Summary

Ontex is a global healthcare corporation. We have looked after its Australian digital presence since 2015, and since 2020 we have run the whole program: search, paid media, the websites and the web application behind them.

Eleven years. Three WordPress builds, one merge back into a single domain, a legacy PHP application brought under control and then rebuilt in Laravel, and an SEO program that took organic traffic from a standing start in 2021 to eighteen times that level by 2025.

We work this account the way we would work it if we owned the business. That means putting budget where it returns the most, saying so when something stops working, and building assets that keep paying after the campaign that created them has finished.

What We Do

Search Engine Optimisation

Owning The Word Customers Actually Use

In Australian healthcare, nurses do not ask for an “absorbent bed protection sheet”. They ask for a Kylie. The word is the product category, and it belongs to a brand Ontex owns.

Kylie brand logo

We built the site around that. Today Ontex Healthcare holds position one in Australia for kylie sheets, kylie blanket, bed kylies, kylie incontinence, kylie pads and the rest of that family, plus the product terms that sit alongside them: id pants, id slip maxi, id comfy junior, lille suprem fit maxi. It also ranks second and third for non branded searches like “free pad samples australia”, which is where new customers come from.

That is the difference between ranking for what a marketing department would write and ranking for what a nurse would type.

On Site Optimisation

We rewrote and restructured content with a clear rule: match the page type to the intent. If somebody is looking to buy, a blog post should not be the thing that ranks. The product page or the category page should. Working that through a WooCommerce catalogue of this size is slow, unglamorous work, and it is the work that moved the numbers.

Earning Links That Compound

We publish genuinely useful reference material on continence care. Most of that traffic never buys anything. That is the point. Other websites cite it, and those citations are what lets the commercial pages rank.

SEO Results

Estimated organic visits, by calendar year:

  • 2021: 2,580. The SEO program started in May of that year at 153 visits a month
  • 2022: 7,531, up 2.9x
  • 2023: 14,838, up 2.0x
  • 2024: 32,172, up 2.2x
  • 2025: 45,367, up 1.4x, peaking at 5,250 visits in September

That is an eighteen fold increase from 2021 to 2025. Measured in the client’s own Google Analytics to mid 2024, all traffic visitors were up 6.5x and sessions up 6.0x over the same program.

Chart: Ontex Healthcare estimated organic visits per month, 2021 to 2026

Estimated organic visits, month by month, from a standing start in 2021. The SEO program began in May 2021 at 153 visits a month and peaked at 5,250 in September 2025, a 34 fold climb. The pink section is 2026, when Google’s AI answers began absorbing the informational searches that sat at the top of this funnel. Ahrefs estimates, all countries.

2026: What AI Search Actually Did To This Site

Then the shape changed. Google began answering questions directly on its own results page, and the clicks that used to come with those answers stopped arriving. Estimated visits for the first nine months of 2026 were 17% below the same nine months of 2025. We are not going to dress that up, and the chart above shows it.

What matters is which searches went. Comparing September 2026 with September 2025 in Australia:

Chart: Ontex Healthcare Australian keyword rankings, all keywords down 74% while top three positions rose 15%

The searches that vanished are the informational ones, the questions Google now answers on its own results page. They were never going to buy anything on that visit. The commercial positions, the ones somebody lands on when they are ready to order or request a sample, went up over the same year. Australian rankings, Ahrefs.

The searches that disappeared are the informational ones, the “why does my child wet the bed” questions that Google now answers itself. Those visits were never going to buy anything that day. The searches that decide revenue, the ones somebody runs when they are ready to order or request a sample, are in the top three positions, and Ontex holds more of those now than it did a year ago. The estimated value of each remaining visit rose by roughly 30%.

That is the difference between a site that lost traffic and a site that lost the traffic it could afford to lose. Every content driven business is going through this right now. Most of them cannot tell you which half they lost. We can, because we track the account at the keyword level rather than reporting a single sessions number and hoping.
Chart: Ontex Healthcare referring domains and domain rating, 2021 to 2026

Referring domains in pink, domain rating in navy. Twenty two sites linked to Ontex Healthcare Australia in January 2021. In September 2026 it was 754, and domain rating had gone from 13 to 50. Clicks reset in 2026. The authority behind them did not. Ahrefs, monthly.

The underlying asset kept getting stronger through all of it. Twenty two websites linked to ontexhealthcare.com.au in January 2021. In September 2026 it was 754, and Ahrefs domain rating had gone from 13 to 50. Clicks reset. Authority did not.

Google Ads

Two Audiences In One Account

Ontex sells to two very different people. A consumer buying for themselves or a parent, and a healthcare professional specifying product for a ward or a facility. They search differently, they cost differently to reach and they convert differently. The account is structured so those two audiences are funded and judged separately, rather than averaged into one number that hides both.

Catching Demand Someone Else Paid To Create

The strongest performing part of the account intercepts people searching for a rival brand’s free sample offer and puts Ontex’s own sample offer in front of them. Somebody else spent the money creating that demand. We make sure Ontex is in the room when it shows up.

Google Ads Results

Over the twelve months to August 2026 the account delivered more than 8,300 sample requests and enquiries, from 22,675 clicks against 234,960 impressions. That is a click through rate of 9.7%, which is roughly three times what a search campaign is normally expected to do.

The main consumer campaigns are running at around 10% search impression share. The account is limited by budget, not by demand.

The Websites

2023 Merged The WordPress Websites

We reversed direction on the three separate websites and merged them back into the primary domain, ontexhealthcare.com.au. Three domains meant three lots of authority, three technical stacks and three content programs competing with each other. One domain compounds. Recommending that we undo a build we had delivered three years earlier was the right call for the business, so we made it.

2020 Built 3x WordPress Websites

We used the global corporate brand guidelines to create three new WordPress websites for Ontex in Australia.

The brand guidelines were very detailed and had many specific requirements, but there was a great deal of flexibility within them. We helped the stakeholders of the new Australian website understand their options and gave recommendations, so they could make the most of those guidelines for the Australian operation.

2015 Built Custom WP Website

In 2015 the Brisbane based marketing team asked us to bring multiple brands with partially broken websites into a single new website on ontexhealthcare.com.au.

We devised a sub brand set up for the WordPress theme, so each major section of the site could continue to be represented as its own brand. The current website still carries an evolution of that original “Kylie” section at www.ontexhealthcare.com.au/kylie, more than a decade later.

Laravel Web Development

Legacy PHP System Support

One of our senior PHP developers supported a custom web application for more than three years. It had been built by another Brisbane agency years before. The first challenge was getting control of it and a comprehensive understanding of the codebase. Central to that was bringing in proper source control, a release process, and wrangling the issues into a sensible queue of things to do and things not to do.

The client’s IT specialists had full access to our git repository and project management system, so they could work with us collaboratively and with full transparency.

The legacy system was single tenant and had been copied multiple times to handle multiple partner organisations. The codebase was mostly the same across those copies, but not quite, which is the worst of both worlds.

Replacement System Using Laravel

Knowing the existing system in that much depth meant we could identify the real problems and make recommendations. The IT team at Ontex recognised the need to replace the legacy system with something less unique and less difficult to work on.

The decision was made to build a replacement that could be multi tenant, handling all the partners’ instances and their respective domain names and designs out of one codebase. That made it possible to add future partners, and made maintenance, hosting and management significantly easier and cheaper.

Laravel was chosen because:

  1. It is a well known, flexible PHP framework used widely by web developers.
  2. Redundancy. If a developer, project manager or agency needed to be replaced, another Laravel skilled team could take over and know how to get to grips with the project.
  3. Flexibility. An MVC framework keeps functionality separated from design, so different specialist developers and designers could implement their parts to replicate the original system and then improve on it.
  4. Upgrade path and support. The application was originally built in Laravel 7, and has been moved forward as new versions have been released.

Why It Matters Who Does This Work

Eleven years on one account is not an accident, and it is not loyalty. It is what happens when the people who sell the work are the people who do the work.

We have recommended undoing our own build. We have told this client when a channel stopped earning its budget. When Google changed the rules in 2026 and the traffic curve turned over, we did not quietly reframe the reporting. We showed what fell, showed what held, and got on with protecting the part that pays.

That is what we mean by doing what matters. If you want an agency that will treat your website the way it would treat its own, talk to us.