10 Best Practices to Improve Your Healthcare Location Strategy 

If patients encounter roadblocks while searching your locations, those issues signal more than a directory design problem. They become a barrier to helping patients find the care they need, often when they’re under stress and looking for answers as quickly as possible. 

Here are some best practices to follow when rethinking your location strategy and how to take your location profiles from a repository for contact information to a valuable part of the care journey.

1. Highlight access to care, not just location information 

Reframe your location strategy as part of your organization’s broader mission: connecting patients to the right care, in the right place, as easily as possible. To do that, your location listings should clearly communicate what services you offer, where those services are available, and how they can access them. 

Design your location content around patient access and decision making, not simply your organizational structure. By prioritizing clarity and convenience of care over internal hierarchies, you’ll provide healthcare consumers with the information they’re truly looking for, not just a listing of addresses and phone numbers. 

2. Start with an audit of existing location content 

With your renewed focus on access to care, it’s time to audit your current location listings.  

A full location audit should include: 

• A full location content inventory across your site 

• A UX assessment to see how users are interacting with your location content, how they arrive at your site, when they leave, etc. 

• An SEO and search traffic analysis 

• An assessment of content inconsistencies and duplication across services, providers, and directories 

An audit like this can uncover common location strategy issues, such as locations scattered across multiple pages, inconsistent naming conventions, and unclear relationships between services and facilities.  

3. Establish a clear location taxonomy 

Defining and categorizing your locations by patient intention, rather than internal org charts, is another step toward ensuring your location strategy is focused on care access. 

Potential location types include: 

• Hospitals 

• Multi-specialty outpatient builds 

• Service line-specific clinics 

• Labs and imaging centers 

This process also gives you an opportunity to decide what shouldn’t be categorized as a location, such as internal departments or corporate headquarters. 

4. Create profiles for each location with patient engagement 

A rule of thumb we’ve seen work for other health systems is that if patients interact directly with a department or service line, it deserves its own location profile, even if it’s within a larger building or facility. 

For multi-specialty buildings, patients often care less about the facility itself and more about the specific clinic or office they need to visit. In those cases, we suggest creating an individual location profile for clinics with: 

• Unique hours 

• A direct phone number 

• Separate scheduling or online booking 

• A separate entrance or suite within the building 

Let real-world patient behavior determine when to split locations. Avoid overloading a single page with dozens of services that function differently, as this could complicate a user’s care journey. 

5. Consolidate microsites into location profiles 

Many health systems fall into the trap of creating standalone microsites to explain complex locations, like multi-specialty buildings or campuses. Over time, this can lead to duplicate content, SEO competition between internal pages, and an increased maintenance burden that can use valuable marketing resources. 

Instead, create robust location profiles that offer structured, search-friendly location data, page-level navigation, and consistent branding. 

These modular, in-depth location profiles reduce fragmentation while making it easier for patients to navigate, search engines to crawl, and marketing teams to maintain and scale. 

6. Design location search for multiple use cases 

Not all healthcare consumers search for care in the same way. Users can arrive at your location profiles in a variety of ways, like locals searching by a location name they already know, or newcomers searching for a particular service line or care “near me”.  

Your location strategy should support all of these scenarios, and offer multiple entry points, whether a patient is searching for a location by name, by service, by proximity, or by geography. You can do this a variety of ways, including: 

• Placing simple, prominent search bars on your location pages 

• Offering filtering by facility type and services 

• Allowing ZIP code or geolocation-based search 

• Linking to high-traffic locations 

• Showing useful info like addresses without requiring patients to click out of a main location landing page 

By showing key details up front and providing patients with multiple ways to find locations, you can minimize friction and increase the likelihood that they’ll select your organization for care. 

7. Optimize location profiles for clarity and action 

The visual hierarchy of your location profiles plays a major role in helping patients find what they need, fast. Your location profile design should emphasize key information like phone number, today’s hours, address, and directions, while offering user-centric features like click-to-call, map integration, and embedded online scheduling. 

To test your location profile design, see if you can answer the following questions within a few seconds of landing on the page: 

• Is this the right place for my needs? 

• Are they open? 

• How do I contact them or book an appointment? 

• How do I get there? 

8. Building location data for findability 

If patients are coming to your location profiles via organic search, they may not be getting the full picture of the care you provide. Third-party platforms sometimes create unofficial, competing location profiles, and even within your own site, inconsistent data can weaken search visibility. 

In a time when AI-driven search is on the rise, prioritizing structured data and findability is more important than ever. 

To fix this, centralize your official location profiles, eliminate duplicates, add structured data to your pages, and align your locations with key third-party platforms such as Google Business Profiles or Yelp. Ensure you’re pulling from one authoritative source of truth for location data and push that consistency across your website, social media channels, and third-party directories. 

9. Create governance guidelines 

Don’t stop after your location profiles are redesigned. Document guidelines such as when to create a location profile, which data belongs at which level, how to handle new locations from acquisitions or partnerships, naming conventions, required information, and branding rules.  

By developing these location standards early on, you can prevent fragmentation as your organization grows. 

10. Be in it for the long haul 

Location strategy is not a one-and-done project. Even after launching your new site, auditing locations and contact information, managing external listings, and being prepared for new locations is an ongoing process.  

With a scalable structure in place, future growth becomes manageable instead of chaotic. Treat location strategy as a living system — one that improves over time, rather than something you “finish.” 

A strong healthcare location strategy goes beyond maps and addresses. It improves access to care, reduces confusion in complex systems, supports findability, and presents a unified brand that stays consistent even as organizations grow.  

If you’re looking for a roadmap for updating your location strategy, Geonetric can help. Reach out to our team today to learn about our digital solutions!