RenalMed.co.uk: a victory for SEO best practice

“Have you Googled ‘renal medicine’ today? Please pass on my thanks to all the team. Could not have done it without YOU”

…So read an email I received from Dr. Andrew Stein, Consultant in Acute and Renal Medicine at University Hospital Coventry & Warwickshire.

Following the success of his AcuteMed.co.uk website – our first site to achieve more than 100,000 hits in a year – Dr. Stein commissioned us to build an online resource aimed at junior doctors in renal medicine. Launched in April 2012 from a standing start and with a brand new domain, RenalMed.co.uk achieved Dr. Stein’s aim of being “top of Google” for key phrases including renal medicine and renal commissioning in slightly less than a year.

Now, search engine optimisation is a complex business that our blog will discuss in more detail over the next few months. It’s just as much about the competition as it is about your own website, and I know that renal medicine is a pretty specialised topic, but whatever way you look at it, this has been a pretty good performance.

Best of all, RenalMed’s success is testament to the power of good practice. The website was built using Noisegate CMS – ensuring that it’s accessible, standards compliant, easy to update in the right places, etc. etc. – and the advice we’ve given to Dr. Stein and his team has been very straight forward:

• Google likes big sites
• Google likes sites that are updated regularly
• Keywords are vital – make sure they’re in the right places
• Keep at it and be patient!

…and what do you know? It’s working, and it’s beating some very serious competition including the Royal College of Physicians, the British Journal of Renal Medicine, GP Notebook and Wikipedia.

Now we just have to keep it there…