AGA Uses BrightEdge to Restore Traffic After Site Redesign

Transcript of AGA's SEO Story

Our SEO program at AGA is relatively recent. On our old website, we didn't focus too much on SEO. We did gain a lot of organic search traffic just because of the content we had. We didn't put a lot of focus into SEO until our recent website redesign. Because we lost a lot of credibility, due to inaccurate redirects and things like that.

At AGA, we have a combination of three teams that work on SEO. We have our communications team, our IT team, and also our marketing team. And we're kind of going there for different reasons.

Our marketing team uses the Data Cube so that way they can expand their reach through organic search.

Our IT team, they implement things on our website directly, that our communications team can’t. So, if we find coding, something wrong with our JavaScript or something like that they'll handle that.

But the communications team, they're the ones who are really in there. They're the ones working with the Data Cube & Content IQ and also looking at the reports and setting up dashboards for different team members.

I mainly use the Content IQ portion of BrightEdge. It really helps identify areas of our website that really need to be spruced up. One of the main things we noticed is a lot of H1 tags were missing. And that was flagged by the system itself. That really helped us gain credibility, especially with our content pages. But it also flagged that we had a problem with our JavaScript. Some of the pages weren't being read by Google bots. The BrightEdge system and it was able to flag that for us.

And that's kind of why we're actually going to go through another redesign. And we have that in mind, we have the knowledge gained from that in mind for that redesign, so we avoid that problem in the future.

When we did our technical optimization with Content IQ, we actually saw a lot of gains. There's a very clear example with our patient GERD page. It went from being on the second page to the first. BrightEdge has a huge impact on the content we produce at AGA. As everything is tied to essentially how it performs.

So, our marketing team is in IT to make sure that programs and events that we have gain a lot of exposure. And so that we understand how much of it is coming from organic search, and how we're increasing that through things like the Data Cube.

BrightEdge also plays a role in how we push out patient-targeted content. It helps us ensure that we're reaching the right audience. Who's searching for the right terms.

And that's especially important because we're competing with websites, like Web MD and Wikipedia and other associations.

So BrightEdge has been instrumental in our mobile strategy. We've switched to a mobile-first website. Some of the insights we've gained from the BrightEdge platform really help us. What it showed us actually is that our pages are mobile friendly, but they're not loading as fast as they could be. And that's going to ding us in the future because we weren't aware of how slow the pages were. And we also weren't aware how much Google prioritizes mobile so that's been really key in that.

BrightEdge has actually helped us a lot in doing more SEO work because it lets us show the metrics and show the actual wins and also more importantly it lets us show the potential wins. I think when you see all you do is make these small little changes and you can gain a lot of impact, that's huge.

Especially when we're presenting to VPs, or the Board or things like that. The organization as a whole has become more metric-focused. It’s not just about doing a program but showing how that program actually performed on which platforms and what can be learned about what we did.

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