Healthcare Rollup Case Study

Company Background

The client is a private equity-backed roll-up merger of hearing health clinics. The client is experiencing rapid growth, and in 2019, has more than 230 clinics located in 25 states. The clinics are staffed by licensed audiologists generating revenue through hearing assessments and sales of hearing devices.

Business Challenges

Following a merger which added a 160 clinics, the client had multiple 3rd-party marketing services providers, no unified marketing strategy, and a small, traditionally focused marketing organization. The client’s business objective is to leverage their digital footprint to drive online scheduling of hearing assessments in the individual clinics. Through the hearing assessments, and one-to-one interaction between patient and provider, the opportunity to drive revenue through the dispensing of hearing devices is most likely to occur.

The company was burdened by 96 separate website domains, including multiple brands, across 25 states. This created an exceptionally difficult environment for the organization to manage and increased digital marketing expense as efforts were duplicated across many domains. Execution and accountability to results were challenged by the many entities involved and exacerbated by poor relationships with existing digital marketing vendors that exhibited a lack of transparency, communication, and results.

Individual clinics weren’t ranking consistently in their local environments, paid search efforts were diffuse and marginally successful, and a lack of clear and consistent reporting restricted data-based decision making. There are no organization-wide investment in organic search, commonly search engine optimization (SEO). While some locations or groups of clinics had invested in SEO, the expense involved with ranking dozens of individual brands and websites was simply too high and a more efficient solution was required.

Finally, to adapt to the growth goals of the organization, a digital marketing environment that allows new locations to be quickly integrated and successful with ongoing marketing activities was required.

Solutions

To achieve the goals presented by the client, RefractROI recommended a WordPress Multisite environment. This is a powerful solution, as it allows for consolidated management of multiple websites under one domain.

• Consolidated website management and site architecture across all locations while still maintaining the individual brand, name, and local language of the individual clinics.
• A structure that consolidates website Domain Authority to allow each location in the network to rank competitively locally, builds the strength of the national brand, and immediately impacts the marketing strength of newly acquired providers.
• Templated digital marketing assets that can be applied to new providers, reducing the time and expense spent on each location.
• Individualized conversion tracking and reporting to assess digital marketing effectiveness and ROI across individual locations.

SEO services were also recommended and segregated by the goals of the local clinics and the national website. Local SEO services address the Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP) consistency and ensure locations rank naturally for non-branded traffic within 5 miles of the physical locations. National SEO Services are designed to achieve a high Domain Authority for the client’s “umbrella” site, to which all local “child” sites are linked. This structure allows for Domain Authority achieved at the national level to be dispersed across each location in the network, and vise versa.

The WordPress Multisite infrastructure and leveraging both Local and National organic search has brought greater efficiency and improved results for the client. The Multisite environment is a robust content management system requiring little effort to edit website content changes across both the “umbrella” and “child” sites. All acquired content and links support the entire structure, not just individual domains. Individual locations and brands are represented uniquely and accurately. These activities have helped achieve high national rankings, traffic, and conversions for the client’s “umbrella” site.

Results

Customers now find the client and its network of clinics for what they do, not for who they are. Not only are they ranking on more generic search terms, but they are ranking higher in search results. The results below were realized 90 days after the site was launched.