Massive AFC Migration Increases Brand Experience and Awareness While Boosting SEO Rankings with IDS’ Services

Snapshot

American Family Care (AFC) Urgent,
Non-Emergency Healthcare Clinics

IDS / Migration Services

Results Pre-Launch v. Post-Launch:

Sites migrated

Franchisees migrated

Locations ranked #1 for
“urgent care (location)”

Total pages migrated

Custom features added, including mega menu, forms, Google map embed, regional functionality

Hours spent in one quarter

IDS Client:

American Family Care

American Family Care (AFC) operate urgent, non-emergency healthcare clinics across the United States.

In response to the growing need for immediate care, AFC provides affordable, accessible, and convenient care in comfortable and professional environments.

By providing high-quality urgent care, primary care, and occupational medicine in less than half the time and cost of an emergency room visit, AFC locations treat more than 6 million patients a year with extremely high rates of patient satisfaction.

The Solution IDS Created to Help AFC

AFC turned to IDS, its preferred digital marketing agency, to provide a solution to migrate independent websites to a single, unified platform. The anticipated project was to take six months to bring front-end and back-end efficiencies and improved brand experience and awareness without sacrificing unique content and built-up SEO success.

One of the biggest challenges the IDS team faced was the sheer volume of pages that needed to be migrated within the projected time frame.

Overall, AFC required roughly 9,500 pages and 7,000 blogs of content to be migrated. Additionally, IDS knew they would need to work with various partners in the existing AFC vendor and partner ecosystem to effectively achieve the objectives, along with almost 24,000 redirects to anticipate and set up.

The first batch was completed in six months, and at the 14-month mark, about 80% of the sites were migrated. The project is still in progress at the 21-month mark.

The updates IDS completed included:

Creating brand consistency

Improving local SEO

Scaling content by location

Improving user experience on desktop and mobile

As part of its ongoing communication with franchisees in the AFC network, IDS pointed out some of the anomalies in unexpected drops in traffic that occurred during the migration.

For example:

01.

Blog keywords and traffic

IDS migrated most blogs from previous domains, but Google views these as new posts. Blogs build relevance over an extended period of time, meaning any ranking before the migration was lost and restarted on the new domain.

02.

Brand Keywords

Some sites had been ranking high for terms like “AFC urgent care” or “AFC PCR test.” While these searches bring in traffic, only a negligible amount is local, in which case the best practice is to direct these searches to the national site.

03.

National Keywords

Much of the keywords bringing organic traffic to the local sites resulted from national keywords. Blogging is a great way to bring in users to a site, but there’s not a large impact on patient volumes on a local versus national level.

IDS also took into consideration website speed and load times. The migration required significant increases in site speed to accommodate the increased traffic. There are a variety of factors that go into the quality of site speed, including:

Creating brand consistency

Improving local SEO

Scaling content by location

Improving user experience on desktop and mobile

IDS anticipated and prepared for these and other factors during the migration, employing a strategy that would limit the impact on site speed. The strategy included:

Compressing code to ensure pages would render quickly

Ensuring lazy loading functionality to render only necessary elements

Reducing image sizes using third-party compressors

Using Nitropack plugins to keep load times under 1 second

The Outcome

The goal of the IDS team was to create a template that took into consideration the best elements of each of the individual sites to create a look and feel that would ultimately produce the best results for AFC while also providing a robust, informative, and appealing site for consumers. This included:

Extracting all content from existing sites

Most of the AFC locations had their own content, blogs, language, policies, and structure unique to their individual sites. IDS worked to ensure all the content was extracted, copy edited, and migrated over to the new platform.

Updating key SEO factors

Some sites had multiple locations under a single domain. IDS took these from a single location to multiple sites, allowing for increased ranking capabilities on Google.

Creating redirects for every domain

IDS spent countless hours setting up redirects for pages on all sites to ensure that saved sites or bookmarked sites would be redirected to the afcurgentcare.com domain.

Establishing communication with each location

IDS worked with each location to get signoff before migration to ensure there would be minimal unexpected downtime or site outages.

Overall Stats on Ranking for SEO

Period Pre-Launch, April v.
Post-Launch, current (GSC/SEMRush):

Keywords ranking in the Top 3 increased 24%

Organic impressions increased 265%

Locations ranking #1 for “urgent care <location>” is at 77%

Overall Stats on Estimated Traffic

Period Pre-Launch, April v. Post-Launch,
current (Google Analytics):

Bounce rate decreased by 39%

Pages per session increased 10%

Session duration increased 60%

Conclusion

IDS worked with AFC to set up the timeline and create a process for transferring ownership of tasks with a cadence that could be shared across the team. We mutually agreed on checkpoints and created lists, and documentation reviews, assets, etc.

We developed a clear communication plan that included:

7 Days
Prior to Launch

Request final edits

3 Days
Prior to Launch

Confirm launch date with franchisees Confirm launch sites with corporate

Day of Launch

Advise franchisee of launch

Post Launch

Communicate smooth launch and new URL

Credentials

The IDS team partnered with a third-party source for a further layer of support to provide quality assurance.

As the project is still in progress at the 21-month mark, IDS maintains a continual relationship with AFC.

Our continuing relationship includes:

Ongoing Management of 260 Sites

New Design Ideas

120 Franchisees with enhanced services that include

Local findability (GBP and listings)

Active SEO (ongoing content optimization, link building, reporting)

Strategy and consulting

Website updates

Content, SEO

New Design Ideas

Scoping future enhancements such as:

Augmented site speed optimization

Addition of Nitropack to the site

Further lazy loading of content

New template

Topics to discuss

Nearby locations functionality

Number of callouts

Alert banner at the top of site

Stock imagery selection

Diversity of images across site

Flow and importance of Information

Pre-Launch v. Post-Launch
Overview (NUMBERS)

198 – Sites migrated

63 – Franchisees migrated

16,500 – Total pages migrated

60 – Custom features added, including mega menu, forms, Google map embed, regional functionality

2,083 – Hours spent in one quarter

Pre-Launch v. Post-Launch
Google Analytics Immediate Results

39% – Decreased bounce rate

10% – Increased pages per session

60% – Increased time on site

Pre-Launch v. Post-Launch GSC/ SEMRush Immediate Results

24% – Increased keyword ranking of Top 3

265% – Organic Improvement

77% – Locations Ranked #1 for “Urgent Care <Location>”

PPC Statistics

58% – Increased Conversion Rate (Not including COVID ads)

Average CPA – $10.5

Are you interested in learning more about the digital marketing services IDS offers and how we can help your business?

Get in touch with a member of our marketing team today!

Massive AFC Migration Increases Brand Experience and Awareness While Boosting SEO Rankings with IDS’ Services

Snapshot

American Family Care (AFC) Urgent,
Non-Emergency Healthcare Clinics

American Family Care