Local SEO Creates Healthy Growth For Providence St. Joseph

Demonstrating the value of local SEO was critical in achieving political buy-in from the thousands of clinics and providers throughout the organization. We started with a pilot project in the Seattle Metro area in April of 2017. Initial work focused on primary care providers and urgent care locations – two of the highest value beneficiaries of local search performance.

We claimed listings for every entity and worked with providers and clinics to gather the requisite information and assets to fully optimize these profiles. We ensured all NAP (name, address and phone number) data was consistent among all key online citations, added descriptions, photos and category designations (among many other things). Importantly, we also leveraged an “appointment booking” feature originally intended by Google for restaurants and other service businesses to prominently offer local search users the ability to make an appointment.

Within six months of pilot start, nearly one third of all appointment bookings for our test area originated from local search (where previously only 1% originated from local search).

• Discovery Searches: +47%
• Total actions: +39%
• Website Clicks: +44%
• Directions: +50%
• Phone Calls: +38%

Buoyed by this success, we designed and evangelized a strategy to expand local SEO systemwide to more than 2,000 locations and providers – and received organizational buy-in to do so.

• Total actions: +35%
• Website clicks: +71%
• Directions: +15%
• Phone calls: +51%

With the bulk of clinic and provider listings claimed and optimized, we turned our attention to improving the conversion funnel on our local landing pages to maximize the value of our surging local traffic.

After benchmarking best-in-class booking experiences and conducting user research, the team recommended creation of an entirely streamlined online appointment booking experience and were immediately presented with two, critical problems:

• The data required to power this new booking experience existed in disparate and unrelated systems and had never been combined in a single data store
• The Providence engineering team had an 18-month backlog and couldn’t support this work

The Wheelhouse DMG engineering team resolved this dilemma. Their work included:

• UX design and development of a several test variations for new booking experience
• Development and support for a system to provide real-time, continuous integration and indexation of physician, location and appointment availability data in a new data lake to support the booking experience.

We then ran dozens of CRO experiments focused on reducing friction and increasing conversion rates throughout the local user flow. Our experiments included:

• Designing and deploying appointment booking functionality for location pages, which immediately increased appointment bookings from local traffic by 40%
• Designing and deploying interstitial appointment modals on provider profile pages to enable a single-click entrance to the booking engine from Google My Business profiles. This work resulted in a staggering 515% increase in online appointment bookings for physicians.
• Incremental refinements to the appointment booking experience, augmenting our data lake to surface information previously unavailable for the booking experience, but of significant value to end users (e.g. insurance accepted by a physician, “next available appointment” display, etc.) and testing to determine the optimal manner and time to introduce this information to maximize conversion rates. The cumulative effect of these tests was a further increase of 632% in appointment bookings

With more than a year’s worth of extraordinary local SEO performance data to work with, we conducted an audit and analysis to determine which GMB features, when fully optimized, appeared to correlate most with gains in visibility and engagement. The result of this analysis was clear: profiles that were fully optimized to leverage all relevant GMB features drove disproportionate performance.