The team at Altru Health System, located in Grand Forks, ND, has been blogging for years.

In the beginning, they had five separate blogs. In their second iteration, they brought those five together as one, but the experience still didn’t feel as cohesive as it could be.

With the latest iteration, launched in March 2018, the Altru team wanted to create more of a wellness and lifestyle experience, moving away from a standard blog with a running list of topics and instead providing intuitive navigation that gives users the freedom to browse high-level topics of interest.

Working with their long-time digital agency, Geonetric, the teams created a solution that streamlines the experience, offering health and wellness information as well as patient stories, employee spotlights, and Altru system news — all in a beautiful, responsive design that integrates with the larger Altru website.

Creating High-quality Content

Altru already had a proven track record of developing compelling content for their patients and communities but really wanted to expand and deepen content on the new site, creating a network of related posts readers could continue to enjoy by topic or category. The Altru marketing team also works diligently to repurpose their already-impressive content library by reusing content that’s evergreen and proven performers.

Current and prospective patients aren’t the new blog’s only target audiences. Altru also wanted to shine a spotlight on their employees, sharing stories about what it’s like to work at Altru and how it’s a place you can grow and evolve as an employee.

The Altru team also focused content on donors and volunteers. With numerous ways to show support and around 300 community members volunteering annually, Altru wanted to be sure to share stories about the way the community steps up to impact the lives of others.

Engaging Design

The visual draw of the site is strong, with magazine-quality imagery and social-media-inspired card design. The blog is built in WordPress, and the Geonetric team worked with Altru to ensure the theme supported Altru’s brand.

The homepage boasts an eye-catching call to action, encouraging site visitors to sign up to get health tips delivered directly to their inbox. The homepage slider features the top four stories, quickly connecting returning visitors to new content and inspiring them to click. It also highlights featured authors, including doctors and dieticians, with headshots and bios that appear with a rollover effect.

Over the last year, the Altru team has worked to incorporate more video throughout the site since creating content in more than one format makes it easier and more engaging to promote on social media platforms.

Altru also shares employee spotlights from the blog on LinkedIn to aid in recruitment efforts.

Integrating Across the Site

The Altru system website underwent an award-winning redesign on their content management system, VitalSite, at the same time the new lifestyle site was created. The Geonetric team worked to establish thoughtful taxonomy and categorization to ensure stories from their content hub dynamically display on the homepage and related pages throughout the main site, including doctors and service lines.

The Geonetric team was instrumental in ensuring the two systems worked together and shared content, allowing the team to build strong connections between their content marketing efforts and the services and care they provide. The result? A seamless experience with engaging content that supports site visitors as they research and evaluate different providers and treatment options on their patient journey.

Improving Traffic and Engagement

Since launch, the Altru blog has averaged nearly 5,000 page views each month. Previously, visitors spent an average of 45 seconds on the site, but that’s since doubled, with users engaging for 1:41 minutes on average and visiting more than one story per session. In addition, the majority of the guest author pages have a lower exit rate, below 20 percent, and have an average time on page of 1.5 – 3 minutes, indicating that users are reading the articles.

Mobile was also a huge driver for the redesign, with more than half of their previous blog traffic coming from smartphones and tablets. The improved statistics are supported by the enhanced navigation and responsive experience delivered to users on mobile devices.

In a competitive market, Cone Health Medical Group knew well the importance of user-friendly location profiles optimized for search engines. That’s why the group serving North Carolina’s Piedmont Triad partnered with Geonetric for design, content, and SEO work for numerous clinics and medical offices. The goals were to:

• Make it easier for health care consumers to make appointments
• Improve user-engagement metrics
• Provide a dynamic visual presence

Focused, collaborative start

CHMG launched a pilot project with four clinics, knowing early, demonstrable success was key to getting the rest of its locations on board.

After several conversations with the medical group, designers and content strategists worked together to build a page architecture that made it easy to find information about services, patient resources, appointments, address and hours of operation. Prominent images of each provider link to profiles with custom-written biographies that give a sense of personality and approach to care. Teasers promote Cone Health’s Wellness Matters content marketing hub assets relevant to each clinic’s audience. The attractive page design makes navigation intuitive on all devices.

SEO & keyword research drive recommendations

Local convenience is key for consumers — “near me” searches for health-related services have doubled since 2015. And since 30% of mobile searches are related to a location, it was vital for CHMG’s location profiles to be optimized for local search.

That’s why digital marketing experts performed keyword research to help Geonetric target each unique clinic profile to a hyperlocal audience. The agency looked at several factors, including:

• Competitor websites
• Existing content
• Google search suggestions
• Local search ranking factors
• Questions searchers ask
• Search volume

The research helped Geonetric develop a keyword portfolio to focus the content of each location and help CHMG stand out from the competition.

Comprehensive content

To ensure the location profiles met patients’ and consumers’ needs, Geonetric’s writers interviewed stakeholders at each clinic to:

• Discover and communicate the benefits of choosing a particular medical office and its providers
• Get answers to common patient questions
• Learn how to set apart similar CHMG clinics from each other and external competitors
• Provide thorough information about the services offered

Each location profile lives on a website with content describing the service lines available throughout all of CHMG. Clinic webpages don’t duplicate this general service-line information but rather link to it while highlighting specific services key to the individual practice.

Results

In addition to improvements in pageviews and bounce rate, CHMG saw a dramatic increase in visits to provider profiles from location-profile visitors.

After seeing the successful performance of the first four location profiles, CHMG partnered with Geonetric to write webpages and perform keyword research for more than a dozen additional clinics. As CHMG continues to bring in additional practices, the medical group has built a solid foundation for effective web presences.

When Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, approached its 2018 redesign, the team had strategic goals in mind for brand growth that tied in with the website:

• Support ongoing organizational growth
• Improve patient satisfaction and provider engagement
• Improve care navigation for several targeted service lines, including Cardiology, Pulmonology, Oncology, and Ear, Nose & Throat (ENT)
• Grow volume and market share in key service-line clinics, including Obstetrics, Cardiology, Surgery, Urgent Care, and more
• Increase the number of lives covered and touched by Mercy annually, including achieving 82% of patients seen by their primary care provider
• Connect and engage current and prospective patients
• Increase Foundation’s assets and endowments
• Promote new and existing services, especially the new advanced open-heart surgery

They also wanted to attract new employees who share Mercy’s values, especially nurses, as well as bolster opportunities for donations to their Foundation.

Goals and metrics from the get-go

To help establish a foundation of success for their new website redesign and launch, the Mercy team set benchmarks that aligned with key goals, including tracking current appointment requests, class registrations, job application submissions, and online donations.

Built on the same content management system as their old site, VitalSite the new site had new goals, particularly increasing web traffic and engagement from new site visitors as Mercy aimed to attract new patients to the hospital through urgent care visits.

Geonetric’s digital marketing team helped Mercy set up tracking of downloads, outbound link clicks, and email address click-throughs, making it easy to measure engagement across the site. Geonetric also provides quarterly analytics check-ins with the Mercy team so they get an even closer view, year-round, of the health of their website and marketing efforts.

UX testing and collaboration among digital experts

On the Geonetric side, content strategy, digital marketing, and design worked closely throughout the planning and design phases: Content strategy guided the site architecture and navigation experience, while digital marketing laid out important conversion points and goal tracking. Design helped bundle all the research and discovery together into a layout that speaks to new and existing patients and captures Mercy’s tagline, “The Mercy Touch^®.”

But, most importantly, the pre-launch user testing and heat-map analysis revealed valuable information to both teams that drove redesign decisions. For example:

• Navigation: The main navigation testing revealed users primarily clicked on Find a Provider, Our Services, Patients & Visitors, or relied on site search. Less-used main navigation items were moved to lower-priority navigation in the redesign to ensure patients easily found the information most relevant to them. Users commented that “Our Services” was confusing if looking for medical services only, so this page was renamed “Medical Services” in the redesign for clarity.
• Drop-down Navigation: In addition to navigation label changes, comments from participants in the usability study indicated that not knowing what was included under each section made it difficult to choose. As a result, Geonetric and Mercy strategized drop-down navigation that provides some top-level pages of interest for patients, as well as interactive search fields for pages like Find a Doctor and Find a Location.
• Site Search: Data showed that users were relying on site search more than expected. Based on the terms searched, such as “medical records,” and “urgent care,” adjustments were made to the main and task navigation for visitors. For example, “urgent care” moved to the main navigation for easy access on all devices.
• Mobile: Mobile scroll maps revealed users stuck to the top of the site on the homepage, which helped designers consider the top-billing needs that required above-the-fold placement. However, internal pages had much more scroll interaction, making it easy to incorporate design elements to break up service-page text.
• Medical Services: The A-Z links on the services landing page was highly interactive for users. While the previous design featured eight primary services before the A-Z list, the new design spotlights only six, making it easier for users to reach the A-Z links quickly.

Positive results post-launch

If more traffic, engagement, and interest from patients was the goal of the redesign, Mercy’s team has much to celebrate:

• Post-launch, bounce rates decreased by 10% and session duration and pages per session increased.
• By moving urgent care to the main navigation (including added emphasis with a pop of color in red), views of the page about MercyCare Urgent Care’s eArrival service nearly tripled in the three months immediately after launch compared to the same three-month period the previous year. The urgent care check-in tool, eArrival, also saw more engagement. Urgent care location pages dominate the top locations list, too.
• Medical services, as a whole, had a 101% direct traffic increase and a 3% organic traffic increase.
• Entrances to Find a Doctor increased by 10%.
• To give better visibility and structure to search engine indexing and the A-Z service links, Geonetric recommended moving bariatric surgery to its own section, away from the surgery service line. The result? A 15% increase in traffic to bariatric surgery’s landing page.
• Provider profiles are enjoying a 10% increase in traffic, while heart — which has a new open-heart surgery to promote — has seen substantial growth of 132% in sessions, aligning perfectly with Mercy’s goal for more visibility.

Conversions and completions also increased for the contact us, Birthplace tour request, and patient pre-registration forms. Most impressive, Mercy’s Hall-Perrine Cancer Center saw a 163% increase in 2018 as compared to its 2017 traffic numbers, making it one of the services with the largest digital growth for the organization.

And finally, after the launch, Mercy received a Best in Class Award from the 2018 Interactive Media Awards, giving the marketing team a feather in their cap for all of the hard work in the name of digital patient experience.

While planning their 2018 redesign, OMC kept an eye on the growing (and existing) competition in their Rochester, MN community. But more importantly, the OMC team wanted to help their patients more quickly find the most appropriate non-emergency care clinic.

With an SEO retainer through Geonetric in place, they asked for help: How could OMC build a better non-emergency care service line section – their own branded Convenience Care – that leads patients to the right clinic when they need it most?

A Collaboration of SEO and Content

As any SEO expert will tell you, it’s more than just keywords that drives good indexing and connections with users. Geonetric’s digital marketing team was ready with tools to help research current user experience and seek out trends in keyword data to help drive better page titles and optimization opportunities.

But OMC also needed improved navigation and content, so Geonetric’s digital experts and content writers teamed up.

In the six-month project, from January to June 2018, digital marketing researched data to drive better results for OMC’s Convenience Care service line. As they revealed keyword data and user research, content wrote fresh, keyword- and user-optimized content for each Convenience Care service provided.

Monthly check-ins throughout the project kept the OMC team informed of the progress made and the metrics in flux as content was implemented on their website at olmmed.org.

Geonetric’s digital marketing team also set up specific Google Analytics tracking for the new-and-improved Convenience Care section, as well as Schema.org markup to help search engine indexing.

And OMC’s Clockwise MD wait times site still have a home on the new Convenience Care section as a subpage.

One of the biggest changes (and benefits to patients) was a previously existing PDF for “Acute care or FastCare?” to help patients decide which clinic to visit. Geonetric transferred that PDF to a responsive table on the Convenience Care landing page, which helped increase conversions to the section’s subpages as patients found the answers they were looking for. Including the information on the page was also a great way to include valuable keywords.

Leading Patients to the Right Front Door

The results were what both Geonetric and OMC had in mind when they started the project.

Since launch, the Convenience Care section has seen an increase in organic traffic and engagement. The goal, though, was to get patients to the right clinic when they needed care.

In comparison with 2017, the whole Convenience Care section saw an 18% increase in organic traffic and an 18% drop in bounce rates. More conversions were discovered, too, as the Convenience Care landing page dropped in engagement, but its subpages increased.

And since launch, conversions to reserve a spot at one of the clinics increased by 298%, showing that users are comfortable with what they learned from the content to schedule a visit online.

Overall, all subpages in the section, now newly renamed and uniquely developed, saw massive traffic increases, including a 61% increase in acute care, and a 260% increase in FastCare clinics.

MidMichigan Health, headquartered in Midland, MI, knew the importance of investing in business listings to both improve the experience for searchers and boost their own optimization efforts. The organization has an internal person dedicated to the effort, and they had partnered with an outside vendor for added assistance. Although they were seeing some benefits, they knew they could find even more value.

That’s why MidMichigan Health reached out to their trusted partner Geonetric and their expert digital marketing team to bring a more holistic strategy to their efforts. Geonetric’s intimate knowledge of MidMichigan Health’s organization and the VitalSite Locations module allows Geonetric to partner with MidMichigan Health’s internal team member to optimize the data for both on-site visitors and external listing sites such as Google and Bing.

Building on the Foundation

Geonetric’s digital marketing team took over where MidMichigan Health’s previous vendor had started; creating a true partnership between MidMichigan Health and Geonetric, sharing brainpower and ensuring the internal team and the agency are collaborating. With more than 900 listings to manage, MidMichigan Health was already using bulk uploads to efficiently claim, create, and update multiple listings at once instead of managing each listing individually.

Geonetric redesigned MidMichigan’s bulk upload spreadsheets to make them more compatible with multiple search engines, saving valuable time in submitting data to both Google and Bing. Geonetric also worked with Google to provide insight into how complex healthcare organizations like MidMichigan Health structure their facilities, locations, and provider information and how healthcare searches differ from the retail searches that Google My Business was originally structured to accommodate.

“Searching for the nearest lab, locating a doctor in a group practice, or finding your way to a healthcare appointment on a large hospital campus are not the same as finding your local Applebee’s or Home Depot,” said Megan Yezak, Marketing Manager at MidMichigan Health and MidMichigan’s primary web strategist. “In healthcare, there isn’t just one door to go in, one phone number to call or one set of hours for every service in the building, so understanding which service consumers need is a critical first step to presenting them with locations and phone numbers. Google’s original rules and structure made it difficult to do that effectively, and because Geonetric represents many healthcare clients, they were able to advocate for change by demonstrating to Google that this was not just one organization trying to game its way to the top of the search engine, but a legitimate pain point for an entire industry and its customers.”

Geonetric’s knowledge of how to work with Google has helped MidMichigan Health create a strategy to ensure its listings work for both Google and Bing searchers. In addition, since Geonetric works in this space exclusively, they understand how other factors, such as Healthgrades ratings and reviews, can impact business listing and optimization efforts and work to build a strategy that takes into account other ranking influencers.

Next, the team ensured that the online listings for their 900+ facilities and providers matched MidMichigan Health’s source of truth — their website. Geonetric was able to leverage their intimate knowledge of MidMichigan Health’s web strategy and naming conventions to ensure consistent attributes across all data sources. Since Geonetric also manages MidMichigan Health’s website, they are able to make needed design or functionality changes to their online location and physician directories to ensure the business listings and CMS modules work together.

Once the listings and website were in sync, the team began to enhance those listings further by adding photos and user-friendly descriptions that abide by character limits. They also added UTM parameters on all listings, making it more accurate to track engagement with individual listings.

After the team completed the work for Google they repeated the process for Bing, which required the data be prepared and structured a bit differently than Google, including required NPI numbers for providers.

In addition, the team is working back through initial listings to ensure accuracy by identifying and removing unclaimed, duplicate listings from Google and Bing and taking advantage of new features provided in listings, including managing departments within listings for large locations.

Transforming Traffic and Increasing Sessions, Calls and Conversions

As with all optimization work, it takes a few months to see the impact. The business listing effort, which began in October 2016, is now providing impressive results including a 20,000 year-over-year increase in overall traffic, with a majority coming from organic search and local listings. MidMichigan Health also saw a 12 percent increase to www.midmichigan.org/doctors from direct, local listings, and organic search traffic. MidMichigan Health is witnessing a transformation in their site traffic, with clinically-focused provider and location searchers outnumbering job seekers and other secondary audiences as top site visitors. In fact, MidMichigan Health’s top-three-viewed sections are now consistently Find a Doctor, Care & Treatment, and Locations & Phone, surpassing even the homepage.

Google local listings have brought in 41,339 sessions, up 24 percent from last year. Of the Google local-listing users that came to the site, 2,005 clicked on a phone number, a 14 percent increase from last year. Bing local listings brought in 1,470 sessions, up from 0 last year. Of the Bing local-listing users that came to the site, 24 clicked on a phone number. In addition, the bounce rate for users coming from local listings is only 54 percent, with users visiting between 2-3 pages on average and spending 1:30 on the site.

The MidMichigan Health team is also excited to see how this investment in business listing management will help set the organization up for success as voice search continues to gain popularity.

Reap the Benefits from Ongoing Focus on Listings

As Yezak, notes: “This work is not for the faint of heart.” With a small team, it’s too much to manage internally alone. That’s why MidMichigan has an ongoing monthly retainer in place with Geonetric.

Through the retainer, Geonetric’s digital team continues to focus on MidMichigan Health’s business listings, providing monthly bulk uploads to both Google and Bing, adding and removing facilities and providers as needed, and troubleshooting issues that arise from user-generated content.

Geonetric not only identifies issues, but also advocates on their behalf with Google and Bing personnel to troubleshoot and resolve the issues. This saves MidMichigan Health time and hassle, and Geonetric is often able to resolve issues much faster because of their resources and experience dealing with these problems.

The digital marketing team meets monthly with MidMichigan Health to discuss results, review completed work, and prioritize next steps. They provide recommendations and strategy on where to prioritize efforts for the next month based on MidMichigan Health’s goals and industry best practices. The team keeps MidMichigan Health updated on changes in the industry and advises them of the impact of those changes to their business listings strategy which is essential because changes happen constantly.

*This case study was written prior to MidMichigan Health’s name change to MyMichigan Health.

Firelands Regional Health System is the only full-service medical center in Erie County, Ohio. With that responsibility — as well as serving nearly 80,000-plus residents in the Erie County and Sandusky metro area — Firelands wanted to emphasize their dedication to patient wellness by creating a digital experience that helped connect them with doctors, locations, and services when they need it most.

After researching their options, Firelands Regional Health System’s marketing team chose Geonetric to serve as their digital partner and CMS provider with the award-winning system, VitalSite.

Straightforward Goals to Set the Project Course

Firelands Regional Health System felt their website didn’t match their innovation and dedication to patient care. Its previously disjointed mobile experience was resulting in high bounce rates and its lack of a location directory and outdated physician directory made it hard for visitors to build connections.

The Firelands Regional Health System team also wanted a consistent brand experience among the medical center, foundation microsite, and Firelands Physician Group microsite.

They also had the need to provide dynamic, mobile-friendly and HIPAA-compliant forms that patients could complete to request appointments, medical records, or contact the organization. Geonetric’s Form Builder was a helpful addition for Firelands Regional Health System.

Connect Patients With the Right Content

One of the biggest draws to VitalSite is the ability to easily control providers and locations through the platform’s Provider and Location Directories. Backed with research on how consumers seek new doctors, Firelands Regional Health System built out their provider profiles to include detailed biographies and patient testimonials.

The Firelands Regional Health System team also worked hard on building a better services experience with content. By developing pages and subpages in their Care & Treatment section, they were able to capitalize on services they weren’t previously representing, making some services more easily available to users from organic search. Since they already had a relationship with an SEO provider, they worked with that agency to optimize their refreshed content in VitalSite.

With VitalSite’s taxonomy structure, the service pages now dynamically display related locations and providers to lead users toward conversion, such as requesting an appointment.

And while some healthcare organizations gradually invest in content marketing, Firelands Regional Health System dove right in. Prior to and post-launch, they invested heavily in developing fresh, new content for their Empower blog, featuring patient and employee stories, content about health and wellness, and information for healthcare professionals.

Redesign Results that Shine

With a new, responsive design and consistent branding across their main site and two microsites, both Geonetric and the Firelands Regional Health System marketing team are excited to see it thrive.

Since its launch in May 2017, the websites have seen great results across a myriad of devices. Organic traffic increased by 6% and mobile traffic increased by 20%.

Organic keywords ranked on Google’s first page. An increase by 51% for “Firelands” and 46% for “Firelands Physician Group.”

Social traffic saw the biggest bump post-launch – thanks in part to their Empower blog content – with a 329% boost.

A lowered bounce rate around 31% across the whole site is something to celebrate, but the best news is their improved ability to connect patients with providers and locations: The provider directory saw an 88% traffic increase and the location directory saw even more, with 122% traffic improvement.

An Investment in Marketing Pays Off

The Firelands Regional Health System marketing team has been busy since launch. In 2018, the team received three Gold Aster Awards – one for their physician recruitment advertising, another for an urgent care billboard campaign, and the third for their blog, Empower.

And, they just recently found out the new website took home a Best in Class from the 2018 Interactive Media Awards.

All of these awards and recognitions have helped the Firelands Regional Health System marketing team move up to the top 5% in the nation.

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.

With Mayo Clinic in their backyard, OMC is interested in finding creative ways to compete in Rochester, MN. They often focus on their differentiators, such as providing exceptional patient care that is focused on caring, quality, safety, and service.  They are known in the region for their convenient, quality personal care. One place the medical center knew they could deliver better awareness was around emergency room (ER) wait time. OMC turned to Geonetric and our digital marketing team to create a digital advertising campaign to help build awareness for their ER services.

Playing to Strengths

It’s widely known in the area that Mayo Clinic’s ER wait time can be quite lengthy. Depending on how busy the ER is, the wait can be anywhere from 4-6 hours or even longer. In fact, people have been known to post on social media about how long the wait times at Mayo Clinic’s ER are.

On the other hand, OMC has impressive wait times –they average just 11 minutes from being admitted to seeing a healthcare provider. OMC has a great working relationship with Mayo Clinic and will send patients to Mayo Clinic when they require a high level of specialized care. Because of this relationship, patients who present to OMC’s ER with certain symptoms can receive the required tests at OMC and get transferred to Mayo Clinic sooner than if the patient went directly to Mayo Clinic!

Developing the Campaign

To build awareness for their emergency room, Geonetric ran a paid advertising campaign with display ads on Google and Facebook that feature an engaging GIF ad promoting OMC’s 11-minute average wait times. The ads targeted granular geographic regions where people in Rochester would be most likely to be using their mobile phone, browsing online, or on Facebook.

Beating Industry Averages

Over the course of the 3-month campaign, the GIF ad was viewed over 500,000 times on Google’s Display Network and received 3,248 clicks to the website. This is a click-through rate of 0.65%, which is above the industry average of 0.59%.

On Facebook, the ads had over 83,000 impressions, a total of 3,392 post engagements, and 731 clicks to the website. This was a click-through rate of 0.87%, slightly above the industry average of 0.83%.

Since this was an awareness campaign, there was not a custom landing page or place to convert. OMC wanted people to go immediately to their ER if they had an emergency, and didn’t focus on getting phone calls, website visits, or other forms of engagement.

When Holzer Health System launched a fresh redesign at the end of 2015, their goal was to provide a responsive, user-friendly experience to their growing patient base in Gallipolis, OH the southeastern Ohio Valley.

The organization was evolving, one step at a time. But in 2017, the focus on building a stronger, more competitive orthopedic department and roster of physicians became a key focus, and the Holzer team wanted to support those investments with thoughtful digital marketing.

Aligning Clear Goals to Drive Conversion

Holzer partnered with Geonetric’s digital marketing experts to set a paid search campaign in motion for November 2017 to February 2018. Competition had shifted market share for orthopedic services, and the goal of the campaign was to drive volume specifically around joint replacement and sports medicine, bringing new patients through Holzer’s doors.

The Holzer and Geonetric teams worked together to identify the core audience for these campaigns: Joint replacement ads were specifically targeted for adults ages 35 and above, as well as older adults; sports medicine ads were targeted toward active adults. The campaigns would drive users to a landing page where they could either complete a form, which would be the primary conversion or call the system through a trackable phone number. Geonetric also set up phone call ad extensions as another option for people to convert.

With Google AdWords, keyword planners, and regional research on their side, the Geonetric digital marketing team set out to build successful, conversion-inspiring campaigns.

Building and Measuring Campaign Efforts

Holzer’s competitive differences were their local access to exceptional orthopedic care (less traveling for patients in their area), and cross-collaborative care under one system, letting patients have a more fulfilling recovery time with all the specialists they need at their side.

The Geonetric digital marketing team set up search and display ads on Google, targeting the Ohio Valley and some parts of West Virginia, as well as video ads on YouTube to drive traffic to an orthopedic landing page, which was built and monitored by the Holzer marketing team. Geonetric provided guidance around industry-proven best practices for landing page design and conversion to Holzer, too, helping to set them up for success. Tips included keeping the form near the top of the page for easy conversion, and adding a video to the page to make it more engaging.

Aside from the work with Geonetric, Holzer also had TV and radio commercials and Pandora advertisements running to build awareness of their new orthopedic doctors and surgeons.

The teams met every month to discuss the progress of digital campaigns, determine any changes or adjustments that need to be made, and reviewed the status of conversions.

Results: Stellar Conversions and New Appointments

After three months of paid search campaign work with video and display ads, the efforts paid off. Traffic from mobile devices was extremely high, with nearly 76% of the Google display ads coming from mobile devices with full browsers.

Altogether, the campaign performed miles ahead of expectations, with over 640,000 impressions and nearly 1,400 clicks. The team brought in 22 conversions during the three-month campaign and tripled the healthcare industry average click-through-rate (2%) with a 7.28% CTR.

The trending keywords for orthopedic services in their area (such as “Orthopedics Gallipolis”) brought in more impressions, more clicks, and higher conversions, too – giving Holzer’s orthopedic services and impressive team of doctors the attention they deserve.

Back in 2015, Bronson invested in creating a better online user experience and started that journey by migrating their website into Geonetric’s VitalSite. A branded microsite, Bronson Positivity, was also launched, highlighting inspiring patient stories.

The bronsonhealth.com website included a powerful, versatile find-a-doctor tool that enabled patients to easily find and choose a doctor from over 1,000 options, by specialty, availability and across 70 locations in southwest Michigan. The VitalSite Provider Directory made it easier for prospective patients to quickly access provider information – shortening search times and increasing traffic to and time visiting individual provider profiles.

In addition, the VitalSite platform allows flexibility to extend and customize provider profiles – enabling the Bronson team to showcase skill, expertise, and the unique personality of their care teams. Profiles include dynamically-controlled lists of accepted insurance plans by location and calls-to-action that drive visitors to MyChart to communicate online with their provider.

The directory also integrates seamlessly with news, events, location and service pages on Bronson’s site, allowing their team to dynamically promote providers on related pages, within high traffic sections and directly in search results. Patient stories are also dynamically displayed from the Bronson Positivity microsite due to a thoughtful strategy between Geonetric’s digital marketing and design teams.

Meet Your Doctors in a Whole New Way

In 2016, Bronson added a helpful way for patients to be even more informed when choosing a doctor by posting short “get to know” videos in the provider directory. These showcase each provider’s personality, special interests, and commitment to their patients, community, and work. The effort has resulted in increased engagement and time spent on the site.

With a strong foundation in place, the Bronson marketing team took providers’ profiles to another level in 2017. Observing the emerging consumer need for transparency, Bronson partnered with Geonetric to dynamically integrate patient ratings and reviews data from another vendor partner, National Research Corporation (NRC), into each provider profile.

All of these elements exemplify a patient-centered strategy for choosing doctors using qualification and selection criteria.

Enhanced Results in Search

Bronson wanted to ensure all the hard work that went into improving the provider profile user experience was easily accessible to organic search users, who make up a bulk of healthcare traffic across the web. Geonetric added schema to the provider profiles, making it easier for search engines to connect user queries to specific profile pages.

The digital marketing team at Geonetric also developed a keyword portfolio, which guided the development of more robust and search-friendly HTML page titles and page descriptions for all Bronson providers and locations.

After the metadata was live, provider profiles saw a double-digit increase in organic search entrances, which helps solidify the profiles with Google indexing and ranking, since Google and other search engines do factor click-through rate in ranking a page’s value.

In addition, many other measures helped to demonstrate success and a worthwhile ROI for the many enhancements made to provider profiles. Bounce rates decreased, session duration went up and user engagement increased. In particular on smartphones and tablets.

A Partner to Keep an Eye on Analytics

Analytics and insights are a major component for tracking success, identifying opportunities, evaluating user engagement, optimization and more. Bronson Healthcare and Geonetric’s digital marketing teams have worked closely together to leverage the best and most cost-effective tools and practices.

Together, they have continued to create new and improve existing reporting, conversion tracking, and data processing solutions. All of these pieces enable them to continue evolving and delivering the best online healthcare experience to the consumers of today and those of tomorrow.