Locator & SEO Case Study: Healthcare Provider Locator

Introduction

This healthcare provider approached MetaLocator with a requirement to replace a series of physician profile pages that were fraught with problems including:

• Poor SEO performance
• Constant data discrepancies
• Inconsistent branding and display

The healthcare provider was under distinct and immediate pressure to respond strongly to physician complaints of incorrect data. 

Customer Profile

Their Healthcare System is a leading healthcare organization based in the United States. Established in the 1950s, this healthcare provider has grown to become one of the premier healthcare providers in the Southern US, offering a comprehensive range of medical services to residents and visitors alike.

The provider is renowned for its commitment to delivering high-quality, patient-centered care across a broad spectrum of specialties, including primary care, emergency medicine, surgery, oncology, cardiology, orthopedics, neurology, and more. The organization operates two acute care hospitals along with numerous outpatient facilities, clinics, and medical offices strategically located throughout the region.

Project Objectives

The healthcare provider needed MetaLocator to ensure that their provider locator tool displays accurate and up-to-date information about physicians and healthcare facilities within their network. This includes details such as locations, contact information, specialties, and hours of operation.  They required a clear and reliable connection between the locator and their data sources to replace a patchwork of unreliable tools and workflows.  In addition to this immediate need, their requirements included:

• Clear and robust data pipeline: The healthcare provider needed a reliable data feed that supported CSV integration, in addition to pulling data from their credentialing system (MDStaff) and the Reviews from Ratings.MD.  The data pipeline should support daily reporting on record assimilation, including audit trail support such as logging, timestamps and field-level source attribution.
• Display, Manage and Moderate Reviews:  The solution should seamlessly integrate with the healthcare provider’s existing patient management or electronic health records (EHR) system to ensure that provider reviews and ratings are linked to the correct healthcare professionals.   The solution should also include a moderation and approval workflow that allows the healthcare provider’s administrators to review and approve provider reviews before they are published publicly. This helps ensure that reviews are accurate, respectful, and compliant with their guidelines. 
• Enhanced User Experience: MetaLocator provided a customized search interface that can be tailored to match their branding, website design and user requirements. By creating a user-friendly interface, the healthcare provider improved the overall experience for patients searching for healthcare providers, leading to increased satisfaction and engagement for their audience.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The healthcare provider required optimized provider and region-level pages for search engines.

Approach & Implementation

MetaLocator worked with the healthcare provider’s staff to determine detailed requirements by following a time-tested Enterprise onboarding process.  Our onboarding process has been refined to a predictable, well-organized program that helped them organize the teams, resources and assets required to succeed.

MetaLocator leveraged our Locator product, our Reviews and Ratings features, our Directory and Location pages features.

• Complete Design Services: MetaLocator’s design team provided a complete design package for all application states, including mobile and desktop profiles for review and approval by the company’s staff.  The designs incorporated the provided brand standards and a simplified UX targeted toward their 65-and-older primary demographic.

• Location and Region Pages: MetaLocator built a series of optimized pages for each provider, city and state based on the approved design. These pages included meta tags, schema markup, and structured data. By implementing these SEO best practices, the healthcare provider improved the visibility of their physician pages in search engine results, making it easier for patients to find relevant healthcare providers.
• Ratings & Reviews: MetaLocator leveraged an integration with Ratings.MD, a popular review aggregator to insert review summaries and details into the MetaLocator application, which provided for a layer of moderation and filtering in addition to highly valuable content for Physician profile pages.

• Geolocation and Mapping: MetaLocator included a complete searchable locator with geolocation and mapping capabilities, allowing the healthcare provider to display providers on an interactive map interface with correct and easy-to-use results. The Locator helps patients easily locate nearby healthcare facilities and even navigate to their medical offices.
• Analytics and Reporting: MetaLocator provided analytics and reporting tools to track user interactions with the provider locator and physician pages. The healthcare provider now has insights into search trends, user behavior, and conversion metrics, enabling them to make data-driven decisions to further optimize their online presence.

Impact

The healthcare provider is no longer plagued with constant flow data-related support issues and has complete alignment with their source data, allowing them to focus on core service delivery and improvement.  

Physicians are reporting vastly increased satisfaction with the individual profiles which users are reaching the profile pages directly from Google searches.

Their location pages received immediate and fast-growing adoption by search engines in the within the first 30 days of launch as evidenced by MetaLocator’s in-app reporting features:

Conclusion

Locators overlap with many different industries, technologies, processes and standards.  MetaLocator helps organizations of all sizes and industries navigate a successful locator program.  The concepts and features outlined in this case study can be applied to nearly any industry.