Providence – Local SEO Phase 3: Redesigning the Appointment Booking Experience
Redesigning a healthcare system’s appointment booking experience to increase conversions.
Challenge
Providence wanted to deliver an more intuitive appointment booking experience to increase conversion rate and delivers better patient experiences.
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.
This case study focuses on Phase 3 of our long-running Local SEO strategy project. At this stage in the engagement, we’ve optimized Local SEO across the system and our work is driving significantly more traffic via local listings. In Phase 3, we turn to our Technical team to leverage first-party data, technical and UX improvements to drive huge additional performance gains.
358%
Increase in appointment bookings YoY
386%
Increase in Location Page Conversion rate
18mo
Engineering Backlog Avoided
Approach
We architected an appointment booking experience that simultaneously improved the patient experience and reduced the marketing team’s reliance on internal developers.
Wheelhouse recommended a streamlined online appointment booking experience but 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 developed a solution to warehouse and serve physician availability logic directly into a redesigned appointment booking experience.
Outcomes
Our solution significantly increased Providence’s online appointment booking metrics.
The approach that we developed enabled us to feed real-time data about physician, location, and appointment availability data into the appointment booking experience. It also enabled us to quickly run dozens of CRO experiments focused on reducing friction and increasing conversion rates throughout the local user flow. This ultimately led to an astounding 358% increase in online appointment bookings.
“Wheelhouse epitomizes the true meaning of the word “partner”.”
– Jill Sato, Swedish/ Providence
