Arcare is an established aged home care provider operating across Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales, with over 50 aged care residences. Calibre9 worked closely with Arcare to develop an increased level of organic visibility, with the ultimate goal of increasing their occupancy rates across their residences.

From February 2023 to June 2024, our objectives were to:

Increase organic traffic YoY by 15%
Increase organic conversions YoY by 20% (from 1,328)
Improve page one visibility by 25% (from 486 keywords)
Drive occupancy rates to over 80%

Our target audience covered both the potential residents, and in some cases the family decision makers (PoA), making it important that the content and strategy was balanced and appealing to both audiences.

We were also targeting search terms for specific locations, suburbs, cities and states, making it important that we had broad range coverage to capture as much of the market as possible.

We created a comprehensive strategy, starting with several in depth research projects, allowing us to identify where there were issues across technical, content and offsite and plan out solutions to ensure the domain had a solid foundation across each key pillar. We then worked to six-month schedules to plan out the work required for both Calibre9 and the client to work through issues and the opportunities.

These top-level tasks included:

Research Phase

1.Market Analysis (competitor reviews and performance analysis)
2.Technical Audit
3.Content Audit
4.UX Audit
5.Backlink Audit

Implementation Phase

1.Technical fixes
2.On page optimisation
3.Internal linking implementations
4.Content rewrites / creation
5.Backlinks – primarily citations to support local residences

Based on the initial research, there had been a large focus on the individual locations where Arcare had residences but little else. We changed this to target users not only searching at a suburb but also, importantly, at city and state levels where search volumes associated with key terms like ‘aged care melbourne’ were much higher.

This involved reworking the content strategy and optimisation of existing state and city pages which allowed us to not only target the relevant city specific searches, but also ensure the information was segmented and clear from a localisation perspective.

With focus shifting to the city specific pages, the internal linking structure across the site was reviewed and amended to ensure these pages had links in place from other visible locations on the website. These changes, alongside tech fixes, content and optimisation of metadata led to significant improvements in rankings across both types of keywords like ‘aged care’ and ‘aged care melbourne’ which is business #2 on page 1.

We also wanted to maintain and grow visibility for more localised results of the residence pages. To boost performance we implemented schema markup to help provide additional context to search engines on the key NAP information. We also built citations to support the performance of these pages, this was prioritised based on residences that had lower occupancy rates.

Over the years, the domain had also built up a very large volume of content, much of which was thin or offered little value to users. A large-scale clean up was completed, with recommendations made for removing, redirecting or no indexing over 1,000 URLs.

There have been major hurdles to overcome with this project starting with the actual website and limitations and restrictions on changes to templates and site design. Communication channels and getting buy in from the internal tech resource was imperative, while there were no solutions in all instances, we were able to get enough done to influence rankings.

As part of the aged care industry, Arcare faced significant challenges due to COVID-19. The entire industry struggled to fill beds because of fears of potential outbreaks. To address this issue, recommendations were made to add content to the website that ensured transparency about how Arcare residences managed infections and the measures they implemented to minimise impact. This approach helped build confidence in the brand and ensured that enquiries did not significantly drop as a result.

The aged care industry is also extremely competitive, with numerous local competitors as well as bigger national providers. Additionally, federal and state governments often dominate search results for many of the keywords we aim to target. This required us to review opportunities and prioritise those where we believed Arcare could realistically achieve top-ranking positions, focusing on areas where we could have the most significant impact.

Finally, although we have a strong relationship with the Arcare marketing team, it was challenging to ensure that the senior leadership fully understood our goals for the site and recognised the success we achieved. This understanding was crucial for instilling confidence that their campaign spend was yielding a good return on investment. Through educational sessions, we demonstrated the value of our SEO work, which led to their decision to allocate additional budget for a new site which is about to launch, further enhancing SEO performance and its impact.

AHrefs Ranking Data > Feb 23 – Jun 24

221 additional keywords ranking in the top 3 positions (100% increase)
270 additional page 1 rankings (55% increase)

GA > Users by Month > Feb 23 – June 24

Users have continued to grow over the time period reviewed (Feb 23 – Jun 24). For the four months where YoY data is available, each of the months have seen growth in users over over 20%.

As well as driving the extra traffic to the site, we have also seen this lead to extra conversions. One of the key conversion points is form submissions which have again seen significant increases over the months where YoY data is available in the time period reviewed.

Doing a full YoY comparison, we can see the below results (Jun 22 – May 23 compared to Jun 23 – May 24)

Metric
1 Jun 2022 – 30 May 2023
1 Jun 2023 – 1 May 2024
Change %
Users
137,856
166,708
21%
Sessions
206,270
256,203
24%
Conversions
1,328
1,938
46%

These additional conversions have been a key driver in Arcare seeing record levels of occupancy across their residences. All residences now have occupancy rates of over 90%, with 82% of the residences sitting at over 95%.

We took over the campaign at a time when organic performance had been relatively flat for Arcare who were struggling to stand out in a competitive market.

Through the strategy created and implemented, we have been able to improve performance for Arcare across the full range of keywords targeted, leading to record levels of organic traffic and visibility, which has fed into Arcare also enjoying record levels of occupancy.

Considering the value of each placement/bed, this campaign has generated millions in revenue.