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Success Story

The MetroHealth System: Organic Search Brings SEO Advantages and Budget Benefits

MetroHealth Website Meets Competitive Challenges

The MetroHealth System has seventeen hospital locations in the northeast Ohio and Cleveland area – a very competitive healthcare market dominated by the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospital, which is in close physical proximity to MetroHealth. These are organizations with significant marketing budgets and a robust outreach to the surrounding area. MetroHealth leadership wanted to increase the system’s awareness in the immediate geographical area. The target market was important, but it was also important to be found even beyond Ohio, by searchers on the Web looking for specific treatments and surgeries.

Both Cleveland Clinic and University Hospital offer the same medical services as MetroHealth, but with the difference that MetroHealth is the only Level One adult trauma center in northeast Ohio, as well as the only Level One adult burn care center and the only Level Two pediatric burn care center. While other systems offer trauma and burn centers, MetroHealth wanted to promote their status and the certifications they’ve worked hard to reach and maintain.

Matching or even attempting to surpass these major players in building awareness and generating traffic on a much more modest budget required creative thinking and careful planning. A major step was a highly usable, transactional website that allowed visitors to find what they wanted and conduct their business online. And, since general use of mobile devices has now surpassed more traditional access to the Internet, the site had to be mobile to match potential visitors’ on-the-go lifestyles.

When MetroHealth decided to redesign their website to expand their reach throughout the area, they turned to CareTech’s Web team for innovative design and construction and to Peak Positions, CareTech’s SEO partner, for a state-of-the-art search effort.

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Why Organic Search?

Knowing that majority of new visitors come to a site through search, MetroHealth had previously been struggling because they were working with a much smaller budget to spend on search. The larger healthcare organizations in the area could well afford paid Web advertising, such as pay-per-click, Google AdWords. In fact, healthcare keywords are some of the most expensive keywords within the AdWord system – four or five times what they are in many other categories. And prices are often set by what can become expensive bidding wars.

Seven out of ten clicks occur in organic search results, so MetroHealth saw the organic traffic side as something they could really work on with the appropriate vendor to maximize content and page positions – all without breaking the bank. By concentrating on keywords that are present naturally in the page content and show up in the analytics, they were freed from dependence on paid AdWords, allowing them to allocate budget in other areas. Since organic is preferred by Google, organic results, especially in healthcare, translates into trust and validation of the site by Google – in effect endorsing the site to a healthcare searcher.

Laying the Groundwork

The CareTech Web team produced a new design with clean navigation that doesn’t overwhelm and frustrate searchers, causing them to wander away. The site started with somewhat of an advantage, since the URL, www.MetroHealth.org, has “health” in the domain name, plus Google favors “.org.” So once the newly redesigned site was launched, MetroHealth’s Kate Ruggiero, Senior Digital Communications Manager, and Nancy Fishburn, Director of Shared Services, looked at how organic traffic was flowing on a weekly and monthly basis to get a feel for the general search terms people repeatedly used. They monitored the top performing pages, which typically were the same from month to month – location pages, provider pages, career opportunities – and which don’t need promoting because those pages perform well enough organically on their own.

Then the team concentrated on departments and services that weren’t getting as much traffic as they should be, likely because of local competitors taking over Google search results. They went through the analytics and pulled a number of terms related to the target pages.

Modifying Terms for Best Advantage

At this point, the MetroHealth team involved Jack Roberts, president and CEO of Peak Positions, in order to get the most out of organic search engine optimization and maximize the budget. They provided Roberts with the list of terms from their Google Analytics results, and he and his team went to work. They researched and investigated each term and produced an insightful report on whether the terms were worth pursuing or not.

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One of the larger health systems in the area was already dominating terms like “heart surgery” or “bypass surgery.” But the SEO team found other related or similar terms or synonyms that people might have been searching for. They modified the terms so MetroHealth would have the best advantage in ranking higher in Google search results instead of chasing terms that were unattainable.

Targeted Promotions

Peak Positions was provided with a range of organic terms to choose from and narrowed it down to fifteen or twenty really strong keywords. Traffic is monitored month to month, and weekly conference calls between the two teams are scheduled to keep tabs on performance. As long as traffic continues to increase, keywords are left in the campaign. When a keyword begins to “go stale” or not perform, then it is replaced with an alternative.

The CareTech and Peak Positions teams talk with the MetroHealth team about twice a month, noting what’s working and what’s not working. With this schedule, changes and updates can happen on regular ongoing basis, which is very critical to SEO. It is necessary to regularly monitor how search engines react, then make adjustments in order to make it easier for Google and the others to index the site and rank it. A well-designed SEO program should deliver rankings, traffic gains, benefits, and value for upwards of eighteen months before a major re-evaluation becomes necessary.

Ranking Responsive Design

Recently another factor has become significant to the always-changing Google algorithm: responsive design. With the enormous popularity of mobile devices (now surpassing desktops and laptops for search) websites that adapt their designs automatically to display content on all devices are favored by Google. With all things being equal, of the websites in Google’s database on a particular keyword, the site that is mobile-friendly is going to outrank the site that is not – by implication, it can be trusted more to render content and serve users in all browsers and devices. Accordingly, the new MetroHealth website was designed to be responsive from the beginning.

Accessibility Raises Trust

MetroHealth’s mobile-friendly website and its responsive design contributes to accessibility – a key point that also raises rankings. Mobile expands a website’s reach into impoverished and low-income areas where people who can’t afford laptops or desktops more than likely do have smart phones – and still search for healthcare information and services. In addition, accessibility is an issue for seniors, who typically search for and consume more healthcare than any other demographic group and who may have a custom browser, such as those for the

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visually impaired. Such capability also raises Google’s “trust” ranking of a website.

Results

In conjunction with SEO and healthcare-focused Web experts, like Peak Positions and CareTech Solutions, MetroHealth has improved the volume and quality of traffic to their website from search engines via “organic” or un-paid search results, while realizing a considerable budget advantage.

Over a recent six-month period in late 2014 and early 2015:

PROJECT STATISTICS

OVERALL SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC INCREASED BY 16%

ORGANIC SEARCH TRAFFIC IS UP BY 4.5%

NEW SITE VISITORS INCREASED BY 7%

LOCAL TRAFFIC (CLEVELAND) INCREASED BY 7%

TESTIMONIALS

“CareTech had been instrumental in redesigning our site and improving its performance. Our site traffic has grown immensely over the last year and a half since the site has been live, so just plugging in this new SEO campaign and all these plans has really been a positive thing. We’ve seen enormous growth in those (targeted) areas of the Web. And I know for certain, having been in this industry for a while, that we wouldn’t have seen that kind of page traffic had we not invested in the SEO effort ... I’m positive this is something we couldn’t have attained on our own.”

Kate RuggieroSenior Digital Communications Manager, The MetroHealth System

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