Merit Medical and DeCort Interactive have teamed up to create dynamic, results driven websites.
HOSTING PROJECT SCOPE
Utah based company, Merit Medical is a leader in innovation for medical devices used in angioplasty and stent placement. Their previous web presence consisted of several independent hosting environments resulting in compounded time management demands for Merit’s employees and reduced overall performance efficiency of their websites. Merit needed a solution that would ease time dedicated to managing their sites and a hosting environment robust enough to support their global product distribution network. DeCort Hosting set out to create a unique solution, tailored to fit their needs.
HOSTING SOLUTION
Merit’s rapidly growing product offering and expanding market penetration required a large amount of server space. So, we defined two main goals for Merit’s hosting environment; redundancy and efficiency.
We designed a web server cluster where the individual nodes/servers spoke to each other in a master-master configuration. The master-master cluster configuration ensured that data is consistently replicated between available web nodes/servers. It also created redundancy by utilizing a common file storage solution to ensure consistency of content delivered to the end user while also simplifying data management requirements.
A load-balancer was positioned in front of the web cluster. The load-balancer acted as the traffic control director by distributing the incoming web requests across the individual nodes/servers. This encouraged efficiency and increased site responsiveness.
To ensure all redundancy, a backup server cluster was placed in a remote data center to provide fail-over capacity for the hosted websites in the event of a catastrophic event at the primary data center.
Rise in Organic Search Volume
Rise in Organic Search Visits vs. Total Visits
Decrease in Bounce Rate Year Over Year
Year Over Year Organic Search Visits
GLOBAL SEO PROJECT SCOPE
In addition to a new hosting solution, DeCort provided Merit Medical a new search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. The project scope included maintaining and/or improving Merit’s current SEO presence, moving Merit.com to WordPress, modernizing the look and feel Merit’s legacy site and handling the integration of Merit’s newly acquired product line, Hero GRAFT.
Merit.com (MDC) is a highly authoritative domain built on an intricate web of internal, external and inbound links. Merit subsidiary sites such as Merit OEM and Merit Sensor rely on MDC’s PageRank for their online authority. Any mistakes or oversights during MDC re-platforming (migrating to WordPress) could cripple their entire umbrella of product lines.
SEO SOLUTION
Our team inventoried all of Merit.com’s (MDC) page elements and pages critical to SEO; approximately 3,600 URLs. From there we laid out a strategy on how to maintain parity. Our team also plunged into mapping and redirecting legacy MDC pages and URL errors to pages on New Merit.com. In addition to this, our strategy also established key performance indicators (KPI) specific to SEO. This included analyzing pre- vs. post-behavior conditions and then providing recommended solutions. Since maintaining Merit’s search position was high priority, we continuously follow up on the implemented solutions to ensure their continued applicability. In the end, the numbers speak for themselves.
See our post on bounce rate to for more SEO information.