SEO Project – Abbott – First Check Family

I was brought in as a third-party consultant to an agency in Columbus that worked with Abbott regularly on their websites. This was a drug testing brand that Abbott had purchased, wanted to revamp its website, optimize it for SEO to bring in the right type of customer, and increase sales.

My responsibilities were to figure out where the website was currently ranking, identify the most important pages on the website, identify the tactics that were responsible for the rankings, improve upon those pages, and help provide sitemap recommendations to better organize the website.

We were able to identify the most critical tactic that was the reason 5 of their pages were bringing in over 40% of the website’s traffic, an internal linking strategy that was very intuitive, user-friendly, and great for SEO. We also mentioned to them that this high-performing content could also be used as a content magnet for retargeting ads to then bring customers back to the website to buy their products.

Despite showing how successful this SEO strategy was for the website and the big picture results it could bring from ads, Abbott decided to completely ignore our recommendations in effort to “modernize” these pages.

All of the internal linking was removed from the pages and as we predicted, those pages lost most of their SEO value and subsequently the traffic associated to those pages. The traffic to the website has never recovered since.

Lesson learned:

• Interlinking is extremely undervalued in the SEO world. Interlinking is just as effective if not more effective than external linking.
• Billion-dollar companies do what they want, even if it means losing them millions of dollars in sales.