Brief
From pioneering bladeless cataract surgery in Houston to ranking within the nation’s top 5 for LenSx laser, Eye Center of Texas offers a team of highly trained specialists to the Greater Houston area through six locations. Baal & Spots was asked to reimagine their digital experience to modernize their branding and to engineer a platform that would optimize traffic through organic search engine results. We worked alongside Eye Center of Texas from conceptual creative vision and data-driven insights to write, design, and develop a rebranded website — while also providing support for SEO and growth strategy enhancements.
The challenge
Eye Center of Texas had a website that was over five years old with a dated look and feel. The new experience needed to seem revived, not disjointed, and have a seamless, responsive flow — all with more than 300 pages of existing content already in the mix. These nuances required a strong strategy that details sure-fire methods for such a big overhaul from the old to a new website.
Since this new experience needed to maintain search ranking, we had to think through affordances that represented the brand yet also served for better usability. ECOT’s outdated sitemap needed to also be reorganized to help with this usability direction, and the content needed stronger consistency between older and current copy to deliver greater value for growth.
The results
Our relationship with Eye Center of Texas has spanned six years and continues through ongoing analytics and growth initiatives. Our work has succeeded in securing the company’s placement as a top eye care center within the Greater Houston area, with their website seeing a 92% average increase in organic keyword rankings year over year — nearly 34,000 keywords as of January 2024.
Between launching in November of 2019 and January of 2024, the site has seen a 258% increase in overall keyword rankings, a 379% increase in keywords ranking on the first two pages of search engine results pages, a 456% increase in top ten keywords, and a 327% increase in keywords ranking in the top three positions. This growth has resulted in a significant increase in website traffic, with organic search accounting for over 92% of all website visits.
Eye Center of Texas’ aggressive SEO strategy and continued optimizations have also been attributed to attaining 173 leads per month from organic form fills and SEO-driven lead generation.
How we did it
1. A clear and consistent brand message
We wanted to create a branding system that was a manifestation of their previous identity as it was important for this transition to feel like an evolution. Additionally, we kept in mind that this new design system would need to work within a variety of scenarios and alongside lengthy content.
Our design team decided to recreate their palette of deep red and navy blue using a more vibrant red paired with the same blue. For added flexibility, we integrated secondary colors that are less saturated and fall within the greenish-blue family. As for typefaces, we wanted to choose something that spoke to their prestigious level of care and to the bold, state-of-the-art technological abilities of their service. Ultimately, we went with Playfair Display for titles and IBM Plex Sans for the body.
2. Overhauling the UX/UI for enhanced user engagement
We created an infrastructure that elevated the importance of content strategy to optimize for search results. DevOps and the technology team worked to prevent security issues and bugs during and after the development phase. We worked diligently to establish a site system of components that were reusable for new pages, profiles, services, and ongoing updates. The user flow was also improved by decisions such as reducing the number of forms a potential patient needed to fill out and intuitive navigation between topics.
