Modernizing a trusted brand in medical education

American Medical Seminars has always leaned on its reputation and repeat customers, but that wouldn’t be enough for the new goals AMS had in mind. While the team at AMS worked to refine its offerings, Parkway considered how it could modernize every aspect of the CME provider’s online presence, from its ecommerce website to the digital strategy that includes email campaigns and search engine marketing.

Before writing or designing a single page, we sat down with our client to talk about the CME industry as a whole, what information potential customers often had trouble locating on AMS’s website, and what existing content and functionality were no longer necessary.

With our extensive industry and user research in mind, we began working on refreshed brand elements, a streamlined sitemap and user experience, and how all of these updates would work within the confines of a very complex ecommerce framework.

The design team began with an updated logo, replacing the previous version with a sleek mark that is decidedly contemporary yet easily recognizable. We continued to build on the aesthetics of the logo as we designed a website with bold backgrounds, high-end imagery, easy-to-find details and clear calls to action. This dynamic visual identity is carried through emails, print pieces, advertising assets and more for a striking look that stands out among competitors.

As is often the case with older websites, this one had become pretty big, with unused and duplicated pages confusing crawlers and customers. Streamlining the sitemap and optimizing remaining pages for search and AI engines resulted in a 60% increase in organic search traffic over the previous year, with revenue from that traffic increasing 20% year-over-year. Several relevant, high-volume keywords have already seen improved rankings, as well as increased citations in Google’s AI Overviews. These changes also help Google Ads understand what pages are most important, which is essential as the platform becomes increasingly AI-driven.

Users landing directly on an event listing are 8% more likely to register in the weeks post-launch compared to the weeks leading up to launch. And those same users are two times more likely to convert than during the same period last year. In the same weeks after the new website launched, return on ad spend (ROAS) increased 160% year-over-year, as well as 20% over the previous period. These impressive results reflect not only a deliberate website design, but a year of paid and organic search optimization and the offline work of the AMS team as well.