Hartford HealthCare, based in Hartford, CT, accomplished a lot with a new CMS and vendor-led redesign. And while their improved visual presence checked the right boxes and built on the integral patient experience, the new CMS proved difficult when it came to retaining their strong search rankings.
Post-launch, Hartford HealthCare knew they wanted to reallocate their efforts and focus on improving search engine indexing and marketing. HHC reached out to Geonetric to handle the intricate steps required for untangling any technical SEO knots behind the scenes.
Kicking Off: A Complete Site Audit
As Geonetric and Hartford HealthCare met during the proposal process, Geonetric’s own digital marketing experts dove deep into hartfordhealthcare.org to see any low-risk, high-yield opportunities that we could tackle first to deliver immediate success.
Once the project kicked off, a full website audit across Hartford HealthCare’s web entities revealed technical, high-impact opportunities for improvement to tackle right way, from invalid “noindex tags” to duplicate or missing metadata to incorrect or missing redirects.
Geonetric’s search experts also provided a thorough analysis on Hartford HealthCare’s current search impressions and conversions as a benchmark for monitoring success going forward.
While errors are never welcome news, the ability to visually see what needed to be fixed – and how quickly it could be done — gave the Geonetric and Hartford HealthCare teams a specific roadmap to follow to continue to add to the evolving and growing online web presence.
Achieving Early Success
The Geonetric team got to work making updates and enhancements. Among the most pressing fixes to address after the audit were repairing Pages marked with “noindex” tags (preventing Google and other search engines from indexing) and resubmitting the site’s XML sitemap to Google Search Console to have the site re-crawled the site structure and its content properly recognized and visible to users in search results.
As a result, Hartford HealthCare’s homepage saw a nearly double increase in organic traffic almost immediately following the “noindex” repairs. Service pages also saw an uptick of organic traffic entrances after the “noindex” tags disappeared.
By identifying 400-level errors across the site, both the Hartford HealthCare team and the Geonetric team found ways to implement the appropriate 301 redirects to improve indexing and ranking factors in the future.
Geonetric also consolidated Hartford HealthCare’s multiple Google Analytics accounts into one – as well as creating multiple views and filters – to make it easier and more accurate for the Hartford HealthCare team to track data and traffic going forward. In a related vein, Geonetric is also implementing cross-domain tracking across all of Hartford HealthCare’s web entities to get a holistic understanding of how their marketing efforts from source to conversion are working across all of their sites. Google Tag Manager was also implemented on relevant sites, giving visibility to the success of their marketing efforts and SEO work, tracking everything from phone number clicks to buttons to downloads.
Moving Forward in the Right Direction
Now that the technical and foundational priority items have been addressed for Hartford HealthCare’s organic traffic, the Geonetric digital marketing team is continuing to move the needle forward.
Over the coming months, both teams will continue to monitor the organic fluctuations while approaching new strategies to enhance on-page optimization, such as building keyword-to-content maps for top-ranking service lines and retooling page titles and meta descriptions to make the search engine results page (SERP) experience better for potential patients and visitors. The next technical issue Geonetric’s team will be tackling with Hartford HealthCare’s web vendor is adding a rel=canonical element to their provider pages and across their multiple sites and provider listings so they are not competing with themselves.
In addition, both teams – working in tandem with Hartford HealthCare’s web vendor — will continue to run reports and audits for places to improve user experience and indexing opportunities for the Hartford HealthCare brand.
Stay tuned to read more about Hartford HealthCare’s continued success with Geonetric’s digital marketing retainer.