Posted on December 30, 2020
2020 Brought Glacial…
There’s no doubt about it that 2020 has been a year to remember. As it draws to a close, we asked a few of our specialists to look back on the year, as well as look forward to what 2021 may bring us. Keep reading to learn more!
Content Marketing: Sarah Gelber, Content Marketing Specialist
In content, we had two big takeaways from 2020! The first is “quality over quantity” which rang true this year more than ever before. Our data suggest that four or five pages of well written, SEO-optimized website content makes far more of an impact than 15 weak pages of content!
The second is the timeliness of your well-written content. Practices that took quick action found themselves much further ahead of the pack in regards to Google ranking. Think about the new services, doctors, or locations your practice added this year.
Are those well represented on your website and Google search results? The sooner Google has it, the sooner the world will know about it!
We expect these two key factors to continue to be pertinent in the 2021 landscape!
Local SEO: Jeffrey Kustron, Local SEO Specialist
Local SEO has been incredibly active this past year. This pandemic has prompted Google, Yelp, Apple Maps, and many other major platforms to roll out updates on the fly, to keep up with the rapidly changing world.
This was a year where Google My Business rolled out more updates than ever before. Some of these updates included the new COVID-19 style post, the ability to mark your business as temporarily closed, the addition of the COVID-19 info link, and the telehealth info link to name a few.
After the roll-out of lockdowns and restrictions in March, businesses started to feel the effects of the pandemic in April, with many businesses losing revenue and patient traffic. This made April the lowest month in consumer trends this year.
This is a graph of the total Google Customer Actions across our client base. As you can see, customer actions plummeted in the month of April.
Glacial Multimedia definitely wasn’t an exception in this, but thanks to our clients, employees, and vendors, we have been able to grow during this crazy year. Our Local SEO service has increased the total profiles managed by (71%), we have found and suppressed 4,326 duplicate listings (+8%) and managed a total of 37,818 different citations (+57%)!
As the year comes to a close, we can safely say, 2020 was another busy year in local SEO.
Paid Search: Spenser Pontbriand, Director of Digital Marketing
My summary of 2020? Surprising.
Surprising that we all got sent home from work in the middle of March. Surprising that so many of our clients were forced to shut down for months.
Surprising that having a baby during a pandemic was actually for the best (all that extra time spent at home!). Surprising that many of our clients and their campaigns…had their best years ever.
If you had told me back in April, after many of our clients stopping doing digital ads, that our client leads would be UP 149% year over year, I never would have believed you. But despite so many accounts suspending ads for months, so many practices came out firing when it was time to re-open.
In a year with so much uncertainty, seeing this growth in performance month after month was a beacon of hope that everything will be okay. As we wrap up the year, we continue to hear about clients having their best year ever despite all we’ve had to collectively endure – things I never would have expected to hear back in March and April.
This gives me hope that we – both Glacial and our clients – can come out swinging in 2021, putting all we’ve learned to good use, and have another ‘best year ever’.
Social Media: Matt Fernandez, Director of Social Media Marketing
While the year 2020 has generally been “quite the ride”, we did see some positives in digital advertising. On social media, we witnessed the best overall lead generation across all our accounts in our history.
Both Cataract and LASIK saw a significant drop in the cost per lead. LASIK saw the cost per conversion drop 30% on social media and Cataract saw an even more significant 70% drop in the cost per conversion.
The significant increases in performance we attribute to multiple factors:
- Early on during the COVID shutdown, we experienced a period of time where advertisers pulled their campaigns, and the clients that kept their campaigns running saw a significant increase in performance due to a lack of competition.
- Using the data from the previous year’s campaigns, we made some changes to the campaign structure to better optimize for conversions, which has had a major impact on performance.
- We continued to optimize forms and lead generation tools such as the Self Test to make them better than ever before.
- The Facebook demographic is an aging demographic. With more tech-savvy people falling into the cataract demographic every year, we are seeing that audience convert more every year on Facebook.
Thinking about what you can do to kickstart your practice’s digital marketing strategy in 2021? Glacial Multimedia is here to help! Contact us to request a quote now!
