords to learn more about what users and search engines were most likely looking for during a Surescripts-relevant search. 
• Parsed through the top search results for each keyword and made note of semantic terms, sub-topics and types of content (i.e. charts, videos, quotes, links to external resources, images, etc.) that were common across multiple listings. 
• Provided insights to Surescripts’ team of in-house copywriters to be used in developing high-quality copy.

Further Copy Optimizations:

• Optimized main headers, sub-headers and body copy to include target keywords and semantic terms. Title tags were also created. 
• Identified opportunities for internal linking to show connections between related pages.

Technical Updates:

• Updated the XML sitemap. 
• Implemented a redirect map.