ASLTIP

The BRAINBOX website for the Association of Speech and Language Therapists in Independent Practice went live at the end of February 2007.

Why BRAINBOX?

Here's what ASLTIP's Mary Hampton had to say about why BRAINBOX were selected:

BRAINBOX were originally introduced to ASLTIP through Jude Awdry at Woodside Secretarial, who provides ASLTIP's admin services. Jude had worked with Gary Straughan to produce a new website for another organisation she works for, so she had seen the process "close up" and gave a glowing recommendation. Gary has produced a number of draft specifications for ASLTIP in which he has incorporated numerous changes as our knowledge and specifications expanded. He has been extremely patient and very understanding in explaining the terminology and we have been very impressed by his responsiveness.

Read Mary's full article on the ASLTIP website

The "Before" Picture

Our starting point - as you'd expect - was to evaluate the exisiting website. Here's a summary of our findings:

View the full ASLTIP Website Evaluation (.pdf 137 kB)

Our key concern was was the low Accessibility score, because it is strongly correlated with search engine friendliness. This was confirmed when we searched (on various search engines) for terms like Speech and language therapist:

While the website was doing a good job serving the ASLTIP Members, it was a doing a poor job of bringing in new clients.

The expected benefits of the new website

The new website - with its new design, content and functionality - will be far more attractive to search engines. As a result,

• … the website will get a better search engine ranking…
• … which will bring more visitors to the website…
• … which will mean more therapist searches on the website…
• … which will result in more enquiries for the ASLTIP therapists

The new website will also attract therapists who are considering independent practice. As a result,

• … membership of ASLTIP will increase…
• … which will provide the website with more content…
• … which will increase its search engine ranking!

I hope you see that there's a "virtuous circle" here: more visitors lead to a better website which leads to more visitors which leads to… you get the idea.

The brand new BRAINBOX-designed website

The new ASLTIP website went live in February 2007.

It certainly looks the part - far more professional than its predecessor.

But is it working?

Google Position - as at November 2007

Let's update the Google position information. It's fair to say that progress has been made:

Now we're able to gather real data from a live website, we can now identify the most important search terms for the website. They are:

Yes, yes, all very impressive. But is it working?

The improving performance chez Google and the other search engines has meant that more visitors that ever are visiting the website. What's amazing - even to us! - is that more than 60% of all visitors to the site go on to perform a Find a Therapist search.