“Geonetric helped us take a strategic approach with our redesign. Their experts provided experienced, objective guidance at every turn and ensured our site met our organizational goals as well as kept the user in focus. Their VitalSite content management system is an ideal, stable platform for both our website and our content marketing hub, allowing the two to work together and create a seamless user experiences.”
Patrick Kane, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Communications, and Business Development
Cape Cod Healthcare
It had been three years since Cape Cod Health Care (CCHC), based in Hyannis, MA, redesigned their website. But their team had been planning months before the redesign officially started. From cross-team meetings to a marketing off-site to outline goals, the CCHC team knew what they wanted going into the process: to increase traffic and pages per session, improve engagement with their popular Cape Cod Health News hub, and focus on the consumer at every turn. With clear goals in place, CCHC’s long-time agency Geonetric got to work designing and building the site. But the strategic approach was just beginning.
Taking a Strategic Approach
Together, Geonetric and the CCHC team embarked on in-depth pre-launch strategy. The team invested in user-behavior data analysis, heatmapping, and scrollmapping, as well as performed usability testing on key elements of the new site, including tree testing the information architecture and first-click testing the new design. All this happened in conjunction with comprehensive content, location, and search engine optimization (SEO) strategy led by Geonetric’s experts to create a guide for the upcoming redesign.
Iterating on a Popular Content Marketing Hub
One of CCHC’s strategic investments is their popular Cape Cod Health News. The content marketing hub launched in April of 2015 and has been an integral part of how CCHC connects with and engages their community as a health partner. To better leverage this popular content, CCHC wanted to move it from a separate WordPress site into their main system-wide site. Bringing the hub into their VitalSite content management system (CMS) would facilitate better connections between content marketing articles and service, provider, and location content. Integration would also enhance SEO of both content marketing and foundational service-line content.
To make the move, Geonetric worked with CCHC on a sophisticated content strategy, thoughtfully looking at how to structure the content, pages, and taxonomy. The Geonetric team also took inventory of what was moving from WordPress to VitalSite, identifying new opportunities to seamlessly connect Health News audiences with the topics and services they’re interested in.
The result is a new content marketing hub that builds on the strong foundation CCHC had created but offers more integration with their site and an improved user experience. New custom panels also allow the team to display hub stories with related service-line content, as seen on the heart and vascular care page.
Indicating Great Things to Come
The site launched in early January 2019, boasting many new features and functionality in addition to the content hub, including robust location profiles and geographic targeting personalization, providing an enhanced, unique experience for site visitors who share their ZIP code.
In just the first 30 days since launch, the strategic approach is paying off. Year-over-year, users are up 31 percent, new users are up 35 percent, sessions are up 40 percent, and bounce rate is down 7 percent. For the Cape Cod Health News hub, its new home in VitalSite is working out well. The team is enjoying the stability and flexibility that the CMS provides, and users are engaging, with almost 10,000 pages visited and 25 site visitors contacting the health system through its hub in the first 30 days. Search rankings are also moving in a positive direction. Since go-live, there have been 332 new keyword rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs) and 30 new keywords in the top 10 of the SERP, plus a 7 percent increase in organic position and a 9 percent increase in organic clicks.
The first month after go-live can be rocky for a new site as it works to get indexed and regain rankings. Taking the time to invest in strategy before and during the redesign protects those rankings, delivers immediate value, and sets the site up for continued success.
Investing in Strategy Ensures Redesign Delivers Value to Consumers and Health System
