How We Used Our SEO Expertise to Increase Organic Traffic & Appointments for A Leading Hospital Network in India

About the Client

It’s a leading healthcare services provider in India with 10+ hospitals providing treatment across 25+ specialties. The NABH and ISO accredited hospitals provide the best-in-class services to all patients at the highest standards of medical excellence.

The areas of specialty include- Cardiology & Cardiac Surgery, Oncology, Minimal Access Metabolic & Bariatric Surgery, Neurology & Neurosurgery, Orthopedics & Joint Replacement, Renal Transplant, Bone Marrow Transplant, Aesthetic & Reconstructive Surgery and more.

The Challenge

Patients seek out the centers for quality care at home and in hospitals. The website was already pulling in organic traffic, but the number was not satisfactory.

The main challenge was to further increase organic growth through:

• Leverage organic searches to target a wider audience base
• After medic update it was a challenge to optimize the website as per EAT guidelines.
• Grab the eyeballs against intense competition amongst healthcare centers like Apollo Hospitals, BLK Hospital, Practo, DHRC, Medanta etc. We needed to grab the eyeballs by using:
  • More than 300 researched and identified keywords
  • 1000+ pages.
• Increase the number of booked appointment - for 10 competitive specialties including – Cancer, Cardiology, Liver Transplant, Orthopedics, Neurology, etc.

The Solution

When we first analyzed the website, we realized instantly that the site is humungous - with 7000+ pages. Instead of spreading ourselves thin, we began by focusing on the landing and supporting pages (1000+) of the identified 10 specialties. We spearheaded an information-focused campaign about diseases including identifying the symptoms, suggested treatment plans, etc.to increase the value of on-site pages for users and search engines as well.

We identified the following opportunities to scale traffic & ranking:

Best SEO practices

We identified 300+ keywords with a monthly search volume of around 1.6 million. Based on the keywords identified, we mapped target landing pages to be created and optimized.

• While the task was mammoth, we broke down the structure into smaller, more manageable targets.
• A massive off-page activity was undertaken wherein we created hundreds of content pieces per month, totaling more than 1200 in one year.
• Optimizing the metadata, Speed of the website and existing content along with other SEO best practices were adopted.

Managing Google Updates

We created an information-rich strategy to strengthen the website ranking on the principles of Google updates.

In the first week of Aug 2018, Google released one of its broad core algorithm updates, later called ‘medic update’. The update impacted many medical sites including our client’s website. However, with the medic update, we turned our full attention to the EAT principle and took the following steps:

• Got accreditation badges shown at the main website header and footer.
• Optimized testimonial section of main specialty pages
• Embedded testimonial videos from client’s YouTube channel on main specialty pages
• Embedded testimonial videos on ‘condition & treatment’ pages.

Content Structure and Optimization

We knew that leveraging information-based content was necessary to achieve top results on SERPs – it helped the client’s pages began featuring on rich snippets. Here are some of the steps we took:

• In-depth research was undertaken to address patients’ queries, searches and fears.
• Created new city pages for the 10 targeted specialties.
• The content was factual, to the point. It was targeted towards building trust between the user and Hospital.
• From an SEO perspective, we focused on improving indexing, and adding expert videos for EAT value.
• Specific keywords were used to help users reach the bottom of the sales funnel quickly and without wasting any time. For example, a user searching for best oncologist in Delhi was instantly taken to the pages featuring oncologists in the client’s Delhi hospital.

Conversion

In order to improve the conversion rate on site:

• Improved existing forms to make the ‘book appointment’ process easier and hassle-free.
• Incorporated “Book an appointment” sticky buttons on the footer and header of specialty, treatment and doctor listing pages. This helped us to improve the number of booked appointments.

The Results

Keywords Ranking:

From the month of Sep'18 to Aug'19 we saw a gigantic improvement [85%] in keywords ranking in the top 10 that have massive search volume growth.

Keywords ranking data from SEMrush -

Share of voice data comparison -

Overall Traffic Growth:

Overall, we saw a fantastic improvement of 51% of organic traffic as compared to the last year for the 12 months period Sep’18-Aug’19 vs Sep’17-Aug’18.

Note - The absolute numbers have been indexed in order to facilitate the comparison of growth over 12 months.

Traffic Growth Specialty-wise:

The organic search ranking for targeted specialties saw a major upward movement in top 10 results, and so organic traffic also increased.

Booked Appointments:

As per Google Analytics, we delivered 217% increase in booked appointment through organic sessions as compared to the last year for the 12 month period Sep’18-Aug’19 vs Sep’17-Aug’18.

Note - The absolute numbers have been indexed in order to facilitate the comparison of growth over 12 months.