Case Study: An Analysis of the Chatsworth Care Website

For today's case study, I'm going to be analysing the website, and online presence, of the website for the Plymouth based care home, Chatsworth Care.

A 'warm and friendly' residential home, Chatsworth Care is a care home of some renown, as it has been rated as 'excellent' in every Care Quality Commission inspection they have ever had.

Great work guys!

Chatsworth Care were nice enough to let me conduct this case study when a number of other organisations asked me not to feature them, so I'd like to thank them publicly for this.

And now, with that done, let's begin the case study!

The Things I Like About The Website

Firstly, as Chatsworth Care describes itself as a 'warm and friendly residential home,' it is very appropriate that the first thing you see on the website's homepage are some warm and welcoming images of the care home's residents and staff members.

These images do a great job of really establishing the care home as an open, friendly, caring and compassionate place to be, with happy looking staff and residents alike.

This creates trust with the website visitors, which is absolutely vital when your business is taking care of people, some of whom will be frail or vulnerable.

This invaluable sense of trust is furthered by many of the other features of the homepage, such as the video about the care home which contains important information about the extensive training the staff have received, their client focused ethos which is 'all about the residents,' the wide variety of dietary options available and several other important things which will reassure potential clients and suggest to them that perhaps Chatsworth Care Home will provide the compassionate, generous and considerate environment that their loved ones require.

More things which help to build trust with the website audience include the detailed list of the care home's facilities and the banner that reads, 'Chatsworth Residents Will Always Come First,' which are displayed on the left and right hand sides of the website:

There are also some more nice images (such as the ones below) of the care home itself, it's residents and it's staff, across a number of other pages of the website, and also a gallery page, which gives people an in-depth look at the care home from both inside and outside.

This helps to further establish Chatsworth Care as a care home with a genuinely compassionate and empathetic environment, which is very well equipped to serve the needs and desires of it's residents, and which is geared towards ensuring that everyone who lives here has a high quality of life which is rewarding and enriching.

As mentioned, communicating these things to people who are looking for a care home for their loved ones is absolutely vital, so it's great to see that the Chatsworth Care Home's website does this so well.

Another thing the website gets right, is to have the care home's contact details in the header (and footer) of every page of the website:

This is important for two reasons.

Firstly, displaying contact details prominently on every page of your website is another way to build trust with your audience, as it shows you're not hiding, and that you are a legitimate business, and secondly, having these contact details readily available at all times means that if someone looking at the website likes what they see, and wants to get in touch with Chatsworth Care about potentially becoming a client, then they can do so quickly and easily.

The Things Which Could Be Improved

While the Chatsworth Care website is nicely designed and communicates an invaluable sense of trust, warmth and compassion, there are a number of improvements I would suggest making to both the website and it's overall online presence which would help them to secure more clients, if this is a goal they're trying to achieve.

Changes To The Website's Design

- Promote The CQC Reports More

Firstly, as I mentioned in the intro, Chatsworth Care have received outstanding Care Quality Commission reports every time they have been assessed, which is extremely impressive.

However, I feel they don't mention this enough on the website, as receiving such excellent assessments is obviously something which people looking to find their loved ones a care home would value very highly.

Displaying their fantastic track record a little more prominently on the website would be a great way to build even more trust with their website visitors, and make them more likely to consider Chatsworth Care as an appropriate home for their relatives.

I would recommend making a simple banner graphic to promote their excellent CQC reports, and then putting it somewhere near the bottom of every page of the website.

- Have 'Contact Us' Forms On Every Page

Contact Us boxes are a great way to generate leads from your website, as any website visitor who is interested in potentially becoming a client can quickly and easily give you their details, so you can then follow up with them.

This is important because not everyone will want to call you using the phone number on your website, or they may be visiting your website out of your contact hours, and then not make the effort to call you later when your phone line is open again.

Unfortunately, the Chatsworth Care website does not contain a single 'Contact Us' form on it, as even the one on their Contact page does not display properly (for me, at least).

This strikes me as being a big missed opportunity, as there have surely been a lot of people over time who have found the Chatsworth Care website and wanted to get in touch with them through a contact form, but been unable to because of their absence.

Simply by putting in a Contact Us form somewhere on every important page of the website, it is very likely that Chatsworth Care would have more people getting in touch with them to enquire about their care services.

- Show Some Testimonials From Satisfied Customers

A key aspect of today's online marketing landscape is the use of customer testimonials like the ones below:

Testimonials can be very persuasive indeed.

In fact, in a recent case study, customer testimonials increased the number of conversions by 34%, while according to research done by Nielsen, 92% of people will trust a recommendation from a peer, and 70% of people will trust a recommendation from someone they don’t even know.

It is for all these reasons, and more, that almost all big brands now show customer testimonials on their website.

For increased effectiveness, include a picture of the happy customer alongside their testimonial, and for maximum impact, get the customer to record a video testimonial.

So, now that we've established why testimonials are so important for your business, the question to ask is 'how many are there on the Chatsworth Care website?'

And the answer to that question is, none. Absolutely none.

I've had a thorough look at the website and can not see anything resembling any kind of testimonial on any of it's webpages at all.

Clearly then, this is a major issue which should be remedied.

And, as I've already stated, including testimonials from satisfied customers on the Chatsworth Care website could potentially increase the number of website visitors who convert into sales leads and customers by 34%, so this is another simple alteration which could prove to be very lucrative indeed.

- Miscellaneous Suggested Improvements

At this point, my main suggestions for improvement have been outlined, but there are a couple more things which I feel are worth outlining.

Firstly, Chatsworth Care's main email address, as displayed in the header of every page of their website, is a personal one which uses @btconnect.com instead of a business one which uses Chatsworth Care's website domain of @chatsworthcare.co.uk

Although this may seem a minor thing, there are many reasons to use a professional email address which features an @yourwebsite domain instead of a personal one which uses the name of BT, Sky, Gmail, Hotmail or another provider.

These benefits include increased credibility and professionalism, and seeing as how creating a professional email address is relatively easy to do, is cheap or free, and can be set up to receive all the emails sent to the original personal one, I think this is something well worth doing.

Secondly, the Chatsworth Care logo at the top-left of every webpage should really be a clickable button which takes you back to the homepage, because this is something that helps substantially with navigating around the website, which is why so many websites use their logos as clickable homepage buttons these days.

Presently, the logo is just an image, and clicking on it does nothing, which can make it difficult for people to navigate to the website's homepage from another part of the website, as I found out when I was making my notes for this case study.

Making this logo image into a clickable button which takes people back to the website homepage is another simple change which can help the website function much better.

Changes To The Website's Online Marketing Presence

When it comes to assessing the overall effectiveness of a website's existing online marketing strategy, I usually try to answer the following questions:

-Where does the website rank in organic search for certain lucrative keywords?

-Is the website's on-page SEO (search engine optimisation) good?

-Is the website's off-page SEO good?

-Does the website have enough lengthy content?

-Does the website have a blog?

-Do they show up on the local map pack?

I'll now analyse the Chatsworth Care website and answer each question in turn.

Where does the website rank in organic search for certain lucrative keywords?

The organic search results are the blue links which appear every time you do a Google search, like in the example below where I've searched for 'BBC':

Ranking on the first page of organic search results for certain search queries can be very, very valuable indeed.

If, for example, you are a lawyer based in London, and your website ranks at number 1 in Google's organic search results for the search term 'london lawyer', then you can expect to receive tens, or even hundreds of thousands worth of business every year through just this single search term. And no matter what your line of business is, there are always certain search terms relevant to your business which will make you A LOT of money, if you can rank near the top of page 1 of Google's search results for them.

And ranking on page 1 really is crucial, as 95% of the website traffic from Google searches goes to the websites that are ranked on page 1 of the search results.

So then, what are the important search terms which Chatsworth Care could do with ranking their website on page 1 of the organic search results for?

Well, as they are a care home in Plymouth, I've done some quick analysis using a great tool called Keywords Everywhere to find out how many people are searching for things like 'plymouth care homes' and similar phrases in Google in the UK every month, and the results are below:

So, to find out where Chatsworth Care's website is ranking in the search results for each of these valuable search terms, I'm going to use one of my favourite tools, a Google Chrome extension called Fatrank.

As you can see, the results are disappointing.

The Chatsworth Care website is only ranking in the top 100 search results for two of these keywords, and only on pages 5 and 7 for those; well below the all important page 1.

This is a big problem, because as Keywords Everywhere has told us, at least 600 people in the UK are searching for these particular keywords every single month, but since Chatsworth Care's website ranks so far down the Google search results for them, they're missing out on a huge number of potential customers, month after month.

As well as being a problem, it's also a real shame, because having used KWFinder to assess how difficult it is to rank on page 1 of Google's search results for these valuable keywords, the results show that it is not that difficult at all to do.

Note that the green 'Difficulty' numbers in the right hand column in the KWFinder screenshot below are all under the benchmark score of 30 which indicates that a keyword is easy to rank highly for:

So, the question now is, 'how can the Chatsworth Care website rank higher in Google for these keywords and others?' and to help answer this, I'm going to work through some more of the questions I posed at the start of this section.

How Good Is The Website's On-Page And Off-Page SEO?

Firstly, it's important to define terms. On-page SEO can be defined as 'the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines,' while off-page SEO 'refers to links and other external signals' that are not on the website itself.

To answer the question of whether the Chatsworth Care website has well-optimised on-page SEO that is conducive to it ranking highly in Google's search results, I'm going to use one of my favourite tools, Serpstat.

Serpstat has an awesome on-page SEO audit tool, which I used to assess the Chatsworth Care website, and it gave me these results:

The overall score is 61%, which isn't too bad, but there is much room for improvement.

This is shown by the fact there are 14 high priority errors, which, if fixed, would significantly improve the Chatsworth Care website's on-page SEO and cause it to rank far higher in Google over time.

As for off-page SEO, the most significant factor determining how high a website ranks in Google's search results is the number, and quality of, links back to your website that other high-quality websites are giving you.

According to Serpstat, the Chatsworth Care website currently has 14 other websites linking back to it, from 38 individual webpages.

In truth, these numbers are pretty low.

For example, here are the numbers for another care home I've recently analysed:

As you can see, the figures for this website are much higher.

And, the truth is, you can never have enough backlinks from other high-quality, authoritative websites, because the more of these you have, the higher your website will rank in Google!

Given these factors, I would therefore suggest that the Chatsworth Care website sorely needs some more backlinks to it from other high-quality websites; ideally ones in the same industry, or a closely related one.

Does the website have enough lengthy content?

Studies have shown that webpages which have long word counts tend to rank better than webpages which don't.

This trend can be observed in the following graph:

While it's not always necessary to make every page of your website have 2000+ words of content in order to improve it's SEO, a good rule of thumb is to try to ensure all your webpages have at least 1000 words of unique content each, if you want them to rank highly in Google's search results.

I used this tool to determine how many words the Chatsworth Care website had on several on it's main pages, and none of them had anywhere near 1000.

By adding more content to these pages in order to bring them past this 1000 word guideline, it is highly likely that the website would rank higher in Google's search results for popular and relevant search phrases, thereby bringing more people to the Chatsworth Care website, where they can be converted into customers or sales leads.

Does the website have a blog?

Having a blog on your website is a great idea. By having a regularly updated blog, you're showing Google that your website is active and is regularly being maintained. This helps your website to earn Google's 'trust', which should help it to rank higher, over time.

Adding more entries to your blog will also create more pages on your website, which is useful because having a large, authoritative website is also a strong 'trust' signal to Google, which will help to show Google that yours is a legitimate website that genuinely helps it's visitors, and consistently provides them with value over time.

By winning Google's trust in this way, their algorithm should consider your website as being worthy of attention, with the result that you will often find yourself ranking progressively higher and higher in the Google search results as your quality blog posts help to win more and more of Google's trust.

The Chatsworth Care website does not contain a blog, and it is for these reasons specified that I think they would benefit significantly from starting one.

Do they show up on the local map pack?

The local map pack is, as the name suggests, a map of local businesses that appear at the top of the page when you do a relevant Google search.

For example, when searching for 'glasgow lawyer', this is what you'll see:

So, does Chatsworth Care Home show up when we search for 'care homes plymouth'?

No :(

We have to click on the 'More Places' button below the third result to see it listed, and unfortunately it's then a long way down the list:

Now let's try searching for 'plymouth care homes' to see if Chatsworth Care Home shows up on the map pack for this search term:

No. it doesn't :(

Again, we have to click on the 'More Places' button to find it, where it is at the bottom of page 2:

Let's try one more search term.

This time I'm searching for 'care homes in Plymouth':

Again, Chatsworth Care Home is not on this map pack, and this time it doesn't appear to be listed anywhere even after we click on the 'More Places' button:

These results represent some major missed opportunities, as a lot of people are searching for care homes in Plymouth, but Chatsworth Care Home is ranked too far down (if it is even listed at all) to have much chance of catching their attention, which means that their higher ranked competitors are much more likely to obtain these people's business.

To help put this into context, I'll show the image again of how many people are searching for care homes in Plymouth in the UK every month:

If Chatsworth Care Home was ranked at the top, or near the top, of these map pack lists of Plymouth care homes, then they could expect to get hundreds of extra visitors to their website every month, where they would then have the chance to turn these people into sales leads and customers.

Thankfully, improving the ranking of a business in the map pack list is not that complicated.

Firstly, what we need to do is increase the number of Chatsworth Care Home's citations, which can be defined as 'an online reference to your business’s name, address and phone number.'

Common citation sources include listings in business directories and press releases.

Other factors that help websites to rank higher in these local map pack results include putting a Google map showing your location on every page of your website, and getting some Google reviews.

So, by listing their care home in online business directories (particularly local business directories), by issuing a press release or two which contains the address and phone numbers of their care home, by getting a few Google reviews, and by making a couple of additions to their website, Chatsworth Care can significantly improve their care home's rankings in these Google map packs, which may well prove to be a lucrative endeavour.

Conclusion

Over the course of this review, I have outlined ways in which Chatsworth Care can improve their online presence to get more customers through their website.

Although there are many things I like about their website's design in it's current form, there are a few alterations which I think will help to turn a greater number of their website visitors into sales leads and customers; namely, introducing some 'Contact Us' forms, adding a few testimonials from satisfied customers and showing off their outstanding CQC reports more, along with a couple of other, more minor changes.

There are also a number of methods which could be used to ensure that the Chatsworth Care website ranks higher in the Google search results, and consequently gains an increase in attention, exposure and website traffic.

In particular, gaining more backlinks from other high-quality websites in a relevant industry, improving the website's on-page SEO, adding a blog, raising the word count of the most important pages and increasing Chatsworth Care Home's rankings in the local map packs are all measures which would provide Chatsworth Care with substantial benefits.

As outlined, they are presently missing out on a number of opportunities to get a good deal more highly targeted and very relevant visitors to their website every month; visitors who could easily turn into lucrative clients.

Key Takeaways

The questions I have tried to answer in this review have been;

Is the website's design optimised to convert as many of it's visitors into paying clients as possible?

Is the website's on-page SEO good?

Is it's off-page SEO good?

Does it have enough lengthy content?

Does it have a blog?

Do they show up on the local map pack?

And where are they currently ranking in the organic search results for certain lucrative keywords?

By attempting to thoroughly answer these questions while analysing a website, you should get a strong and detailed insight into the website's current effectiveness at enticing and converting website visitors, while also discovering several things which can be improved upon without too much difficulty, in order to bring significant gains to the website owner in the near future.