Providence – Local SEO Phase 1: The Swedish Hospital Pilot
Proving enterprise value of Local SEO.
Challenge
Demonstrate the value of Local SEO to achieve political buy-in from thousands of clinics.
With more than 2,000 locations, Providence St. Joseph Health is one of the largest healthcare systems in the U.S.
Wheelhouse DMG has worked with Providence since 2013, supporting a number of strategic engagements including analytics strategy and implementation, system-wide content strategy, strategic engineering, SEO and digital advertising.
In 2017, we were asked to develop and lead implementation of a new local SEO strategy for Providence. When our work began, local SEO was not unified by a wholistic strategy. GMB profiles were inconsistently claimed and populated – and no unified means of tracking either implementation or performance existed. Although the near-term goal was to increase local search visibility, the “gold standard” for local SEO performance was an increase in appointment bookings.
We started with a pilot project in the Seattle Metro area in April of 2017. Initial work focused on piloting the approach with Swedish Hospital primary care providers and urgent care locations – two of the highest value beneficiaries of local search performance.
This case study focuses on Phase 1 of our long-running Local SEO strategy project.
>30%
Appointment bookings originating from local search
47%
Increase in discovery searches from local search
50%
Increase in requests for directions
Approach
Optimize local listings by ensuring consistent NAP data, securing citations, adding photos and descriptions, and then enabling direct appointment booking.
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.
Outcomes
Nearly one third of all appointment bookings originated from local search within six months.
Our optimization work resulted in tremendous gains in local SEO performance and engagement within 6 months.
Appointment bookings from local search increased to nearly one third of total bookings for our test area, whereas previously less than 5% of bookings had originated from local search.
We also drove increases in other key areas – including a 47% lift in discovery searches, 39% more total actions, 44% more website clicks, 50% higher requests for directions, and a 38% bump in phone calls.
The comprehensive local listing optimization clearly demonstrated its ability to connect Providence with high-intent patients ready to book appointments. With the pilot a success, our next step was to initiate Phase 2 and roll it out across the enterprise.
“Wheelhouse epitomizes the true meaning of the word “partner”.”
– Jill Sato, Swedish/ Providence
