Let’s Talk Growth

In this live case study, I am going to review American Addiction Centers (AAC) website (AmericanAddictionCenters.org), reverse engineer its organic growth strategies and show you exactly how and what they did to stand out from its counterparts in this highly competitive $35B addiction treatment industry.

DISCLAIMER

I do not have access to any of the internal information at American Addiction Centers. I have not been in contact with any of the AAC’s staff or have had access to analytics from inside the company. Almost all the data in this post has been sourced from third party sites and sources are included wherever necessary. I used well known 3rd party SEO tools like SEMrush, SimilarWeb, Ahrefs, Majestic and good’ol Google search to find company financial data. Recommendations and analysis are based on my years of knowledge and experience in doing search engine optimization, optimizing similar treatment center websites and how I would optimize their website.

So let’s get started with a step-by-step and channel-by-channel analysis.

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Who Is American Addiction Centers?

American Addiction Centers (AAC Holdings, Inc.) is one of the fastest growing addiction treatment brands in the United States.

You can’t seem to Google something about ‘addiction treatment’ without seeing AAC’s website links or subsidiary brands such as rehabs.com, or recovery.org (and many more…) properties.

In the year 2011 AAC’s revenue stood at a few hundred thousand dollars. They went from $133 million in 2014 to $212 million in 2015, a +59% YoY revenue growth. That did not stop there either. With onwards of +31% YoY growth in 2016 and +13% YoY growth in 2017, the addiction recovery juggernaut closed the yearly figures at $318 million in 2017.

In 2017, AAC has more than 1,139 residential beds, 636 detoxification beds spread across 12 facilities with the total average daily census of 972 patients. With the recent acquisition of AdCare for $85 million in 2018, and planning several expansion projects, the addiction treatment juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down on acquiring more market share and marketing domination.

With this many facilities and beds to fill, no one has been more aggressive with their marketing than American Addiction Centers.

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Image Source ( AAC’s 2017 Earnings Annual Report)

User Experience (UX) – AAC’s Homepage

Let’s begin with the homepage. What pops out is the clean layout together with the large hero image.

Next— headers and subheaders penned in large font draw the eye.

A first-time visitor quickly gets the low-down on the site.

The simple layout though hides a UX disaster in plain sight.

Let’s go deeper with a heatmap analysis to understand what’s wrong:

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From the above full-page heatmap, areas that get the highest visitor attention are clearly discernible. As are problem areas.

To put it mildly, the homepage manages to violate every basic page optimization rule. The saving grace is that a few tweaks later the number of leads would go through the roof, adding multiple extra millions to the bottom line.

null 2 American Addiction Centers   A Rare Peek Inside AAC’s 1.2M Monthly Organic Growth Strategy [LIVE CASE STUDY]As evident, header and subheader invite most mouse movements.

The real call to action beneath— “More about the disease”/”About Our Promise” remains inert.

There are two calls to action each rotated alternatingly with a sliding header.

First: “Disease of Addiction

American Addiction Centers recognizes that addiction — whether involving alcohol, prescription drugs, illicit drugs — is a disease.”

This is followed by CTA that links to more information about addiction.

Second:

“Our 90-Day Promise

If you successfully complete our 90-day inpatient treatment program, we guarantee you’ll stay clean and sober, or you can return for a complimentary 30-days of treatment.”

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Apparently, the most important CTA by placement, flanked by the hero image is also the one that somehow manages to escape any interaction.

Why?

The sliding header is the likely culprit. It’s the last thing you want on a landing page.

Here’s why.

Eye tracking studies show if visitors perceive something like an advertisement, they ignore it. Popularly called ad-blindness.

Elements such as sliding headers that share similar features to adverts cause the same inadvertent reaction.

By adding the CTA inside a sliding header they’ve effectively sealed it against clicks.

Additionally, two CTAs split traffic. Case in point— half the clicks go to an information page. The other half to a product page. The product page receives half the traffic, resulting in half the potential conversions.

The CTA design doesn’t employ contrast. It doesn’t stand out. If anything, the font’s tiny, the color choice dull and the statement itself inconsequential. No wonder no one clicks.

I wish that were the end of it. Surrounding the navigation bar we have 3 more—notably— Alumni, the chat option and the logo.

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Of this, “chat” gets the most love. It’s commendable they highlighted 24*7 support availability.

We haven’t scrolled below the fold yet and have 5 prominent CTAs staring down at us.

Below the fold, we have a few more.

These CTAs link to other pages on the site providing more information.

Even these are deprived of any attention making them redundant.

Example: Thought Leadership & treatment innovation

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Information is splattered all over the place so much so it feels overwhelming.

So far we saw endless CTAs, information overload and no use of contrast in CTA design.

The problem?

No visitor to the site can adjudge the most important CTA.

The fix?

If I were to optimize the homepage, I would spend some time understanding the site’s core audience. I would pore over Google Analytics data. I would append feedback forms and survey replies received. I might even set up a feedback collection popup like Qualaroo on every page to glean as much data as possible and understand core audience motivations.

I would use A/B tests to earmark pointless CTAs—the ones that don’t generate any conversions.

All in all, based on my findings I would replace multiple calls to action with a single, focussed CTA.

Why?

With any landing page, there’s an ideal conversion path. A/B tests and heatmaps get us closer to it. On the flipside, too many CTAs construct a mammoth roadblock.

Once they’re gone, the path reveals itself.

What then remains is to test various iterations of this single CTA to arrive at the most optimized version.

Two, prevent information overload

In the same way that too many CTAs can feel overwhelming, presenting too much information too can inhibit conversions.

Three, add contrast- make ’em stand out

The call to action on the left side asking to initiate a call by giving the phone number is in a dull brown color.

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I would split-test with brighter colors.

Four, remove useless elements:

Was a logo at the bottom necessary?

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The heatmap shows plenty of mouse movements for a logo at the bottom that links to nothing.

Finally, I’d do something about the whitespace. There’s no effective use of whitespace.

Instead, lots of links and information is crammed into the available space.

Use of photos

Being a drug help center means ample opportunities to collect plenty of candid shots.

Instead, they resort to stock imagery.

Marketing Experiments tested a stock photo against a real photo of their client. Signups improved by 35%.

Never use stock photos. Every single one of them has been downloaded a few thousand times.

If you must— edit them— adding elements that make them uniquely yours.

Considering how easy it is to capture quality photos even with rudimentary phones, using them on a site is a no-brainer.

What are they doing right?

There’s one image that doesn’t seem to be picked up from a stock photo repository. It radiates genuine warmth.null 9 American Addiction Centers   A Rare Peek Inside AAC’s 1.2M Monthly Organic Growth Strategy [LIVE CASE STUDY]

Testimonial

Research shows customer testimonials are highly effective, influencing up to 89% of purchases.

Towards the left, there’s a prominently featured testimonial from the founder.

But why?

I’d only have roses and peaches to say about my business and so would AAC’s founder about his.

Other than eating away space that could have been given to a client testimonial what does this achieve?

And is the location right? Does it get any attention?

Heatmaps tell a different story.

Testimonials help humanize your product helping forge a real connection. Testimonials work because they come across as unbiased.

Growing up in a digital world, net-savvy customers smell insincerity a mile off.

No blog

There are articles on drug addiction, treatment options, alcoholism, and other relevant topics. Much of it is just all over the place. There’s no hierarchy, no categories posts are clubbed under.

The categories that are available don’t list all articles on the topic. The current structure thwarts all efforts at finding content on a single topic with the twisted navigation structure.

Why should there be a blog?

A blog is great for organic traffic.

You get all kinds of long tail traffic and some of them convert to leads. It’s a consistent lead-generation channel.

In addition, there are some attempts in place to convert this raw traffic to leads.

The lead magnet isn’t the best I’ve seen.

As the perceived value of an offer increases, so does the number of people who sign up.

I didn’t get any pop-ups asking me to subscribe to the email list. Popular sentiment would have you believe pop-ups as annoying, doubting their efficacy. They dramatically improve signups. Period.

The articles come across as ill-conceived and poorly executed. None of the blog posts have any images limiting their shareability.

With keyword research and a content strategy in place, more articles would easily secure top spots on Google.

Here’s a list of articles that rank well—on the first page. Some of the keywords are high-volume, highly competitive terms that drive hundreds of thousands of visitors and conversions.

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As evident from the above image, informational content generates the bulk of new links.

The article on the topic “does kratom get you high” brings 27000 organic visitors to the site.

The post— “how long cocaine stays in the system” brings 23000 monthly visitors.

The third most popular post is on the topic— “how long alcohol” stays in the system and so on.

There are no internal links from any of the content to other articles.

Additionally, I can’t find all posts on a certain category or tag if I click through to it.

SEO

In this section, we’ll analyze the technical on-page SEO aspects and off-page factors like backlinks.

Robots structure

Here’s what the robots.txt file looks like on the root domain. The file determines which pages search engine bots are allowed access on.

User-agent: *

Crawl-delay: 1

Disallow: /wp-admin/

For a site with so many pages, the robots file is quite plain.

Robots.txt is used to control which parts of the site a search engine can access.

Second, the file blocks access to login pages and such that you don’t want to be shown publicly, say— wp-admin.

A regular feature is amiss—the sitemap.

The job of a crawler is made easy with a sitemap. Indexation is quicker and thorough. Disallowing bots from accessing parts of your site is powerful. The particular content will cease to exist for the bot.

When you No Index a page or post or parts of the site those parts can be accessed by search engine bots but will not be added to the search engine’s searchable index.

By blocking access to content that doesn’t need to be indexed like categories, tags, image paths and others you save crawl budget.

This way you get to distribute your crawl budget to pages that need to be crawled often.

Crawl budget is the number of pages Google will crawl on your site daily. It’s a relatively fixed number determined by site size, site health, and errors like 404 and the number of links to your site.

According to Gary Illyes from Google,

“Prioritizing what to crawl, when, and how much resource the server hosting the site can allocate to crawling is more important for bigger sites, or those that auto-generate pages based on URL parameters”

The page load speed

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Page load speed is a ranking factor. The quicker your site loads the better its odds of ranking higher.

I used Pingdom to calculate the site’s loading speed—1.61 seconds. Page size is 1.9 MB. Each additional second in load time lowers conversions.

What determines how quickly a site would load?

Several things but the biggest one is— number of requests.

Web pages are complex. New technologies are making it easier than ever to include different elements that make sites better looking and easy to use as well.

Tons of HTTP requests fire up. Javascript, CSS and lots of things load to make your site pretty.

The payoff? Increased load times.

Here’s how to improve load times:

CSS minification can help

.entry-content p {

font-size: 14px !important;

}

.entry-content ul li {

font-size: 14px !important;

}

.product_item p a {

color: #000;

padding: 10px 0px 0px 0;

margin-bottom: 5px;

border-bottom: none;

}

This is what it looks like after CSS minification

.entry-content p,.entry-content ul li{font-size:14px!important}.product_item p a{color:#000;padding:10px 0 0;margin-bottom:5px;border-bottom:none}

With all the whitespace gone, the file’s smaller mandating lower storage.

For a human its harder to read as there are no line breaks and the code is devoid of white space thus making it cleaner and optimized.

CSS, JSS and HTML minification is easy, courtesy to an ample number of free tools that do the heavy lifting for you.

Csscompressor.net is one such tool that automatically minifies CSS code. Depending on the minification level selected it informs you of the number of bytes saved.

The tools identify portions of the code essential for flawless code execution. Everything else gets snipped.

The resultant file is lighter mandating lower storage requirements.

What does it remove?

  1. Whitespace characters
  2. New line characters
  3. Block delimiters
  4. Comments

Most of the aforementioned items improve code readability and aren’t required for proper code execution.

It’s easy to recognize minified files. They all follow the extension .min

For example, header.min.css

Use image sprites

Images sprites pack all images on your site into one giant .png file. Think of it as winzip for images. With all images available at a single destination, the number of HTTP requests goes down. This improves page load times.

It’s a splendid choice for image-heavy sites.

Remove redundant CSS code

Unused CSS is a great tool to find and eliminate redundant CSS code.

Load CSS first

Putting CSS betweenandis helpful. What it does is loads CSS before loading the rest of the page. On the flipside, placing javascript at the bottom is better for improved page load times owing to its bigger size.

Off-page SEO factors

Backlinks

ACC keeps acquiring backlinks at a phenomenal pace.

The ebbs and flows can be traced with Ahrefs.

Backlinks by far remain the most important ranking signal. The more quality links a page has, the better its odds of ranking well.

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The site has 294,000 backlinks from 5250 unique domains.

Of these 4227 domains send do follow links. The no follow links comprise mostly of Wikipedia links that often send massive referral traffic.

The site ranks for 279,000 keywords, generating 804000 visits per month.

There are a few hundred terms that it ranks number 1 for.

The bulk of traffic— over 91% is organic. Of this, articles on the site haul in the lion’s share of visitors. As did the number of referring pages went up, so did traffic.

Even though content optimization efforts are less than ideal, traffic’s high— courtesy of the link profile.

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As you can see from the above graph link growth was minimal from Jan 2014 to 2016. After 2016 it has been a steady forward climb.

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As they began dominating organic rankings paid ads that drove nearly 6000 visitors up until 2015 tapered off.

Reach and growth are completely organic. Ahrefs didn’t find any paid keywords on AdWords.

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The keyword American Addiction centers is a brand name with 5900 monthly searches in the US alone.

SEO is more than links. Content quality, length, number of social shares and overall authority all chip in to determine rankings.

In fact, they could soften the pedal on link acquisition and get rich dividends with content optimization.

I would like to see the kind of results that real optimization work would bring in.

Bettering content is of prime importance.

Especially so since AAC was apparently penalized recently as evidenced in the sharp decline in traffic.

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A sharp decline in traffic generally corresponds to periods when search engines tweaked their algorithms with the tweak resulting in penalties.

At its zenith, the site ranked for over 103,0000 keywords. After Google’s August E.A.T. update the number of organic keywords dipped to 756000.

Why?

Thin author bios could be suspect.

Two, content lacks real authority. It’s sourced from writers with no background in medicine. Here’s one example:null 28 American Addiction Centers   A Rare Peek Inside AAC’s 1.2M Monthly Organic Growth Strategy [LIVE CASE STUDY]

The bios are unflattering at best and woefully inept at worst. They’re deprived of basics. Missing author bios, absent author photos coupled with laughable credentials. The bios are in stark contrast to the homepage which was a species of information overload.

A medical expert should rewrite or vet the content and include their author bio supplemented with credentials on the page itself.

EAT rater guidelines state “Understanding who is responsible for a website is a critical part of assessing E-A-T,”

EAT concerns itself with YMYL content—Your Money or Your Life. Health and Medical content too falls within its scope. When content is written authors should be experts on the subject matter.

Here’s an example of a low-quality page pointed out through the guidelines.

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Image Source

There’s no evidence of the author’s medical expertise.

YMYL pages should be written by experts in their field.

Otherwise, you get a low page score.

There’s no evidence of experts having written the content on this page.

We must realize that for better or worse, SEO has changed fundamentally.

Social media marketing

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SimilarWeb reports 6 million monthly visitors. A tiny percentage is direct traffic meaning people searching for the brand name or entering the URL directly into the address bar.

Social generates .60% of the traffic. There are no paid search ads but display ads are being used accounting for a teeny tiny.06% of the traffic.

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Of they tiny traffic that social media does generate the lion’s share is from Reddit followed by Facebook and YouTube.

Clearly, some efforts are devoted to social media marketing. For instance, the Facebook page:

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  • The about us page succinctly describes the service and is keyword rich. This is important because owing to Facebook’s domain authority, a keyword rich page stands to rank for important terms. Not to mention the links it has from the site itself.
  • The following is large with an active following.

The brand’s Facebook page has 21000 likes, comparatively lower for a business of this repute.

Repute.

They should be working harder to get more followers on the platform.

Most of the traffic that comes from Reddit is due to people asking questions such as these:

These questions are often answered by a third party mentioning AAC.

“I spoke with Jay from rehabs.com which is an American Addiction Centers affiliate. I felt very comfortable talking with him, I felt like he had true compassion for our situation, he shared personal anecdotes about his family’s struggle with addiction, etc. After some time and 4 or 5 phone calls to find out more info (her insurance, her medical history), he called to say he’d found a bed.”

Concluding thoughts

AAC is in it for the long run. The tremendous focus on acquiring quality links coupled with spirited attempts at content marketing are paying rich dividends.

Increasing their spend on content marketing will help AAC shrug off traffic loss due to penalties.

The growth is inspiring.

A real blog coupled with Conversion Rate Optimization will result in links, traffic, and 10x conversions.

There are no paid media efforts supporting any of their marketing efforts. For a business their size it’s the digital equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot. Competitors could easily bid on the branded terms and siphon off traffic.

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