Where do they come from? Where do they go?
As we look to increase our digital take-up, our understanding of Findability of the service becomes ever more important. Are users able to find our service through search engines? What are the key touch points, content items and terms that are driving users to ‘Give feedback on care’ (GFC)?
Using Google Search Console and Google Analytics, we can build the picture of how users are currently getting to the GFC service from online search and gain insight into which search queries are most successful.
A search query is any term or phrase a user enters into a search engine to generate a search result.
Findability is the ease in which users can locate information contained on websites.
Directly into the service
Based on data from 1st March — 31st July 2020, we’re able to see which queries bring users directly to the start page of the ‘Give feedback on care’ journey.
An impression is counted each time a search query results in your website being displayed in the results listing. This is regardless of whether the user clicks through to your site or not.
Unsurprisingly, the top queries that display GFC all evolve around ‘CQC’ or ‘Care Quality Commission’, however, the large amounts of impressions are met with little to no interactions. Likely due to the query not having any context of the user wishing to provide feedback. This also highlights that these users are already aware of the CQC — not a lot of useful information.
Okay, so let’s look at clicks rather than impressions. A click is the count for the number of times a user selects your website from the search results listing.
URL CTR — this is the click through rate is the ratio of users clicking through to the total number of impressions.
The table highlights that the top terms are specific to GFC i.e. ‘cqc feedback’ or ‘share your experience’. These search terms would indicate that the user is aware of the service and know it by title. This is further supported by the click through rate (CTR) for the top 4 click queries, ranging between 80–96%. This emphasises good findability directly into the service.
However, this is only covering users going directly to the service. The vast majority of users will enter through the CQC main website first.
Where are our users landing?
Segmenting the data to only look at users who visit the ‘Give feedback on care’ start page, we can look at the most popular entry points over the last 5 months for organic search
Unsurprisingly, the home page and start page of ‘Give feedback on care’ feature in the top 10. ‘Report a concern if you a member of the public’ is the 2nd most popular landing page driving users to GFC (7.5% of all sessions), with the start page in 3rd (6.6% of all sessions). The top 10 landing pages make up just over half of all sessions — demonstrating the value of all content items adding up.
With subdomain tracking now in play we can look into which pages are more successful in terms of leading to a submission.
‘Report a concern if you are a member of the public’ has the highest traction of 11.51% of organic sessions leading to a submission. This shows that pages with more direct content for users to GFC lead to a higher percentage of submissions.
Top search queries
Now we’ve established the main routes into the CQC site that then lead onto GFC, we can work backwards to look at the main queries that users are searching by.
Removing queries for ‘CQC’, and segmenting to only look at queries leading into our top landing pages, I’ve used search console to compile a list of the top 15 search queries by URL clicks.
The top search queries nearly all feature words regarding ‘care homes’. Once again, this may seem unsurprising considering how CQC is perceived by the public. The topic regarding care homes or home care feels more like a choice that users would seek online, rather than hospitals.
Additionally, our average position for these terms ranges between 1st and 6th place — demonstrating that even for specific terms i.e. ‘report care home’ the CQC’s online presence is strong.
Note: average position is a metric regarding the order of a displayed URL in search results. Ideally, you want to have an average position as close to 1 as possible, as this is first position on a list.
So what about our other key services? We have dedicated pages for users who want to complain about different types of services, but these aren’t providing as much traction into the site.
Looking back on the types of submissions we receive, the vast majority is regarding Adult Social Care at 61%, this includes care homes, which is reflected in our search query data.
Where do we go from here?
- We need to review the content of the top landing pages and discuss as a wider team if there any pages that should be drawing in users that currently aren’t.
- What key terms would we expect to rank highly for that are outside of terms regarding ‘care homes’?
- What content should we generate on the site that will be useful to build on our SEO?
Further updates
- Digital take-up continues to improve on a quarter by quarter basis. Latest figures show that GFC is upto 40.11% of all volumes, and is now the largest concern channel. This is mainly aided by the ‘Because we all care’ campaign activity.
- Form starts are slowing down in such high numbers, whilst the number of submissions is only marginally decreasing resulting in an improvement in our conversion rate to pre-campaign levels. This week is currently seeing the rate back at 39.38%. Let’s hope it continues to rise above 40%.
- Conditional text on the ‘can we contact you’ page continues to show an improvement in the number of users switching their initial response from ‘no’ to ‘yes’ on providing their contact details. Moving from 1% up to 3% on all sessions
- We’re running an A/B test on the ‘check your answers’ page, focusing on the messaging used to prompt users at the final checkpoint in the journey. Our main metric for success will be the exit rate for this page, which currently sits around 5%.
