How to increase the number of patients with the help of SEO? Clinic "Biomed" case

This case is about SEO-promotion of a medical clinic. We will prove that:

• SEO is very important and works in medicine;
• it is important to listen to the advice and recommendations of contractors.

Features of the customer's business

Our customer is a medical center in Lviv with a long history, over 20 years old. The main feature of the Biomed center is a whole range of the most modern diagnostic technologies, including Voll diagnostics, spectral dynamic diagnostics and air therapy, segmental diagnostics, ultrasound examination of the heart, blood vessels and other organs. In addition, the center employs a neurologist, pediatrician, gynecologist, reflexologist, urologist, pulmonologist, surgeon, endocrinologist, orthopedic traumatologist. It is a family center with comprehensive diagnostic services and a laboratory.

Note that services are subject to change. For example, recently the service of ultrasound and collection of tests has been added, while dietetics has disappeared. You need to respond quickly: remove an irrelevant service and make a landing page for a new one.

Customer challenges:

The center approached us in 2015 with the task of improving the site performance, increasing the number of appointments from the site, and strengthening knowledge about the brand. At that time, the site was working on a self-written CMS, without an admin panel.

Home page

And this is what the landing page of a pediatric neurologist looked like.

Small text font, lack of information, active phone numbers, CTA buttons.

We advised the customer not to take on the promotion of the https://www.biomed.lviv.ua/, тdomain, because it is just a transition page to three different sites: a medical center, pharmacies and optics, but to focus on promoting the subdomain https://center.biomed.lviv.ua/.

The new site customer got only in the spring of 2017. Sprava helped only in promoting the medical center.

Promotion region: Lviv and region.

Language: Ukrainian.

Main search queries: diagnostic center in lviv, medical center in lviv, gynecologist lviv, ultrasound lviv.

Seasonality: there is a demand increasing in January, in June-July. The demand for medical services is stable from August to the end of December.

Data for December 2015:

• visitors per month: 410, of which 73.5% are from organic search;
• devices: 68.8% - PC users, 21.9% - smartphones and 9.28% - the share of tablets;
• the bounce rate according to the metric was 9.8%.

Weaknesses and strengths of the project

We faced the following difficulties:

• The medical center did not have a marketer at the time of cooperation. It was necessary to coordinate all actions with the head physician, who did not trust SEO and did not understand the principles of promotion. And the first thing we had to do for the customer was to overcome this distrust and come to a certain understanding of the criteria for the success of the promotion. Now the head physician controls being in the top by queries and the number of orders from the site.
• The old site was not adapted, and it was quite difficult to promote it. We advised the developer of the new site on the structure and semantics.
• The customer wanted to advance on the info queries “what to do if the head hurts”, “pain in the leg”, but there was no budget for writing articles on the site’s blog for these queries. So this tactic didn't work.
• The services of doctors are very changeable, and it is necessary to revise the semantic core and add new queries, remove old ones.

The strength of the project: the reputation of doctors, the focus on family medicine, the complexity of the service: tests-diagnostics-treatment.

What should a medical center website look like?

In each case, we try to provide information for those who want to make a website or redesign and optimize an existing website.

For example, the task is to make a series of articles on non-traditional diagnostics for the Biomed Center. You can make a list of questions on this topic, take an interview via Zoom, Skype, and even by phone with the function of recording a conversation with the head physician. And based on his experience, his answers, make a material where the chief physician will be the author. Decipher, approve and publish. It will be better also because in the stories of real people the reader will recognize their own problems, they will understand that there is a different approach to diagnosis and treatment.

What we did to promote Biomed?

Technical works

• Correction of errors in the development of the site: duplicate pages, bugs in the display of individual elements, correction of addressing, etc.
• On the main page the placement of blocks in the mobile was corrected - they displayed a block with videos and reviews, corrected the slider, and removed errors in the footer.
• In mobile the button for making an appointment from the adaptive menu was added to the header.
• For the accessibility of all items and subitems of service categories a separate internal scroll bar was added for the menu in the adaptive version.
• On the service pages large header template images that ended up on the preview page were removed. Photos of the center itself were added to the texts and adapted for viewing on mobile devices.
• We expanded the structure of the site, as new services were introduced in the medical center, plus in order to make it convenient for potential patients to find the information they need. For example, the ultrasound service was made a separate category and different types of ultrasound diagnostics were created page by page.
• Filling the site with articles on the topics of the medical center: the topics were discussed together, written by a copywriter, optimized by a SPRAVA specialist. Articles were proofread and accepted by a doctor or a marketer from Biomed.
• Adding on the service pages the ability to display a preview of the pages of doctors, to which the patient will come for a particular service, has been improved.
• Improving the display of tables with prices and buttons for making an appointment on the service pages in desktop and mobile, 
• Creating a separate section "Prices" with categories of prices for various services and herbal remedies.
• Creating a keyword search functionality on the site, which also works in the adaptive version.
• Switching the site from http to a secure connection protocol https.
• connection to the website a form for collecting data for a callback from Binotel according to our recommendations.
• At this time, the possibility of displaying tables with prices in special thematic blocks that open / close on the pages of the “Prices” section is being finalized.
• In the near future, we plan to start designing the "Question / Answer" block on all pages of the services for further display of extended snippets in the search.

SEO work

We have developed and adjusted the semantic core (SC) for the regional queries necessary for promotion. The first SC consisted of 33 queries on thirteen landing pages. The priority areas for promotion at the beginning of the work were:

• promotion of the homepage of the diagnostic center and brand queries;
• chiropractor, homeopath, neurologist and geneticist services pages.

We conducted checks in Yandex.Webmaster and Google Search Console, identified and eliminated errors.

We carried out work on the internal optimization of the site: filled in meta tags, worked out headings, worked out internal linking, optimized texts on all pages of the site, corrected errors and duplicates.

We supplemented the content on the landing pages and optimized it. See what the service page looks like now.

There is all the comprehensive information here: a description of the service, prices, answers to questions about preparing for the procedure, what is the procedure for.

Wrote and optimized articles for the "News on the site" section. For example, an article about preparing for an ultrasound includes answers to all questions and competent linking.

How do these articles work? A person gets an information request, reads and follows the links to the services page. If the price and conditions suit him, he makes an appointment. In another way, he reads competent informational articles on this resource and remembers the name of the Biomed center.

Work results

There are three main points that can give an answer to how successful website optimization is. These are positions (for which queries the site is at the TOPs of search engines), traffic (how many more people began to visit the site) and conversions (how many people did useful actions on the site: filled out a form, ordered a call back, made an appointment).

Positions

In June 2019, the customer switched to the SEO Plus promotion package. Then the customer's range of services changed, and in connection with this, we revised the semantics. But in January 2020, new queres were made and obsolete ones were removed. The task of the customer is to notify which services are being added and which are no longer relevant. Our task is to react sensitively and immediately update the semantic core.

Now 85% of site queries are in the top of the search results, for many positions the site is in the TOP-10 of Google search results.

At the same time, it was possible not only to bring the site to the TOP-5 of Google, but also to take the honorable first place in the search results:

• medical center on sykhov in Lviv
• complete examination of the body in Lviv
• price for a comprehensive survey in Lviv
• hydrocolonic therapy in Lviv
• geneticist in Lviv
• voll diagnostics in Lviv
• manual therapy of the spine in Lviv
• ovarian treatment in Lviv
• treatment of cervical erosion in Lviv
• tests in Lviv on sykhov
• price for liver elastography in Lviv
• gynecological ultrasound in Lviv
• veins ultrasound in Lviv
•  children's ultrasound in Lviv
• gastroscopy in Lviv

Also, from time to time, our customer's site is selected by Google for impressions in the zero position, as the most informative site for targeted user queries.

Prices for chiropractic in Lviv

Price for hydro colon therapy in Lviv

The price of elastography in Lviv

The price of a heartbeat in Lviv

Attendance (traffic)

Let's compare the traffic data from Google organic search:

As we know, in March 2020, an all-Ukrainian quarantine began, the reason for which was the rapidly growing number of cases of a new type of Covid-19 infection. But the customer continued to work on the site, improving the content even more and trying to help his patients in such a turbulent time.

That is, clicks from organic (free, non-advertising) traffic in 2020 increased by 41.87% compared to 2019.

Also for comparison: the dynamics of search traffic by months for 2017-2018.

Analytics screenshot: traffic channels 01.01 – 31.12.2018 vs. 01.01 – 31.12.2017.

Traffic channels for the period 01.01 – 31.12.2019 compared to 01.01 – 31.12.2018.

Conversions

Online making an appointment of patients who first came from a Google search (this statistics does not take into account appointments that were made by users who came to the site from other sources):

That is, in a year the number of appointments from the search has increased by almost 2-3 times. The number of appointments from patients who went to the site from other sources (contextual advertising, direct referrals, social networks, etc.) also increased.

The increase in the number of making appointments from different sources was also facilitated by the simplification of the appointment form itself on the site.

As for statistics from Google Analytics on clicks to phone numbers, at the beginning of 2019 the customer changed the previous numbers to multi channel one, but we tracked the number of clicks on it anyway. So, the number of calls:

That is, the number of calls from patients who came from the search increased by 3 times, but the number of calls from patients who came to the site from other sources also increased. As a result, a high quality improvement of the site gave the medical center a significant increase in patient calls from the site by phone. We will note that the phones on the site are clickable, that is, patients call directly from the site.

According to statistics, by source of first interaction with the site (that is, from which source the user first came to the site), in 2020, people who switched from Google organic search made 1579 calls.

Don’t you still believe in SEO, Doctor?

Working with the project showed that it is important for a medical center to be well represented on the Internet and have a well designed informative website that would convey to patients all its features and benefits. And it's not just about increasing the earnings of a particular customer. As the situation with the epidemic of 2020 has clearly shown, medicine is the most important factor in the safe and prosperous functioning of the whole society. And high quality interaction and service, human relationship, effective treatment and assistance to people always pay off financially. We just need to make sure that as many people as possible know about it!

Word of mouth has worked, is working and will continue to work, however, there is “but” here too. In situations when it is safer to be at home than to go and ask for recommendations from friends and acquaintances, the Internet comes to the rescue. And what is written about you there will work almost the same as a recommendation.

There are a number of important arguments why a good site works even better than recommendations:

1. Very often, patients are not ready to admit their illness not only to their immediate environment, but also to their relatives, so it is easier for them to go to the Internet to look for a solution to the problem than to look for someone else's recommendations.
2. There are patients who need the help of medical specialists of a narrow profile. Getting such a recommendation is almost impossible. And if you give information on the website that rare or complex diagnoses can be cured in the clinic, then the person in need will be able to find it and seek help.
3. It often happens that the doctor (even on the recommendation) is not suitable or the treatment did not work, and you need to look for another specialist. And here again well designed information on a person's problem on the websites of medical institutions can be helpful for him.

There are also other reasons why patients go to look for information on the Internet. But the main thing to remember is that if the site of the medical center is not designed and optimized properly, then it is unlikely that it will be able to attract the attention of potential patients in the search results.

Here is a review from our customer.

And if you need to promote or develop a medical website from scratch, please contact us