Case Study:

Marketing Mojo Helps Sentara MJH Reach Local Patients Through SEO: Organic Traffic Up 17% and New Visitors by 16%


Overview

Sentara Martha Jefferson Hospital (MJH) is a hospital located in Charlottesville, VA and is part of the Sentara network of hospitals. It competes locally with the world-renowned hospital offerings at the University of Virginia, making it critical for MJH to focus on organic search visibility. After being acquired by the Sentara organization, MJH noticed that many results for non-emergency services-related searches in Charlottesville yielded other Sentara locations further afield, such as Hampton Roads or Northern Virginia, instead of Charlottesville and MJH. MJH needed to regain organic visibility for its services so that patients could be connected with local physicians and treatment.

Solution

After performing a comprehensive SEO audit, Marketing Mojo identified ways to improve search indexing and ranking factors and ways to ensure that the MJH site would appear before other Sentara hospitals for geographic searches in Charlottesville. MJH then began a full-service SEO engagement with Marketing Mojo to work with the MJH web development team to manage a prioritized list of recommended changes that included:
  • Optimizing page load speed to improve rankings. Many of the images on the page were far larger than required for display, delaying load time.
  • Adding the address of the hospital to its pages to help Google identify that the MJH pages were relevant to Charlottesville.
  • Implementing organizational schema on the pages.
  • Correcting broken links with 301 redirects.
  • Optimizing written content, including title tags, meta descriptions and overall page content.

Results

After only some of the changes were implemented, MJH began to see results. In the first three quarters of 2017, Marketing Mojo increased organic traffic to the Charlottesville pages (the MJH pages) on the Sentara site by 17% while at the same time, the bounce rate of these pages decreased by 47%, indicating that the changes were helping MJH to reach a more relevant targeted audience. New visitors in this time period also increased by almost 16%. Additionally, there were indirect benefits with Google organic search traffic to the site’s “find a doctor” page increasing by 11%, and helping MJH to reach an additional 19% new prospective patients.