Let Philanthropy Thrive Around the Clock

Your community never sleeps, nor should your website. When you choose a robust digital platform like VitalSite, you can continue to raise funds, reach donors, and generate generosity while you focus your efforts elsewhere.

Savvy teams support their foundation’s initiatives with the right CMS because they can:

• Build a user-friendly gift shop with eCommerce integration
• Funnel donations 24/7 using secure, online forms
• Use sophisticated taxonomy to display patient and donor stories in relevant areas throughout the website
• Promote fundraising events that encourage the community to get involved

Lead the way with eCommerce

In most nonprofit hospitals, you’re likely to find a gift shop. That’s because these high-volume operations bring in significant annual gross sales. Especially since this thriving retail business is run by volunteers, reducing the overhead cost of operations. Not only do on-site gift shops attract patients and visitors, but employees also bring a steady flow of business, especially if you offer payroll deduction. Hospital employees value having a convenient place to shop or even to grab a snack while on break.

Get your gift shop online so that you can market your merchandise beyond the hospital foot traffic and invest the revenue back into your organization. Many industry leaders like Holzer Health System, turn to Geonetric to build an online gift shop to broaden their reach.

The Holzer Medical Center – Gallipolis location, a community-oriented hospital in Ohio with 266 beds, boosts sales by offering convenient, same-day delivery to on-site patients and staff.

With a vivid velocity in online retail, trends show that shoppers aren’t slowing down their spending. Tap into the market share by offering your products online.

Manage your inventory and sales with strategic categories such as:

• Branded apparel for employees and volunteers
• Floral arrangements like a seasonal bouquet in different sizes to fit every budget
• Gift baskets for every occasion
• Items without a shelf life such as stuffed animals, stationery, balloons and blankets
• Home medical equipment without insurance coverage like brand name breastfeeding supplies, bathtub seats, and incontinence pads
• Seasonal items to keep shoppers coming back for more

Protect donors with secure, online forms

We understand that community contributions are vital to support your health system’s overall growth and development. Our digital experts can help your foundation team optimize its online efforts to make essential projects, programs and services possible.

Make it easy for your web users to donate online with a secure online form build in Formulate. This form builder was developed explicitly for healthcare websites and follows the AAA standards for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and can be used stand-alone or as part of VitalSite.

Forms that connect with your users help drive donations and engagement. Ozarks Healthcare’s form captures the crucial information needed for online donations and nothing more. This approach keeps users focused on the task at hand.

Your online donation form should offer a variety of giving options like:

• Ability to give a gift anonymously
• Dedicating a donation in honor of or memory of someone
• Designation for donation
• Estate giving

By understanding donor trends and the needs of your organizations, a platform like Formulate will help you access more donors online throughout your community.

Evoke emotion and build brand awareness with taxonomy

Keep your site visitors engaged with strategic taxonomy that uses cross-promotion throughout the site to show related foundation news, events and patient and donor stories.

Ridgeview has three Minnesota hospitals that serve the southwest metro region of the Twin Cities. Ridgeview’s award-winning medical website is built on VitalSite to allow for a high-quality digital experience that’s consumer-focused and user-friendly for all audiences across the Ridgeview system.

“We know that getting support from donors is more important now than ever before. That’s why we’re thankful to better engage our users with an improved design, navigation, and functionality,” Kelly Mulleady, Director, Ridgeview Foundation.

That’s why Ridgeview expands the reach of its foundation’s content with intuitive navigation and custom design, then keeps potential donors’ interest with content that evokes emotion.

Highlight what sets your foundation apart from others with:

• Foundation news hub
• E-Newsletter
• Patient stories and videos
• Donor stories and videos

Embrace events now and post-pandemic

Bringing your community of donors together during events helps strengthen relationships and support. Events help you raise awareness about your cause, provide donor recognition, build your donor base and pave the way for future events.

Major health systems’ foundations know the need for funds never stops. That’s why they choose VitalSite’s calendar module as the tool to organize and promote upcoming events. This calendar tool helps healthcare share their cause with their community and beyond to work towards one specific fundraising goal.

PIH Health in Whittier, California, takes advantage of VitalSite’s calendar module ability for users to search for a specific category that pique’s their interest. By integrating fundraising events into your calendar search your homepage’s prominent upcoming event scroll works as free advertising to your target audiences. Not only does PIH Health increase the reach of their events with calendar module, they capture emotion with slideshows and videos of past events.

You can continue to grow funds for programs, patients and your organization with in-person and virtual events such as:

• Cash raffles
• Golf tournaments
• Health awareness
• Seasonal celebrations
• Silent auctions

Encourage people to participate in events by letting them know they can help by:

• Becoming a sponsor
• Attending the event
• Giving monetary or in-kind donations
• Becoming a volunteer

Build momentum

Get results like the leading organizations above with the right content management system (CMS), VitalSite. You’ll benefit from healthcare-specific functionality like event registration, eCommerce, content marketing and online donations that make it easy to reach the donors in your community. Contact us today – or request a VitalSite demo. The team at Geonetric is ready to help you with your digital needs.

EvergreenHealth is a two-hospital health system in Washington that helps enrich the health and well-being of their community. Their Kirkland campus has a 318-bed medical center and four medical specialty buildings, and the Monroe campus has a 72-bed hospital with a medical specialty building. Kirkland is also home to tech giants like Microsoft and Amazon, and EvergreenHealth knew it was more critical than ever to provide their tech-savvy community with an easy-to-navigate, system-wide website that delivers a premium, mobile-first user experience. That’s why the health system sought out Geonetric’s help to create a new website that builds brand awareness, is user friendly, and is built on a scalable content management system (CMS), like VitalSite for future website needs.

Mobile-first, system-wide approach

Geonetric delivered on EvergreenHealth’s vision for a mobile-first digital platform with a patient-centered focus. The homepage design added branded colors and icon elements along with a more modern design, keeping content clean and easy to scan.

EvergreenHealth’s homepage banner focuses on the broad range of care options they offer and getting site visitors easier access to care – primary care, specialty care, urgent care, emergency care. This user-friendly approach invites people to learn how to match their healthcare needs with the expert health services available throughout EvergreenHealth.

With at least half of all site visitors originating from a mobile device, unique mobile navigation prominently displays the three top tasks. Find a Doctor, Health Services and Locations are anchored to the bottom of the homepage on mobile, creating an app-like layout and allowing site visitors to use their thumb to click on the needed information quickly. In addition, the user-focused task navigation and information panels help visitors search by symptoms, find health services and learn more about EvergreenHealth locations, news, events, and history.

Custom provider profiles

Unlike traditional provider directories where site visitors can only search for a doctor based on name, location or service, EvergreenHealth’s “Find a Doctor” lets patients search using a pre-populated menu of symptoms and procedures. Searching by symptoms makes it’s more straightforward and user-friendly for site visitors to find the right provider with the right expertise. For example, potential patients can search “knee pain” and see a list of doctors specializing in knee conditions.

The symptom search is available from the homepage and the provider directory landing page. Other, more traditional search options, including name, location and specialty like “orthopedics,” is also available.

Because of this functionality, EvergreenHealth knew traffic to provider profiles would increase and looked to Geonetric for their expertise on how to optimize provider profiles.
A new, custom provider profile intuitively displays office information, provider photos, patient ratings and reviews, and highlights the doctor’s expertise to create compelling physician profiles that convert visitors into patients.

Coordinating content strategy and content for the move to system

One concern during the redesign was the volume of content EvergreenHealth had on their current site. Geonetric’s content strategists recommend a simplified, user-focused sitewide structure and navigation for the main site to create a better user experience and help site visitors find medical services.

With the realization of bringing over five out of the seven microsites as part of the system-wide approach, Geonetric worked closely with EvergreenHealth to review duplicate content and prioritize moving high-ranking and high-engagement pages. A content matrix guided the shift from individual sites to a system site, mapping what pages to migrate, edit or create. The matrix also identified natural cross-linking opportunities for visitors to quickly find the remaining microsites, EvergreenHealth Monroe and EvergreenHealth Neuroscience, Spine & Orthopedic Institute.

In addition, Geonetric’s content team wrote several service line sections during the redesign, including primary care and orthopedics to support EvergreenHealth’s small marketing team.

Marketing hub strategy

To take EvergreenHealth’s content marketing to the next level, Geonetric created a content marketing hub strategy. Healthiest Best, a previous content hub microsite, was integrated into the main site to increase traffic and boost search engine optimization. A new content structure driven by user data, makes it easy for readers to find the most popular topics and services. The custom design leverages EvergreenHealth’s system branding and site visitors can filter stories by topic or service or use an intuitive keyword search.

Reeling in the results

Since launch, overall engagement has increased 9% in page views, 13% in pages per session and 4% clicks from Google organic search. With 52% of users on a mobile device, EvergreenHealth saw a significant decrease of 30% mobile bounce rate a 26% overall bounce rate.

Demolish silos

Too often, content blueprints create silos on healthcare websites since they follow how an organization is structured internally rather than how a community views the healthcare system – as one entity.

When you break down silos, you tear down the walls that were limiting how you define your target audiences into separate categories like donors and patients. In reality, patients and donors are often the same people, just with a different task in mind.

Montage Health in Monterey, California, strengthens the health of their community with an easy-to-find Support Montage Health section on their website. This page talks directly to people living in their community and invites them to make an impact through a monetary gift, the gift of time, or blood donation.

Montage Health puts the user first by taking a user-focused approach to their site organization. This translates into foundation content living in numerous places, such as on the About Us page as a panel. This proven best practice elevates the system brand and increases site engagement.

Take a page from Montage Health and help members of your community easily navigate your website by cross-linking philanthropic content in sections like:

• About Us
• Auxiliary
• Content hub such as donor stories and patient stories
• Ways to Give including Foundation and Volunteering

When you implement a successful cross-linking strategy, you help quickly find the information that interests them any time they visit your website.

Write simple content to boost SEO

Quality content will help users find your website and keep them on it. When you simplify your content for search engine optimization, you’ll improve the user experience and increase your rankings

ProHealth Care, a community-based healthcare system with locations throughout southeastern Wisconsin, knows that simple content is still informative. The ProHealth Care Foundation content strategically answers common user questions in their area to optimize for search. More than just a page on the site, this section encourages visitors to sign up for a newsletter, donate, host a fundraiser, volunteer, or attend an event.

Follow ProHealth Care’s lead, and share answers to the questions people in your community likely want to know:

• What’s the mission of your hospital foundation?
• What’s the impact of my gift?
• What ways can I make a gift?
• Is my donation tax-deductible?

ProHealth Care celebrates their community’s generosity by highlighting the mission of their foundation, the impact of gifts and ways to give.

Be straightforward with your needs

Invite your community to explore ways they can make a difference in the healthcare they receive by listing your physical, monetary, and volunteer needs.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought many communities together. People began looking locally to offer their support. Continue your community’s momentum of giving like Ridgeview Foundation, in Minnesota, serving the southwest metro region of the Twin Cities.

Ridgeview Foundation lists causes to support, including:

• COVID-19 Emergency Fund – Explains the need for supplies, equipment, and training to continue caring for patients, families, and staff while showing appreciation to donors who have made a donation
• Support a Health Care Hero – Invites former patients to recognize a Health Care Hero that went above and beyond by contributing funds to purchase materials that ensure the safety of the staff and patients
• Ongoing and future support – Lists initiatives throughout Ridgeview that help patients throughout their community receive high-quality medical care because of donor’s generosity
• Pay It Forward – Helps breast cancer patients cover the cost of living so they can focus on taking an active role in their health
• Events – Promotes upcoming events that support a good cause

When you’re direct and clear about how your healthcare system depends on monetary gifts to support your community, you’ll reach the hearts of people with different abilities to give.

Make it easy to give with prominent CTAs

Once your community knows how they can give, it’s vital to drive online conversions with prominent calls to action (CTAs) like Holzer Health System in southeastern Ohio.

Holzer Health System’s design follows a minimalistic approach to highlight the essential elements on a page. This approach uses space strategically to help users navigate their site more easily, like finding the CTA.

Keeping users focused on the task of donating at hand, Holzer’s CTA panels uses a custom, brand-driven design that incites emotion to take action and strengthens brand identity.

Drive donations and site engagement with a CTA that’s:

• Clear and concise
• Prominently displayed
• Relevant to the page and audience

Once you establish a CTA track your results to measure the effectiveness of your page. Make adjustments as needed to improve your site’s performance.

Make a lasting impact

Having a content management system (CMS) that makes it easy to cross-link and build user-friendly forms helps. All the above sites are built on Geonetric’s VitalSite CMS, with our popular Formulate form builder. Sign up for a demo and see how VitalSite helps hospitals with fundraising in addition to patient acquisition.

And, of course, your content makes all the difference. If you are looking to grow the philanthropy in your community, get an expert’s advice — contact us today! Our content specialists are excited to help you get additional support for your healthcare system.

According to IBM, data breaches in healthcare were the most expensive of any industry at $9.23 million on average. And HIPAA Journal reports 2020 saw more healthcare data breaches than in any other year since reporting started. Breaches are happening more often and cost millions — not to mention that the average time to identify and contain a breach is 287 days. Non-compliance is simply not an option. So, how do you ensure your website is prepared?

Seven best practices to follow

Decreasing risks while protecting your patients’ data and your hospital brand must be a top priority. Evaluate your site on these seven areas to ensure your security and hosting environments are meeting required standards.

Protect user data.

Healthcare organizations must follow HIPAA guidelines, meaning you must comply with requirements to protect the privacy and security of health information. Your website should use secure sockets layer (SSL) technology to securely encrypt necessary page, form, transactional data, and protected health information (PHI) from the web browser to the server. PHI should be encrypted in transit and at rest. That means when it’s being transmitted between systems, such as data sent when a user submits a form, as well as when that data is stored for future use, often in a database. Online forms that accept user data should be managed using specific protocols to comply with HIPAA. Protecting the submitted data in forms is critical. Compliant content management systems (CMS) like VitalSite through form builders like Formulate capture and store specific information when your users view a form submission and creates an audit trail. It logs the user ID, date and time stamp, IP address, and location and state of the data at the time it was accessed.

If you accept online bill payment or online donations, you must also be payment card industry (PCI) compliant and ensure debit and credit card information remains secure throughout the transaction process. Once submitted, payment data should be transmitted immediately to the payment processor and never stored.

Protect administrative accounts.

As part of staying in compliance with HIPAA, and to prevent unauthorized changes on your website, administrative accounts in the CMS must be monitored and protected. With VitalSite, passwords are encrypted and stored using SQL Server encryption. All of this ensures that it’s difficult for an attacker to access and use someone’s password. In addition, other safeguards, such as requiring strong passwords and periodic passwords changes, as well as locking inactive accounts, are also considered industry best practices for account protection.

Stay up to date.

One of the primary ways hospital websites fall out of compliance is by falling behind with CMS upgrades, updates, and security patches to the software administrators don’t see, including web servers, databases, programming languages and framework. Falling behind on updates and upgrades are common ways organizations that run on a platform like WordPress find themselves vulnerable with multiple plug-ins requiring their own updates and patches. Ensure you’re on the latest version of your CMS and look to partner with an agency that provides upgrades as part of the licensing, as Geonetric does with VitalSite.

Review your network architecture.

Whether you manage web hosting yourself or use an agency or third party, ensuring there are tools and processes in place to minimize the risk of a breach is essential. Especially today, where cyber-attacks are all too common. Areas to look for include redundant web application firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and systems to protect from common web attacks like distributed denial of service (D/DoS) and SQL injection.

Ensure 24/7 uptime monitoring and support.

Your web partner should know before you do that your site is down and respond around the clock with a team who can fix the problem regardless of whether it’s a server, network, software, or content issue.

Protect from downtime with scalability.

Reliable networks are more important than ever, which means having scalability in your network is essential – especially when you consider you never know when a surge in traffic will arise. Case in point: healthcare websites saw huge traffic surges as critical COVID-19 communications, testing, and vaccine announcements were released. These traffic spikes need to be considered before they happen. Without auto-scaling in place, availability can be disrupted from unexpected traffic surges or a failure in one part of the system, bringing down the entire site. With proper auto-scaling cloud infrastructure, your site will remain available without missing a beat.

Require backups.

If the worst happens, how much would you lose and how quickly can you be up and running again? These are the questions you should ask. At Geonetric, we perform a full backup of your entire site and database each day. Every 15 minutes we perform transaction log backups and save these for two days. In addition, daily backups are saved for a week; weekly backups are saved for four weeks; and monthly backups are saved for a year. We also perform database consistency checks nightly. It’s also important to ensure there is proper redundancy for quick recovery purposes.

Take security seriously

For many healthcare organizations, especially community hospitals and medical clinics, it’s hard for marketing and I.T. departments to get the privacy and security resources they need to comply with healthcare’s stringent regulations, making it harder for you to prevent and detect security incidents. And cyber-criminals know this – a 2018 report by The American Journal of Managed Care®, found that 37%of small and 36 percent of medium-sized hospitals had suffered at least one data breach from 2009 to 2016. While many executives at smaller organizations feel they are less likely to be targeted because of their size the opposite may very well be true – security gaps amongst this group make them more likely to be a target.

Some smaller healthcare organizations try to solve potential PHI vulnerabilities by removing functionality, but in the end, this hurts user experience and your ability to connect with patients at key moments. With the right partner you can have all the functionality you want plus the security you need.

Don’t take chances with your patients’ data or your brand – partner with an agency like Geonetric that takes security seriously. We’ll take that extra monitoring off your I.T. team’s plate and help ensure compliance with regulations. Contact us today to learn more about our security protocols and to see a demo of our VitalSite CMS or Formulate form builder.

Bonus: Security Questions

Now that you understand more about security best practices, here is a helpful list of questions you can download or reference to help you have more valuable conversations with potential partners.

Fisher-Titus serves 70,000-plus residents in the greater Huron County area with a 99-bed acute care medical center as well as skilled nursing, home health and outpatient services. The medical center has been a staple in Norwalk since 1917. Fisher-Titus has always had a deep commitment to local care.

With big competition a short drive away in Cleveland and Toledo, the organization needed to make it easy for residents to know what’s available without the need to travel. Fisher-Titus turned to digital agency Geonetric to create a new site that was easier to navigate, had a more modern design and was built on a content management system that housed all the needed modules in one platform.

Investing in healthcare-focused solutions and strategy

Having worked with non-healthcare-specific vendors in the past, Fisher-Titus was excited to partner with an agency that focused on supporting the patient journey through digital. The organization was also drawn to the VitalSite Essentials CMS as it came with all the needed features functionality in one, easy-to-use platform.

With a sleek, modern design, the new site better matches the patient-centered care delivered inside the medical center. It also offers an enhanced experience with responsive design.

New primary navigation is based on decades of best practices in how healthcare consumers search and find information, putting Find a Provider, Find a Location, Patients & Guests and Medical Services at the users’ fingertips. Secondary navigation places on the homepage features top tasks like Pay a Bill and View Classes and stand out with icons.

Fisher-Titus’ new site also offers sophisticated cross-promotion throughout the site. This feature, built into VitalSite Essentials, allows site visitors to see related providers, services, locations, events and news in one spot.

That cross-promotion feature comes in handy for sharing content from their blog. This allows Fisher-Titus to share helpful articles on related services pages, encouraging site visitors to stay on the site and learn more about topics they care about.

Enhancing site functionality

One of the benefits of VitalSite Essentials is that is offers the core functionality out-of-the-box. With the new platform, Fisher-Titus was able to upgrade provider, classes, services, and location functionality.

Find a Doctor

Fisher-Titus’ new Find a Doctor offers a robust search feature that allows users to search by their top criteria. With built-in Schema.org markup on all physicians, the directory also helps Fisher-Titus improve search rankings for providers.

Each provider has their own profile page, showcasing areas of interest and specialties, alongside integrated physician reviews. Profiles also show the locations the provider sees patients, with a map, and a call-to-action to make an appointment.

Classes & Events

The Classes & Events directory helps Fisher-Titus with event promotion. The organization can now upload and control their own classes and events calendar, as well as feature related events and dates – something they weren’t able to do on their old site.

Serving a rural community, events and classes are a big part of Fisher-Titus’ outreach. Offering more features to site visitors as well as to administrators has been a much-needed improvement. The Fisher-Titus team is currently working with Geonetric to add a payment module to the functionality.

Find a Location

In addition, the Find a Location directory is a new feature for Fisher-Titus, allowing each location to have a profile with contact information and a map.

Care & Treatment

The Care & Treatment page also offers a full A-Z listing and taxonomy on the backend connects services with alternative terms, making it much easier for site visitors to find the service they are looking for regardless of the label they use to search.

Improving the user experience

The new site launched in March 2021 and immediately started delivering results. There has been a:

• 44.2% improvement in bounce rate
• 21% improvement in pages per session
• 8.4% increase in average session duration

The site is also delivering more site visitors from major cities in the region, including a 29% increase in users from Sandusky and a 15% increase in users from Willard.

In addition, Fisher-Titus worked with Geonetric to set up goal tracking with Google Analytics and since launch they have seen a 5.7% increase in goal completions and a 65.2% increase in goal conversion rate for “Viewed Find a Physician” and “Viewed Physician Profile.”

University Health is a publicly funded, locally owned and operated academic medical center in San Antonio and Bexar County in Texas. The health system has been in existence for more than 100 years with the mission of improving the health of the community through high quality, compassionate patient care, innovation, education and discovery.

The health system was facing an impending upgrade on its Sitecore digital experience platform. University Health decided to use the upgrade as an opportunity to advance digital strategy and build an innovative web presence that lives up to its mission. They turned to digital experience agency Geonetric to make it happen.

Investing in system-centric content strategy

The new University Health website takes a more system-centric marketing approach, leveraging the system’s size, depth, and reach of medical services more effectively. The content strategy focused on bringing the organization’s Health Focus blog and transplant microsites into the main site, making it easier for patients to find the information they need within one site. Cross-linking services, providers, and locations across the site showcases University Health’s expertise and multidisciplinary team approach to care.

Developing more intuitive navigation and making it easier for site visitors to find the information they need quickly was a key redesign goal. To accomplish this, the main navigation is prominent and easy to identify with a sticky header that remains in place even as users scroll.

Other navigation highlights include:

• Strategic drop-down menus from the main navigation give users choices and help quickly guide them to their desired destination. The drop-downs allow users to preview several navigation options, making lower-level content visible without scrolling.
• Sophisticated taxonomy in the prominent site search function allows visitors who like to use search to get helpful, accurate results.
• Expanded footer to address secondary audience needs common to academic medical centers, with links to the Fellowship Program, Residency Program, and Clinical and Internships.

Labeling medical services with patient-friendly terms make them accessible to users of all health literacy levels. Structuring services sections to align with a typical patient journey—from identifying conditions and symptoms to treatment and ongoing care. This approach allows the health system to provide digital touchpoints throughout a patient’s care. Thoughtful cross-linking strategies throughout the content connect to related providers, locations, news, blog content, and classes and events.

Navigation optimization for each user device was essential. To create an app-like experience on mobile, the navigation features three buttons fixed to the header for doctors, services, and locations.

Building and testing user experience design

Beginning with a design workshop, the Geonetric team and University Health stakeholders discussed visuals, reviewed the University Health’s branding standards and agreed on a color palette that considers web accessibility for calls-to-action link text and button styles.

Geonetric fielded an unmoderated first-click test on various design concepts to gain insight on consumers’ ability to start down the right path to find specific information easily. The test uncovered opportunities to enhance the user experience, such as:

• Update call-to-action copy
• Revise mobile navigation display
• Additional areas to cross-link between related pages

The new, tested design utilizes screen real-estate with full-width custom photography provided by University Health. The design also works to visually break up content and call-to-action in clear ways, with eye-catching elements such as a short orange underline for emphasis and visual separation from the body content. The entire site projects a warm and welcoming appearance while maintaining consistency with the University Health brand.

The redesigned homepage is flexible, giving University Health the space to promote high priority services, integrate blog content, align hero images to match marketing campaigns, and an area to highlight campus expansion efforts.

A new provider section boasts expanded search functions to help users find a provider within University Health and a comprehensive provider profile design with integrated patient reviews, videos, locations, and insurance information.

Creating personalized experiences with personas

Taking full advantage of Sitecore’s personalization capabilities, University Health and Geonetric dug into consumer research and web analytics to create six personas for the system. The personas focus on the core service lines of primary care, diabetes, heart, cancer, pregnancy and birth, and transplant.

The personas act as a guide for the University Health marketing team as they create compelling service line and health and wellness content and campaigns. They layout in an easy to read format:

• Demographics
• Technology and media habits
• Top health goals
• Common thoughts and feelings about healthcare
• Top pain points and value propositions
• Tangible ways University Health can assist each audience digitally

Nurturing digital brand awareness and trust

Implementing a new, integrated content marketing hub helps enhance University Health’s brand awareness. Consistent, compelling, and timely consumer-focused wellness content, creates trust and loyalty among target audiences. Improved user experience functions allow users to filter blog content by topics and services and then refine it by expert and service line. University Health can easily swap out featured stories to align with patient journeys or campaigns.

Developing patient-focused content

University Health worked with Geonetric to build out robust, relevant, patient-first content that showcases University Health as a compassionate, expert academic health system. The organization is working to enhance its brand in the community and highlight its alignment with UT Health San Antonio and it’s bring its expertise as an academic teaching hospital to the forefront.

Geonetric’s expert writing team highlights these competitive differentiators in new, user-focused content on the site. The team:

• Developed 78 pages of content for four service lines including, Diabetes and Endocrinology, Pregnancy and Childbirth, Transplant Care, and Women’s Health.
• Created content for University Children’s Health pediatric transplant program and pediatric cancer services.
• Restructured and wrote new content to bring the Transplant microsite into the new University Health website. This section is a comprehensive, 40-page section about transplant care that includes calls-to-action, content, video, and the ability to dynamically pull blogs, news, doctors and locations into the service line pages.

Due to the success of the content development work, University Health is partnering with Geonetric again to write pediatric service line content.

Delivering immediate results

The new University Health site went live late May 2021, and is already seeing positive results, including:

• 11% increase in service line pageviews
• 29% increase in clicks on navigation elements
• 51% increase in clicks on the main navigation
• 19% increase in provider profile organic entrances
• 9% increase in phone calls (clicks on phone numbers) from a provider profile pages
• 7% increase in the average time users spent on provider profiles

Mercy has been serving the Eastern Iowa community since 1900, growing from a single, 253-bed community hospital to multiple clinics and facilities today.

And, because online business listings are crucial to help searchers find healthcare information today, Mercy worked hard to ensure its information on Google and Bing was up-to-date. But, as the healthcare organization grew, so did its listing needs. So, when the ongoing management of hundreds of business listing records became a burden for Mercy’s small team, they turned to their digital agency to take over.

Outsourcing listing management

To bring more efficiency to the process, Geonetric began by creating new bulk upload datasheets for Mercy to simplify claiming, creating, and updating multiple listings in both Google and Bing. And, by following Mercy’s source of truth for providers and locations – its website provider and location directories – Geonetric was able to ensure consistent attributes across both sources. This makes it easier for searchers to find and recognize Mercy information – which is especially important when some facilities are standalone buildings, while others are departments within the hospital.

Geonetric also ensures that Mercy’s listings are taking advantage of new features and content areas, such as links to COVID-19 content and video appointments.

Enhancing provider listings

Too often, healthcare organizations focus only on their locations for business listings. But, provider profiles also make up a significant amount of searches. For Mercy, providers make up 18% of all searches.

That’s why Mercy and Geonetric worked together to ensure that all provider profiles were also optimized with:

• Up-to-date information
• Professional headshots
• Trackable URLs linking back to the doctor’s profile in Mercy’s provider directory

Investing in tracking

In 2020, Mercy and Geonetric added UTM parameters to all listings so the organization could track engagement and conversions when users click the listing, which then redirects them to the website.

In that time, the organization has been found by searchers more than 3.6 million times, with 117,802 of those searchers visiting Mercy’s website, another 216,305 initiating a phone call and 64,236 getting directions.

Moreover, since adding the UTM tracking, Mercy has seen a

• 9.2% increase in sessions from listings to the website
• 7.2% increase in new website users
• 11.4% increase in average session duration

Mercy and Geonetric also track listing utilization by the most popular navigation applications: Of these, Google Maps is the most common, with 67% of business listing searchers using that navigation system; followed by Waze (12%); Apple Maps (11%); and MapQuest (8%). Tracking the use of navigation systems also helps Mercy understand which sources are providing the most traffic and engagement; when updates are needed (if traffic decreases from a specific source); and where to prioritize resources.

But, the work of enhancing listings isn’t done; Geonetric and Mercy are currently working to integrate functionality to make an appointment directly into the listings to capture all of the “no-click” searches.

Maryland-based Adventist HealthCare is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people and communities through a ministry of physical and spiritual healing. The 114-year-old health system and integrated health delivering network offers a continuum of care and is the largest provider of healthcare in the Montgomery County region.

With deep roots focused on community wellness, Adventist HealthCare was an early mover in the content marketing space, creating a WordPress blog in more than a decade ago as a way to share expertise around health and wellness topics. The organization quickly outgrew that platform and turned to long-time partner Geonetric to build a content marketing hub in their main site, delivering a better experience for site visitors and administrators.

Moving from a blog to a content marketing hub

As an organization, Adventist HealthCare invests understanding their keys audiences and their journeys, so the team’s content marketing efforts focus on answering top question and promoting healthy habits and helpful advice. While WordPress was an effective solution for a while, Adventist HealthCare wanted to integrate the blog content more seamlessly into their main website, allowing the content to support more sophisticated journeys and ensure site visitors felt informed and connected at every step before and after treatment.

As a foundation, the Geonetric team created an overarching content strategy for site structure and taxonomy recommendations, ensuring content marketing assets shared the same categorization strategy as the rest of the website.

The content hub, named Living Well, boasts a new custom landing page design with large images, a card-like design, and the ability to filter results by certain topics. Custom interior pages have eye-catching call-outs to put readers on the path to top conversion points, like health assessments.

Cross-promoting with key providers and locations

Building the content marketing hub within the main website’s structure and domain gives Adventist HealthCare more opportunities to connect related content and build domain authority.

Using Geonetric’s taxonomy recommendations, articles in the content marketing hub are connected on provider profiles, service line pages and location pages, putting site visitors on a path to helpful content regardless of how they enter or access the site. Conversely, service line pages link back to health and wellness articles, putting site visitors on a path to helpful content regardless of how they enter or access the site.

This also means content marketing assets are part of the integrated site search, allowing site visitors to find article content alongside searches for doctors and services.

Improving optimization and overall engagement

Since launch in September 2020, the content marketing hub has delivered over 34,000 clicks from organic search engine results pages and 2.5 million organic search impressions. Other notable results:

• Total organic clicks from organic SERP to website increased by over 255,000 or 62%.
• Total search impressions increased by over 5.1 million (52.5%) since the content marketing hub was launched.
• The average position of the site in organic search results improved by 1.2 positions, or 4.2%.

With a goal of using the content in Living Well as part of the patient journey, using cross-promotion strategically was an important part of the project.

• Traffic to the locations section has increased by 34%, to the services section by 21%, and to the doctor section by 21% when compared to the previous period.
• Users who viewed a Living Well page at some point during their visit also viewed 50,144 service line pages, 38,348 location pages, and 18,917 doctor pages.
• Of the 58,382 times a user entered the site on one of the new Living Well pages, 3,377 then viewed a service line page, 3,269 viewed a Location page, and 1,761 viewed a Doctor page.
• Living Well viewers completed 6,999 calls-to-action (including phone calls), viewed a video 3,296 times, downloaded files 1,120 times, emailed the organization 298 times, and had 54 other conversions.

When it comes to website engagement, overall website sessions increased by 140% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago. There was an 18% increase in pages per session, a 42% increase in average session duration, and 23% decrease in bounce rate on the website overall since the Living Well was launched. Other statistics:

• Overall website sessions increased by 140% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago.
• Overall website users increased by 153% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago.
• Overall website page views increased by 174% when compared to the same timeframe one year ago.

Montage Health is a family of organizations dedicated to keeping Monterey County, California healthy. With a 258-bed hospital, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (Community Hospital), a medical group, philanthropic foundation, urgent care clinics, employee wellness program, wellness center, and Medicare plans, Montage Health has more than 2,500 employees and serves more than 434,000 residents.

Although the name Montage Health was chosen in 2016 to represent the system’s “montage” of services, the system has a long history, serving the area for almost 9 decades. The organization’s flagship hospital, Community Hospital, got its start in the 1920s. The Community Hospital name became synonymous with the entire system, even as the organization grew to encompass much more than the hospital.

With multiple websites and a fractured user experience, Montage Health turned to long-time partner Geonetric to create a new web presence on the VitalSite content management system that builds brand awareness for the entire Montage Health system.

Taking a user-focused approach to site organization

The first phase of the project centered on creating a strategy for combining all seven entity websites into one site. From assessing gaps in the user experience to applying user behavior data to diving into the system’s organizational structure, Geonetric’s content strategists built an information architecture that put site visitors first while still representing all entities.

The Geonetric team performed qualitative usability testing, asking site users to complete common tasks — like finding a doctor or location — using different wireframes. Testing revealed site visitors used access-to-care features as a way to help navigate to different types of providers. This insight led to the creation of a Care & Treatment landing page that gives site visitors guidance to choose the best option for their unique needs and preferences. An interactive flip card design and clear, concise copy help users immediately navigate to the best care setting for their needs.

Letting design shine

Building from Montage Health’s brand style guide, the site design leverages the vibrant colors and coastal community the system calls home. Custom icons were created as well as a unique accent bar that helps draw the eye to important calls-to-action.

With the rebrand, the system was working to calm community fears that they had been bought by an outside organization. Montage Health used the redesign as an opportunity to reinforce their community ties by using photos of real locations, real patients, and real employees.

Tasked with making sure all seven entities still had emphasis and representation on the site while living cohesively within the Montage Health brand, Geonetric’s design team gave each entity a custom landing page and interior page where they could use their individual logos and deploy unique branding. For some entities, like MoGo, their network of urgent care clinics, their section of the site has a special but complementary design and tertiary navigation menu that cross-links as needed to interior pages in the section and across the site.

Enhancing the online location strategy

Although all of the entities live within one sitewide, global navigation, it was important that each had a place to tell their own story. This required a thoughtful location strategy that could house more information than a standard single location profile. For example, Community Hospital moved from having its own 746-page website to a robust location profile that not only put the standard location information like hours, maps, and contact information at site visitors’ fingertips, it also gave the hospital a place to share its history, location-specific resources, and cross-link to services offered.

With location-focused copy critical to search engine optimization, all 55 of the location profiles Geonetric developed include Schema.org markup to help search engines recognize the content type. In addition, location-focused keywords are used in driving directions and other content to aid in near-me searches.

Writing user-centric copy

Montage Health enlisted the Geonetric writing team to create new, search-optimized copy throughout the site. Using the findings from interviews with Montage Health’s subject matter experts and in-depth keyword research, the content developers created new copy that answers users’ top questions, follows the patient journey, and adheres to proven web writing best practices. In total, the team developed 420 pages of new content for the Montage Health site, including:

• 48 service line sections (217 pages total), including priority service lines Cancer Care and Heart and Vascular Care
• 55 location profiles
• About us section
• Patient and family resources section
• Accessibility statement
• Montage Health Foundation section
• For healthcare and professionals section

All content cross-links strategically, putting users on a path to finding services, locations, and providers.

In addition, Geonetric delivered content governance workshops for the Montage Health team, as well as recommendations related to their video and classes and events calendar categorization strategies.

Enjoying immediate results

The new site launched in May of 2021 and saw immediate improvements, including a 322% increase in traffic to the locations section on the new site (MontageHealth.org) when compared to the locations section on their previous site (CHOMP.org). Site engagement has increased with a 50% increase in pages per session, a 61% increase in average session duration and a 35% decrease in bounce rate. There has been a 261% increase in organic clicks to Montage Health and a 178% increase in organic search impressions.

PIH Health is a nonprofit, regional healthcare network headquartered in Whittier, CA, with three hospitals, a large multispecialty medical group and a robust post-acute care program. The organization has a large network of PIH Health physicians and more than 7,500 employees — and it keeps growing. With the recent acquisition of Good Samaritan Hospital, a 408-bed hospital in downtown Los Angeles, the organization’s network continues to build resources, expand coverage, and develop a sustainable model for delivering care in the area in the future.

With the acquisition, PIH Health wanted to reimagine its web presence and ensure the site tells a system-centric story in a consumer-friendly way. The organization partnered with their long-time agency, Geonetric, on the website redesign. The emphasis? Reimagined web content, particularly around the key service lines of cancer and heart.

Building the foundation for effective content

As part of the redesign, the Geonetric team reviewed the content inventories of both sites and analyzed them, provided consumer-friendly navigation label recommendations, and developed an overarching content matrix.

The team also revised the website style guide that then could be used by both Geonetric writers and PIH Health’s internal team to present a unified tone and voice throughout the site. This was particularly important as Good Samaritan Hospital content was woven in alongside PIH Health information.

In addition, keyword research for two priority service lines helped identify varied terminology used to search for specialists, medical conditions, and care services. This research was the basis for keyword portfolios, which the team relied on to develop user-focused content that answers searchers’ questions.

Early work on location strategy also proved invaluable. It helped the team to identify which services were delivered at the different hospital campuses. They then used that information to create user paths that connected service line content with location content, putting site visitors on the right track to receive care in the PIH Health network.

Set up with a solid foundation, the team took a deep dive into creating new content for the cancer and heart service line sections.

Sharing the story of accredited cancer care and comprehensive heart care

The new content enables PIH Health to highlight their ability to deliver comprehensive prevention, detection, and treatment right in the Whittier, CA, community. This includes calling attention to PIH Health’s Commission on Cancer (CoC) accreditation throughout the copy.

The Geonetric team wrote 11 new pages of new cancer content, with focused attention on readability and on-page optimization. New pages include Screening & Diagnosis, Cancer Treatments, and Survivorship & Follow-Up Care. The section takes a patient journey approach and meets patients where they are – regardless of if it’s prevention, diagnosis, treatment, or follow-up care.

The Heart & Vascular section highlights the flexible scheduling and coordinated care patients receive at PIH Health. With 11 pages of new heart and vascular content, including new content on Heart & Surgery & Procedures and Cardiac Rehabilitation, the section is more robust and maps more closely with a heart care patient journey experience.

Both sections of new content deliver on PIH Health’s goal of a consumer-friendly website experience and:

• Incorporate actionable language that connects patients to the next step in their journey
• Make it easy to take the next step by highlighting calls to action to drive user behavior
• Meet readability and accessibility best practices with content written at a 9th grade reading level, matched to PIH Health’s unique community
• Use a conversational and friendly tone consistently

Throughout, site visitors are reminded of the benefits of receiving care at PIH Health and the personalized approach the organization takes.

Driving traffic and engaging site visitors

Since launch, both sections are delivering. Compared to the same time frame last year, the Cancer Care section has seen a 702% increase in page views year over year with a 144% increase in organic traffic from 2020.

In terms of engagement metrics, the bounce rate for the Cancer Care section has decreased from 67% (2020) to 45% (2021). The page with the highest level of page views in the Cancer Care section is the Schedule Your Mammogram Today page, with 49% of the page views to the Cancer Care section. Data also show that key pages, such as Breast Imaging & Mammogram, are sending 50% of users on to related locations that offer mammograms, again focusing on PIH Health’s goal of connecting consumers with care options.

In addition, overall rankings for cancer-related searches jumped an average of 10 spots on Google’s results page.

For the Heart & Vascular section, the overall page views increased 228% year-over-year, with organic traffic increasing 181% year-over-year. The top pages in this section – the Heart & Vascular landing page, the cardiology page, and the surgery procedures page – are all driving measurable interactions. Most are going to a list of related providers, aligning with the patient journey and moving toward conversion.