Franchise SEO Improvement with a Brand Consolidation

CPHT’s online presence was reducing as they grew, so their franchises had to pay for traffic with ads or social media marketing. CPHT’s websites needed a total rethink.

The brief

CPHT (Clifton Practice Hypnotherapy Training) is a leading UK-based hypnotherapy training provider with over 30 schools in the UK. Specialising in face-to-face practic

al hypnotherapy training, each of its franchises had their own separate website.

CPHT were known as the number one provider of hypnotherapy training, yet their online presence seemed to be reducing as they grew. Each franchise’s site was only getting organic traffic through its main brand term. On the first page of Google search results, none of the sites had a presence for anything but the brand. Most of the franchises were having to pay for traffic using online ads or heavy investment in social media marketing.

Conversation rate up from 1.25% up to 4.35%

Bounce rate improved from 69% down to 25%

Daily Users up from 20 to 250

The challenge

We had worked with franchisees at CPHT for several years, running various types of online ad campaigns and supporting their CRM integration with Pipedrive. We had even worked on some of the marketing campaigns for their graduates’ new businesses. CPHT needed a complete rethink for how they managed their websites and recognised that we knew their brand inside out.

Previously, when CPHT opened a new school they created a new website, on a new domain, but with the same content. As a result, they were trying to rank for ‘hypnotherapy training’ but their 30+ websites were all competing with one another. They were also being pushed further down the search rankings because every site had duplicate content.

The SEO problems were obvious to us.

  • 30+ competing sites
  • Duplicate content
  • Tired and outdated site design
  • Assets didn’t reflect the current business
  • Dry and flat content that lacked structure
  • Brand’s position and USPs were not clearly defined

The site also wasn’t built with the user in mind and didn’t consider that users can be at different stages of understanding in the customer journey.

Another issue with having multiple sites was that each site had its own set of blogs – over 300 in total! We needed a plan to review all of these, create a template, add a call to action and ensure each blog added value in line with CPHT’s goals.

176

Keywords into top 3 search results

227

Keywords into top 10 search results

250

Keywords into top 20 search results

146

Keywords into top 100 search results

How we solved it

The best solution for CPHT was to have a single website. We needed to improve the content, imagery, functionality and site structure to create a site that would provide them with a great starting point. However, we also needed to gain positive movements from Organic Search Rankings to drive more free traffic to the site through generic search terms.

We would be taking CPHT from 30+ five-page websites to a single 100+ page website with a wide range of relevant content. We’d then need to deactivate all of their old websites and redirect them to the brand’s single site. We also had to review over 300 blogs to de-duplicate them, remove articles that didn’t fit the single-brand approach, and optimise them all for SEO.

Once we’d completed research and understood the competitor landscape, we created the new site structure, followed by the page templates and some content briefs. To obtain improved content, we created a focus group of franchisees consisting of lecturers within CPHT who would help us produce the new content.

A screenshot of the old CPHT layout and design
Old Site

 

New Site

 

The brief for the new site’s image was to be memorable and warm. This sets CPHT apart from the rest of the market, which typically uses photos of graduates or images and icons that reflect their brand.

One challenge we had faced was that each franchise still wanted its own dedicated page. We knew that if we didn’t do this correctly the content could be penalised by search engines as this could be flagged as a ‘doorway’ page. A doorway page is intended to target specific locations and then funnel users onto one page. We chose to create a Schools page that could include links to the franchise pages.

image of cpht.co.uk's old website showing image locations for schools around the UK
Old Site
The new interactive map with selectable pins which link off to each CPHT school
New Site

The Schools page concentrates on the value of classroom-based learning with practising hypnotherapists versus online training courses. It lists the schools by region for easier navigation followed by a new interactive map. The map operates like a Google map and has simply been restyled, with pins created for custom data about each school and internal links to the individual schools’ pages.

We are so pleased and impressed with not only the fantastic, stylish, and very user-friendly website, but also the above and beyond hard work you’ve put in.

Your ability and patience “herding cats” to gather information and content from so many stakeholders, whilst managing to get the new site up and running on time has helped us to create the perfect platform which generates A LOT more users and leads.

With the huge changes in our SEO results, our franchisees will be grateful as they’ll no longer have to solely rely on Google ads to generate leads for their schools.

Oliver Newton

Operations Director

The outcome

Our new content strategy, links and approach for the brand resulted in immediate shifts in SEO keyword ranking positions. The week following the new site’s launch saw huge improvements in all their metrics.

SEMrush results for tracking keywords for CPHT in the week following the site launching
New site SEO rankings from SEMrush

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