May 18

Tuesday Push Results For RevaHealth.com

By Philip Boyle Tuesday Push No Comments »

In preparation for tomorrow’s Tuesday Push for Decisions For Heroes, I thought it would be interesting to look at how being the subject of the push two weeks ago has benefitted RevaHealth.com so far.

The purpose of the Tuesday Push is to “make some noise about ourselves [the small but growing tech community in Ireland] by picking a good example of an Irish Tech Company and highlighting their product(s) every second Tuesday”. It’s a way of increasing the visibility of our sector, one company at a time, and also a way of fostering a community in the industry through honest feedback.

So, let’s get the easy part out of the way. Has being the subject of the Tuesday Push benefited us? Absolutely, but maybe not in the ways that people might have expected. We certainly haven’t gotten any extra (traditional) media or press attention out of it yet, and in terms of extra traffic, we’ve only had around 150 visits to the site or the blog originating from the articles that were written about us (excluding any mentions on Twitter).

We did however get two things that were invaluable to us. Honest feedback, and links to the site.

The feedback was largely positive, but a few people did either run into problems using the site or didn’t like the way some of it worked. This was great to hear, especially because they gave real examples of what their problems or dislikes were. Some of the problems were new to us, others were ongoing issues. We have fixed or are planning to fix all of them. The dislikes were more varied, and often design related (not our strongest area by any stretch of the imagination!). We’ve taken them all on board and we hope that we will get to address as many of these as possible over time.

The push has definitely introduced us to more members of the community than we knew beforehand, which is great, and has also increased awareness of RevaHealth.com and our blog within the community itself, which can only be a good thing.

Links-wise, here are the numbers:

Links to RevaHealth.com 20
Links to RevaHealth Blog 9
Links to Caelen’s Twitter 5
Links to our SERPs 4

Those numbers might not look very big to some people, but ultimately those links are going to help us get better positions in Google and the other search engines. The links come from 15 different sites, many of which have never linked to us before. Also of interest to us was the number of people who mentioned and linked to our blog. We’re really pleased that people are finding it useful and we’re going to continue writing for it as often as we can.

Being the subject of the Tuesday Push has definitely been a very positive experience for RevaHealth.com. If you have the time to spare to give an upcoming Tuesday Push company a little feedback and a link, they will hopefully learn from it as much as we have and appreciate it as much as we do.

What can we do to help improve the Tuesday Push? First up, tell people you know about it and ask them to take part. Secondly, try and get some media to mention it regularly. Newstalk radio and Innovation in the Irish Times spring to mind.

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May 15

Map Search and New Listings Types Added

By Caelen King Health 2.0, Web/Tech 1 Comment »

Last night we launched our latest build of RevaHealth.com which includes a couple of significant new features, one aimed at our visitors and the other at the health clinics that use our site.

Maps

Previously when you looked at the map page in our search results you were presented with just the clinics from the search result. While this made some sense, it wasn’t particularly useful as we had to make the maps static in order to keep page load times down.

Ideally, we wanted the maps to be another way for people to search for clinics, which meant making them interactive again. To do this, and not impact on our page load time, we split each map off onto it’s own page, which has the added benefit of giving them their own URL so we can SEO the map pages separately from the search results pages.

Map of Doctors (GPs) in Cork City

Map of Doctors (GPs) in Cork City

Our map pages are now active. For example, take a look at our map of doctors in Cork city. If you’re from Cork, or in Cork, you should be able to tell at a glance if there’s a doctor near where you are. Where we have the information, we’ve added the price of a general consultation to the map. You can click through to the contact form for each clinic or view their full listing directly from the map too.

As with all new features, we’ll be looking closely at how our visitors use the map to see what we can do to improve it over time, but for now we’re happy to provide what we hope will be another useful service for the public.

Two New Levels of Membership for Health Clinics

We have received a tremendous amount of interest from single professional clinics, such as physiotherapists and general practitioners. They want more than just our Free Listing but don’t have the demand to justify a Pro Listing, and to date we haven’t had a listing to match their requirements. Our new Solo Listing will hopefully be of some interest to these clinics. We have also introduced an Ultimate Listing for large clinics demanding the highest levels of promotion.

Solo Listing

Solo Listings are available to clinics with a single health practitioner treating patients outside of the fields of dentistry and cosmetic surgery. The benefits of a Solo Listing include larger search results, unlimited email enquires and the removal of external advertising from the clinic’s brochure. Solo Listings cost €20 per month or €200 per year.

Ultimate Listing

The Ultimate Listing gives clinics much more than Pro membership. Search results are larger and the clinic is promoted on the front page of RevaHealth.com. In addition to the normal search listing the clinic is also advertised on the right of the page for all relevant search results. Ultimate Listings are available from €750 a month or €7,500 annually.

Our new sign-up page (May 2009)

Our new sign-up page (May 2009)

Clinics that would like to avail of these new types of listing can sign-up directly on RevaHealth.com.

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May 12

How To Improve Your AdWords CTR For Free

By Caelen King Stuff we've learned 5 Comments »

At ReavHealth.com we have spent a lot of time working on CPC campaigns and we are always looking for ways to increase our click-through rates without increasing our costs. The bulk of what we do involves tweaking ad text and adjusting bids to reflect the revenue potential of the keywords. However, there is one method that we have found to be an effective means of increasing CTR that requires remarkably little effort, and that is to maximise the physical presence of your advert on the page.

Advertising pricing is normally based on two factors: size and placement. Both of these factors attempt to price ads based on potential viewer attention – the more attention a placement is likely the get the more it costs. Size is simple, the bigger the advert the more it costs. Placement is slightly more complicated but works on the same principle. In traditional print advertising we tend to see the following pattern:

  • Front of the publication is more expensive than the back
  • Right page is more expensive than left
  • Top is more expensive than bottom

In creating an effective advertising bidding market place, Google and the other search engines have tried to simplify this by eliminating the size variable. They give advertisers very prescriptive maximum lengths for their adverts which ostensibly create an even playing field for a position only pricing model.

This creates the illusion to advertisers starting a PPC campaign that the ad size is fixed and is not a factor to be taken into consideration. However, at RevaHealth.com we have come to realize that spending some time focusing on the size of the ad is one of the easiest ways to increase CTR without increasing our bids.

How to Maximise your use of Space

  1. Line Length. Google gives you 25 characters for your title, 70 characters for the body and 35 characters for the URL. USE THEM ALL! Every character you use increases the size of your ad and therefore attracts more attention than if you don’t use all of the available space. This is particularly important if your ad is going to appear in the premium sponsored positions above Google’s search results rather than in the right hand column.
  2. Bolding. If the keywords a user is searching for are repeated in your ad, then they will automatically be bolded when Google displays it. Bolded words attract more attention than normal words, and increased attention equals increased CTR. Our internal guidelines look to repeat the keywords at least once in the title, once in the body and once in the display URL.
  3. Use Capitals. Each capital letter you use increases visitor attention. Google does not allow you to use capitals letters for everything, but they do allow you to start each word with one, and this is our policy.

Worked Example

The following three sponsored listings were returned when I searched for ‘Dentists Hungary’ in Google. Our advert appears in 3rd position, however because of its effective use of the allowed real estate it achieves a higher CTR than its position would normally merit.

Dentists in Hungary
www.Access-Smile.ie/Hungary Irish Company, Consultation Ireland Full no quibble treatment guarantee

Dentists in Budapest
www.dacadia.eu Save up to 60% on you dental treatment and enjoy the vacation

Find Dentists In Hungary
Dentists.RevaHealth.com/Hungary Huge Choice Of Dentists In Hungary New Pics, Prices, Maps, Free Quotes

Analysis

When you analyse each ad the objective differences become obvious. Our Advert uses more of the available space in each metric.

  Access Smile Dacadia RevaHealth.com
# Characters in Title 19 20 24
# Characters in Body 70 61 70
# Characters in URL 28 14 31
# Bolded Words 3 1 6
# Of Capital Letters 10 3 20

A word of warning – while it is important to effectively use the space provided you must never take your eye off of your messaging. You use of the space and bolding keywords may attract the visitors attention, however if your call to action is poor they will never click on the advert.

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