Finding relief from pelvic floor dysfunction
Helping Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness generate more search traffic by making only the changes that mattered
The challenge
Local searches for “pelvic therapy” put Awake on Google’s second page. Awake needed to be on the first.
The outcome
You’ll find Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness where you should: on the first page. The uptick in new leads helped more patients resolve pelvic issues and led to Awake’s growth.
Accomplishment data
Next Mile helped Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness significantly increase search traffic:
- Initial search rank: bottom of the second page. Current rank, first page, 7th slot.
- ~25% increase in organic search traffic
- ~25% increase in organic leads
- Zero software development, SEO, or content creation expenditure
- Identical business result from what a new site would deliver
- Saved 20x versus building or migrating to a new website
The additional business driven by Awake’s improved local search performance enabled them to grow revenue, add staff, and help more people find lasting relief from vexing discomfort.
Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness: treating the whole
Pelvic floor dysfunction: hidden suffering
Despite modern medicine’s many miracles, pelvic health problems remain oddly undiscussed, even taboo. Whether you’re suffering pain in your pelvis or abdomen, constipation, leaking, sexual difficulties, pregnancy and postpartum challenges, or bowel and bladder problems, lasting relief does exist. Pelvic therapy relieves the symptoms of pelvic floor dysfunction.
Awake: lasting relief from pelvic problems
Tired of pelvic health’s underground status, Dr. Hannah Strom founded Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness to help hidden sufferers overcome seemingly indeterminate, intermittent, and inscrutable pelvic pain for good.
The evidence suggests
Awake provides lasting relief using clinical, evidence-based pelvic physical therapy, not woo-woo ideology or ouroboric symptom-chasing. Dr. Hannah guides her practice with five key tenets:
- You deserve the best: full-length, hour-long sessions 1:1 with a true pelvic specialist.
- Unique, tailored treatment: treatment specific to your situation, your goals and your body.
- Discover "the why": we uncover the reason your symptoms are there in the first place.
- A meaningful plan: we create our treatments to be meaningful and functional and accurately represent your daily tasks.
- A compassionate team in a comfortable space: sessions are with your therapist in our private and comfortable space that is devoted solely to pelvic floor therapy.
She gets results, too, with most patients wishing they’d known about Awake sooner. Trouble is, doctors specializing in pelvic therapy aren’t very common. On top of that, general practitioners, urologists, and gynecologists often know vaguely of pelvic therapy, but don’t know any qualified practitioners, and so getting a referral isn’t easy. You can feel like you’re on your own in your misery.
It seems, then, that medicine has another miracle left to perform: increasing awareness of pelvic therapy! Dr. Hannah, and relief, needed to be readily found.
“Dr. Hannah helped me with my [pelvic] problem. I had no idea you did work with them!”
– A friend of Next Mile
Next Mile: unfamiliar territory, familiar results
A very outside perspective
This mission is not exactly in Next Mile’s domain. A small clinic facing local search and marketing questions? We do complex IoT.
However, connecting people to critical information through technology certainly is. Offering focused, holistic, achievable recommendations about technology strategy definitely is. Remember Hannah’s five tenets? These align closely with how Next Mile handles technology problems. We accepted the challenge.
Assess the whole…website
Hannah needed Awake to be findable by local people suffering from pelvic floor dysfunction. Searches for “pelvic therapy Minneapolis” and similar had Awake on the second page behind resources that weren’t even clinics.
Since pelvic therapy isn’t an oversaturated topic, and since Hannah’s web content equaled or exceeded the quality of similar clinics, something else was up, and it had to be technical.
Google ranks a website relative to a search term mostly on content relevance, but in part based on that site’s performance relative to the usability of said content. They break it down into Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices adherence, and SEO/search engine readability/indexability. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tells you exactly what they’re measuring, and it cast objective light into all the dark corners:
Those scores highlight the price you pay for using Squarespace, Wix, and similar. Easy always has a cost in digital.
Think before you solve
The obvious move is to diagnose each issue, draft a possible solution, furiously ticketize the work, and prep forces for development. Any vendor could lift-and-shift her site to a new framework without all that client-side scripting and we’d nuke this problem from orbit.
Then at the end of it all, Dr. Hannah would net the exact same business result as she’d get from a handful of tweaks she could perform herself with our guidance.
Prescribe extremely specific treatment
One of Next Mile’s mantras is: “you can solve any problem, but only some problems matter.” Our objective was the first page, not perfection, so the most elegant solution wasn’t to go fix every technical issue. Of course we performed the expected diligence:
- Familiarized ourselves with Awake’s site and its performance report
- Interpreted the issues and broke them down into:
- Issues Dr. Hannah fix with our help
- Issues a developer has to fix
- Issues caused by a business constraint
- Things that can't be fixed without massive implications or can't be fixed at all
- Wrote up specific fixes/tasks for a subsequent developer if Dr. Hannah so chose
Rather than activate all the fixes, we chose to creep performance forward incrementally to see each change’s impact. Specifically, we advised three first steps Dr. Hannah could undertake without buying a new website:
- Make changes that slightly boost the SEO score to green
- Make changes that slightly boost the Best Practices score to green
- Improve the cache/caching policy to serve assets with enough speed to increase site performance
Awake’s site hit Google’s first page for key terms after step 2, so we didn’t even need additional caching.
Service specifics: Streamline
Outcome: you will see the doctor now
Broadened awareness
At last, Dr. Hannah’s on the front page of each critical search, and patients have been finding her. Both traffic and organic leads are up by 25% versus previous, and Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness itself has grown quickly into the Minneapolis/St. Paul eastern suburbs’ premier pelvic health clinic.
Personal impact
That increased awareness has brought relief to more people than we expected—people in Next Mile’s personal network. Recently, after seeing Awake’s logo on our About page, we received a missive from a friend saying “Dr. Hannah helped me with my ______ problem. I had no idea you did work with them!” Glad we could help!
"Next Mile's precise recommendations greatly increased exposure,
allowing us to hire new staff."
– Dr. Hannah Strom, CEO Awake Pelvic Health
Today: reduced pain all around
Seek and ye shall find
Right now, Awake’s site does what it’s supposed to do: help local people find a critical, available resource: pelvic therapy from Awake Pelvic Health & Wellness. Searchers can find Dr. Hannah, sufferers can find relief.
Digital therapy
There’s a number of ways this could’ve gone. As digital experts, we’re all conditioned to swing for the fences, reflexively designing, architecting, and engineering for every edge case outside our (frequently naive) ideal path. Excess creates technical and financial debt.
Our time with Dr. Hannah unexpectedly (and necessarily) reinforced the fundamentals: understand the context, know the problem, and recommend parsimoniously.
What's next?
At any point, Dr. Hannah could trigger a new site build and hand those developers the specifics she needs them to deliver against, fulfilling every performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO objective. She’s got the treatment plan should the pain return!