Optimizing a site after it is built is always a challenge. When the budget does not allow for a complete web compliant redesign, and the budget almost never does, the trick becomes giving the client as much bang for their SEO buck as you can. Total redesign takes time and resources that is a luxury that is quickly eaten up when billing by the hour. It is also not uncommon for clients to take on their web projects in phases with the first being design and the second being SEO. This was the case with Penn Foundation Recovery Center. I was not the designer on their site, but was hired to do some SEO work after the site was completed to have a specific aesthetic. The last thing a client wants to hear, regardless of whether you did the design or not, is major redesign costs for a site they just had designed not long ago. In a perfect world I would have completely redesigned the highly graphic heavy site to allow the search engines the ability to read important text hidden in gifs and jpgs. But again, this site was new and built to a very specific visual the site owners wanted kept intact.

My workaround in this case was to build additional pages and navigation built into the existing footer. The Penn Foundation Recovery Center is a drug rehabilitation facility most concerned with exposure in a geographic radius of their eastern Pennsylvania location. Their greatest organic optimization goal was that terms like “Drug Rehab” or similar abuse phrases, (alcohol rehab, cocaine abuse, heroin detox, etc.) would place well in search rankings when coupled with the towns and cities in a given radius of their drug rehab center (Sellersville, PA).

Their most glaring initial problem was that they did not make mention of specific drugs, or any of these geographies in their copy. The copy read a lot like their printed material that opted for a softer more vanilla language to describe addiction and the circumstances around it. This type of language works great in their beautiful printed brochure. Web searchers however use exact terms, and exact drugs in ways that were not used in the web sites copy. The nuance of this optimization effort would be to leave the text that they liked, as they liked it, but find a way to add the meaningful text that could come up in engines.
I always make an effort to add any copy in a way that is not stuffing keywords to trick engines, but to build on, or build around existing copy, a new web narrative that more accurately tells the web sites story using keywords it might not have used, or might not have used effectively enough. To me, that seamless inclusion of new keywords into the site, without “keyword stuffing” is what good SEO is all about.

In the case of Penn Foundation Recovery Center, my on road to entering the needed text was a program they call, “Rehab at Home.” In addition to being a differentiator for them to most rehabs, this was also why they were eager to come up in searches involving towns near them. They wanted families searching for treatments in towns near them to not only know they existed, but to know that discreet treatment was also available in their homes. To that end, I designed a footer for the site that alerted the user that the PFRC was a Drug Rehab conveniently located near Bucks, Berks, Lehigh and Montgomery Counties in PA. Each of those pages was designed to have a brief overview of the facility, and a blurb that alerted the web visitor that rehab was also available in the home in the “following cities.” The cities of the corresponding counties for each page were listed on four web pages. I succeeded in adding the important text that was missing from the site in a way that was both meaningful, and not keyword stuffing.

The results have been even better then I expected. When I began optimization the site was barely indexed and was getting very few organic keyword searches (11). Now? After only a few months the site gets visits from hundreds of keywords (300+) and places on the first or second page of Google for the vast majority of the time when a web searcher places a geographic term and a rehab phrase into an engine. The bounce rate is a meager 30% and the average visit to the site is over 2 minutes. Good qualified traffic with a minimal impact on the existing site. Not too shabby!