This is the fourth article in our series highlighting the technological breakthroughs that shaped healthcare, marketing, and our work at Geonetric over our first 25 years in business. Read the first articles, which cover 1999 – 2003, 2004 – 2008, and 2009 – 2013. 

Geonetric’s 15th year in business saw the rapid rise of internet-connected mobile devices and their use by consumers to look up healthcare-related information. 

This was a crucial time for healthcare organizations and our agency to take a closer look at how websites appeared and functioned on mobile devices. They didn’t just have to look good on a smaller, narrower screen — they had to be easily navigable, and offer quick solutions for patients and visitors on the go.  

Longstanding technology like Adobe’s Flash software platform, which was used to create animations and dynamic experiences in desktop and mobile applications, became casualties in the move from desktop browsing to mobile, especially as Apple’s iPhone gained in popularity. 

“There was some shedding of technology that was really common on the desktop because more and more people were coming with mobile devices,” explained Geonetric CEO Ben Dillon. “These were all steps along the road to say, ‘Ok, the phone can actually be a fully functional front end for this internet thing.'”  

2014

Mobile usage surpassed desktop browser traffic for the first time in 2014. As the amount of time people spent on their desktop and laptop computers drops in comparison to time spent browsing via smartphone, the need for organizations to take a mobile-first approach to marketing and website design became more apparent.  

“We were very early in the movement of rethinking how to build these sites so that they work not just on a desktop but on mobile devices as well,” said Dillon. “Later, we started talking about mobile-first design and design everywhere.” 

(Scroll down to the bottom of this post to see an infographic we created in 2012 — well before smartphone usage overtook browser traffic — forecasting the future of mobile browsing, social media, and how healthcare consumers engage online.)

2015

In line with the growing trend of mobile internet usage, Google began ranking pages with poor mobile experiences lower on its search results page. 

The reasoning, according to Google, was so “users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” 

This move was a further push for organizations to ensure their websites were responsive for visitors regardless of the device they were using to look for information. 

“It certainly had a huge impact. We’re in a place today where mobile web is a dominant piece of the digital experience,” said Dillon.  

2016

Google took its “mobile-first” mindset a step further in 2016 by removing ads from the sidebar. Ads appeared above and below natural search results, allowing search results pages to look similar across mobile phones, desktop and laptop computers, and tablets.  

This year also marked the launch of Facebook’s live video platform, which allowed individual users and organizational accounts alike the opportunity to connect and engage directly with consumers through streaming video. From a healthcare perspective, provider organizations could utilize live video to stream online classes, host virtual hiring events, provide patients and visitors with news updates about the organization, and even stream live surgeries! 

2017

The number of internet-connected devices exceeded the global population for the first time in 2017 — an estimated 8.4 billion connected devices were used that year, compared to 7.5 billion people.  

While the one billion difference between internet devices and people seemed staggering at the time, by 2024, more than 18 billion internet-connected devices were in use.  

2018

The year 2018 ushered in discussions around personal data use and social media following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a British consulting firm revealed that it had harvested the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app and used it for political advertising purposes without users’ consent.  

Facebook was fined $5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission as a result of the scandal, and reminded marketers of the importance of privacy in the data collected and used in advertising — something  that, more recently, Geonetric Privacy Filter was designed to safeguard. 

What’s next?

Our final installment of this 25th anniversary technology blog series will be published in two weeks, covering 2019 through 2024. 

No matter what the future holds for mobile devices, social media, and healthcare marketing, Geonetric is ready with a host of website design, software, and marketing solutions to help your organization stay on top of the latest trends. 

Contact us today to learn how we can help your organization navigate the future of healthcare marketing! 

In honor of Geonetric’s 25th anniversary, we’re sharing the stories and successes of just a few of our healthcare clients across the United States. Some have been with us for decades, others just a few years; some are major health systems, others just one standalone hospital. But one common thread ties them all together: Geonetric has helped them take their digital marketing programs to new heights.

San Antonio-based University Health was founded in 1917 as Bexar County’s first public hospital. In the decades since, it’s grown to become the third-largest public health system in the state of Texas, with two teaching hospitals, a Level I trauma center, and dozens of other locations across the San Antonio metro area.

University Health joined forces with Geonetric in 2019 when the organization needed a strategy and design partner for a website redesign and a new content hub to host its blogs, videos, and educational content. University Health was working with another agency at the time to handle the actual development of the new site, but Geonetric’s healthcare expertise and focus on measurable results impressed the team.

“We really liked how they approach new projects, especially that redesign, and that they are healthcare-specific. They understood our audience,” explained Selene Mejia, Digital Marketing Director for University Health.

After the successful launch of its new website, University Health continued working with Geonetric to add components and features to the website, like additional content and a dedicated pediatrics microsite.

Searching for results

In 2021, Geonetric assisted University Health with a new project: boosting the return on investment of its pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

In particular, the University Health team needed help building on a previous search engine marketing (SEM) campaign targeting two of its pediatric locations to include 13 additional clinics. After Geonetric stepped in, the first year of the revamped campaign led to a 170% increase in conversions and a 46% decrease in the cost per click.

While Mejia had worked with previous agencies on SEM campaigns before, Geonetric’s commitment to continuous improvement and staying on the cutting edge of search technology stood out.

“We admire their proactive approach in every campaign they handle for us,” Mejia said. “Every two weeks, they introduce fresh ideas to enhance our paid advertising campaigns through A/B testing, adjusting keywords, and exploring new platform features.”

Geonetric was originally tasked with managing six of University Health’s campaigns for 15 months. After seeing the initial results, Geonetric took over four additional campaigns as well as managing the system’s SEO and personalization approach.

Promoting primary care

Today, a primary focus of Geonetric’s work with University Health is an ongoing SEM campaign focused on increasing awareness of its primary care services and boosting appointment requests.

Geonetric’s strategy for this primary care campaign embraced Google’s automated bidding system, maximizing conversions while staying within University Health’s fixed budget. The team also leveraged responsive search ads that adapt to the user and show them the most relevant message possible to help connect new patients with the primary care services they require.

While this campaign has been ongoing, a series of experiments in late 2023 — two years after it first launched — led to a record-setting number of appointment requests in 2024.

“Service line leaders are pleased with the overall results,” Mejia noted.

Looking to the future

Next up for University Health’s partnership with Geonetric are new SEM campaigns, including one focused on the back-to-school season and another on pulmonology.

In addition to future projects, Mejia also appreciates Geonetric’s proactive approach when it comes to breaking developments in the healthcare marketing and technology fields.

“I have worked with other agencies, and usually it was me bringing those kinds of things to them, like ‘Oh, have you heard about this?'” Mejia said. “In this case, [Geonetric] brings that information to us. I particularly value Ben and his team for keeping us informed about HHS guidelines regarding analytics and HIPAA.”

“They consistently innovate to ensure our users have good experiences, even when factors are beyond their control. For instance, Brad personally called our phone number to verify call functionality after noticing a discrepancy in analytics,” Mejia recalled. “For partnerships, we look for someone who can keep us up to date and at the forefront, and Geonetric does that. We’ve been consistently impressed by how they help us in staying competitive.”

Ready to experience the Geonetric difference?

Geonetric has 25 years of digital marketing know-how and healthcare-specific experience ready to go to work for you. If your organization is ready to supercharge its marketing efforts, connect with us today!

In this webinar, Geonetric CEO Ben Dillon shares a snapshot of today’s healthcare marketing space with the results of our 2024 Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends Survey, which includes input from hundreds of healthcare organizations across the country. He also highlights what leading healthcare organizations are doing to stay ahead of the curve and where we expect marketers to invest their budgets in the coming years.

This is the third article in our series highlighting the technological breakthroughs that shaped healthcare, marketing, and our work at Geonetric over our first 25 years in business. Read the first articles, which cover 1999 – 2003 and 2004 – 2008. 

As Geonetric entered its 10th year in business, the online landscape had evolved rapidly to something that barely resembled what it was when we were first founded.  

People were chronicling their lives and forming communities on social media, online reviews were changing how consumers interacted with their healthcare providers, and smartphones put the power of search engines in users’ pockets. 

Easier access to search engines on the go meant marketers needed to put more thought than ever before into how users found their websites, and what they saw once they clicked through. 

2009 

In 2009, Google launched its Real Time search functionality, which automatically incorporated the latest results for a keyword in a dedicated section of the search results page.  

Real Time didn’t simply funnel any new post or page into its results — Google’s search ranking algorithm still came into play there — but it marked another step forward for search engines’ ability to offer users the latest answers instantly.  

2010 

The accessibility of smart devices continued to grow in 2010 with the launch of Apple’s iPad. While not the first tablet computer, the iPad’s innovative touchscreen helped set it apart and paved the way for smart devices that had characteristics of both a laptop computer and a phone. 

Geonetric launched one of the first responsively designed sites in healthcare, and to this day, we design and build responsive websites for all screen sizes so healthcare organizations’ sites look fantastic no matter how users visit them. This is especially important in 2024, with 92.3% of internet users accessing websites on a mobile device, compared to 65.6% who use laptops or desktop computers. 

Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computer platform, was also released in 2010. Today, its broad range of services includes analytics, virtual computing, networking, storage, and more to help organizations manage their technology tools. 

2011 

Schema markup, or structured data that helps search engines better understand a webpage’s content, was first introduced in 2011. While it doesn’t have a direct impact on search engine performance, it can help websites stand out on results pages by displaying rich content like images, star ratings, publish date, and other important information about the page. 

“[It was] the idea that in addition to just having content on the page, you would also try to spoon-feed the search engines a little bit about what this page is about,” explained Geonetric CEO Ben Dillon. 

For example, a search result for a recipe may bring up photos of the finished product, how people reviewed that recipe, the number of reviews and cooking time. A search for a pair of shoes might deliver the price, the buyer rating, if the shoes are in stock and how long a delivery would take. 

Apple also launched its Siri voice assistant in 2011, kickstarting a shift toward voice search and the need for marketers to think like a voice searcher when creating content. Less than a decade later, 41% of adults reported using voice search daily. 

2012 

Content marketing wasn’t exactly a new concept, but by 2012, it had reached a tipping point where it was an essential component of any successful marketing program.  

This shift was driven in part by social media, search optimization, and users’ desire for content that supports their purchases. Many organizations took this time to capitalize on consumers’ trust in content over direct advertising by dedicating entire departments to content marketing. 

2013 

In 2013 Google made major changes to its Hummingbird search engine algorithm, marking the most significant changes to the way it delivered search results since 2001. This update placed more of an emphasis on natural, conversational-sounding searches and the context around them than individual keywords. 

For marketers and website developers, this update required a move toward more “human” writing and website navigation that didn’t rely on forced keywords. 

“It seems like a never-ending thing to figure out — how do we play with this tool that is realistically the home page for all of our sites?” said Geonetric CEO Ben Dillon. “More people are starting at Google than are starting at the home page of our healthcare websites when they’re engaging with that content.” 

Healthcare websites were not impacted as significantly as other industries since many organizations were already favoring educational content over keyphrase-packed articles, Dillon noted. 

“Healthcare sites have been a little less volatile around algorithm changes than some other industries that went further down the pathway of sacrificing elements of readability or understandability or experience in order to get more SEO,” Dillon said. 

What’s next? 

Our 25th anniversary technology blog series continues in two weeks, covering 2014 through 2018 and the “mobile-first” movement.  

Looking to get in on the ground floor of the latest marketing technology trends before they take off? Our expert team at Geonetric is here to help!

We’ve assisted healthcare organizations in creating marketing programs that stay ahead of the curve for 25 years. Let us help your team prepare for the next 25 — contact us today to get started! 

In honor of Geonetric’s 25th anniversary, we’re sharing the stories and successes of just a few of our healthcare clients across the United States. Some have been with us for decades, others just a few years; some are major health systems, others just one standalone hospital. But one common thread ties them all together: Geonetric has helped them take their digital marketing programs to new heights.

St. Bernards Healthcare is a Jonesboro, AR-based health system that traces its roots back nearly 125 years to a six-bedroom house converted into a hospital during a local malaria fever epidemic. Today, St. Bernards has more than 100 locations and 4,200 employees serving 625,000 patients across Arkansas and Missouri.

The health system has partnered with Geonetric since 2022, when it dedicated the funding to prioritize its digital presence and reached out for help overhauling a website that was “a glorified Word document,” according to Mackenzie Thomason, Website & Digital Coordinator at St. Bernards.

Thomason’s team couldn’t customize their website much at the time and needed assistance completely rewriting its content, streamlining its search capabilities, optimizing content for search engines, and adding a design that fit their storied brand. They also felt their current site wasn’t genuinely representing who St. Bernards was and failed to provide a sophisticated experience that was impressive and useful for both internal and external audiences.

Geonetric’s mix of healthcare expertise and knowledge of healthcare marketing trends made the agency an easy choice for a partner who could take their website to the next level.

A caring content journey

One major goal of the website redesign was creating a digital home that met the needs of patients, employees, job seekers, and donors alike. Part of reaching that goal meant moving the St. Bernards site from Drupal to Geonetric’s proprietary VitalSite® content management system, which allowed for improved structure and organization.

St. Bernards previous website content had been described as a “rabbit hole” of unclear, outdated and hard-to-find information. Geonetric’s content team worked with dozens of St. Bernards stakeholders to rewrite or create new content for 175 pages, with an emphasis on writing in a way that was easy to understand for any users’ health literacy level and communicated how the system’s services could improve patients’ lives.

“We met with most of our main service line doctors in content planning meetings, and I felt like they appreciated their concerns being heard and then showing them the final product before we went live,” Thomason said.

One highlight of the new site includes revamped services pages, which showcase St. Bernards’ service lines in an easy-to-navigate menu so patients and their families can easily narrow in on the issue they’re seeking treatment for. On the individual pages, users can find information about specific conditions that fall under that service line, treatment options, answers to frequently asked questions like when to seek treatment and where treatment will occur, and profiles of the providers they’ll work with.

“A big piece of this was making sure our content truly reflected all of what our providers do,” explained Thomason. “It was a needed change within our organization, and we can tell the benefits of it today through our analytics across the board.”

Real-world results

In the first 30 days following the launch of the new St. Bernards website, views of the site jumped 55%, with a 25% increase in total users.

The new healthcare services pages saw views increase by 60%, with a 31% increase in total users. The time users spend engaged with these pages also increased by 49%.

Aside from the numbers, Thomason has also received fantastic feedback on the new site from team members, including the hospital administrator, who continues to highlight the new site in his public presentations.

“[We got] so much great feedback. Every single one of our internal stakeholders was very impressed,” Thomason said. “People within our organization have approached me and repeatedly said, ‘The new website looks so good’ or ‘It is so easy to find what I need!'”

Trust & teamwork

St. Bernards’ redesigned website content earned a MarCom Awards Honorable Mention for Web Content based on its quality, creativity, and excellence.

In the years since, Geonetric has also helped St. Bernards move their forms to Formulate, VitalSite’s self-service form creation feature, and create a timeline in celebration of the system’s upcoming 125th anniversary. Geonetric also helps keep the St. Bernards team up-to-date on the latest marketing trends and technology.

“Everyone I have had the chance to work with in our complete website redesign has been a top-tier communicator. Honest, timely, helpful. It makes my job so much easier knowing I have a few direct people I can contact no matter the question or situation,” Thomason said. “From a new website launch to post-launch, we have continued re-working and creating multiple projects together. Our goal is to always improve where we can. I see Geonetric as an extension of our team!”

Ready to experience the Geonetric difference?

If your organization could use a digital partner with 25 years of experience, a healthcare-specific content management system, and a team that’s always keeping tabs on the latest in healthcare digital marketing, let’s talk. Contact Geonetric today to learn more about how we can help your organization!

This is the second article in our series highlighting the technological breakthroughs that shaped healthcare, marketing, and our work at Geonetric over our first 25 years in business. Read the first article, which covers 1999 – 2003, here. 

The year 2004 marked Geonetric’s fifth anniversary as an agency, and the third year in its shift to working primarily with healthcare organizations.  

The groundwork for the technology Geonetric would come to rely on to provide digital marketing services to its clients — search engine optimization, search engine advertising and blog content management systems — was set and evolving quickly.  

Social media was in its infancy, with sites like MySpace, Friendster, and LiveJournal hitting the web and allowing more people than ever before to connect via the internet.  

Internet technology was also becoming more accessible to everyday computer users, allowing them to shape the content they wanted to see and share their thoughts online.  

2004 

Facebook — the social media platform with perhaps the most significant impact on healthcare marketing — launched in 2004. Healthcare organizations didn’t take to it right away, as it was limited to college students at first and strictly individuals after.  

However, as the site gained steam and healthcare marketers saw its potential, they found workarounds to connect with their patients on the fledgling network. 

“The idea of an organization having a Facebook page was a real challenge for a long time. They wanted these [pages] to be people, so you had to have a ‘brand ambassador,'” explained Geonetric CEO Ben Dillon.  

This year also saw the popularization of the term “Web 2.0,” which described a shift in websites to allow more user-generated content, ease of use, and interoperability for end users.  

“This idea that it was OK for normal people to have opinions and they would be out there on the internet… [we thought] are we even going to have corporate sites anymore, or is it all going to be user-generated content?” Dillon said. “This was sort of new and scary. A lot of brands were working hard to encourage their consumers to share information. It was a radically new way of thinking.” 

2005

In 2005, Google began offering personalized search results to a limited number of users. These searches delivered results not just based on web page relevance, but also on websites the user visited through previous search sessions.  

While personalized search wouldn’t be applied to all users until 2009, this development paved the way for more targeted personalization and search engine rankings, making a significant impact on the way healthcare marketers gauged how their sites were faring in search results. 

“Before the personalized results, you could just search on the term, and you could find where you were,” Dillon explained. Once that shifted, getting to a place where we had tools that could tell us how we were doing and could track it over time — that was pretty challenging.” 

2006 

Google Analytics first launched in November 2005, but demand for the new tool was so overwhelming that signups were suspended after just one week until the official widescale release in 2006. Prior to the launch of Google Analytics — which was and remains free to use — analytics tracking systems cost money, meaning many healthcare organizations “flew blind” rather than invest in understanding their analytics, Dillon explained. 

“Google Analytics was a game changer, a lot of the tools you either had to run on your own server somewhere or they were very, very expensive,” Dillon said. “Having it as a free offering for the majority of people was beautiful, it absolutely changed the game.” 

2007 

The year 2007 brought two tech releases that would come to have a major impact on healthcare marketers — the iPhone and Google Reviews. 

Apple’s iPhone was the first mobile phone to use multi-touch technology, which allows users to navigate across the screen at more than one point of contact (using a pinching motion to zoom in, etc.), and ushered in a new era of apps and constant connectivity. It also helped further the popularity of the smartphone, driving the need for marketers to consider mobile responsiveness while designing websites. 

Google Reviews gave consumers a voice and the ability for user-generated reviews to appear whenever someone searched for a particular business or organization. While this development provided consumers with a new avenue for sharing their thoughts — good and bad — about a particular healthcare organization, it also caused new headaches for marketers. 

“They felt like they had control of their brand, and they didn’t want this place where other people could post about them,” Dillon recalled. “When one of our clients saw a review they didn’t like, they’d reach out and say ‘Can you take this down? We don’t want this on the internet anymore.’ And that’s not how it works.” 

The rise of online reviews also spurred organizations to take a more proactive approach to online reviews, encouraging people who have had a great experience at their facility to share that online. 

“The number of reviews for healthcare organizations tends to be pretty low, and those reviews tend to skew negative,” Dillon said. “It’s still a point of discussion with health systems. Do you have a program where you’re cultivating reviews? Do you have a kiosk on their way out the door where they can submit a review before they leave the building? The best way to battle against a low score is to get a representative sample of lots of people engaged with the organization.” 

2008 

The first commercially released Android smartphone, the HTC Dream, was launched in September 2008 and served as the first open competitor to other smartphones like the iPhone and BlackBerry. This release helped solidify smartphones’ staying power and the trend toward mobile-friendly web experiences. 

What’s next? 

Our 25th anniversary tech blog series continues in two weeks with a look at 2009 through 2013, and some major changes to how users and marketers interact with Google’s search engine. 

Need a boost in how your organization is using today’s marketing tech trends? Let Geonetric lend a hand! Our 25 years of experience means we’re well equipped to get you up to speed on the latest marketing technology — and prepare you for what’s coming next. Contact our team today to get started! 

The ongoing HIPAA online tracking guidance saga took a turn last week when a Texas judge issued a summary judgment in favor of the American Hospital Association declaring the guidance as unlawful and exceeding HHS’s authority.  

While some pundits are quick to believe that this is the end of the story, the answer might not be so simple.  

Healthcare organizations have been wrestling with HHS’s guidance on the Use of Online Tracking Technologies by HIPAA Covered Entities and Business Associates which was released in December 2022 and then updated in March 2024. For a more complete overview of the guidance, check out our series on this topic. 

At a high level, the most dramatic implications of the guidance were twofold: 

• The combination of an IP address and the URL of a page relating to health information such as a symptom, condition, search for a provider, or online appointment forms would be considered Individually Identifiable Health Information (IIHI)/Protected Health Information (PHI). The summary judgment refers to this IP/URL pair as the “Proscribed Combination.” 

• Healthcare entities needed to consider any visit to their digital properties to be doing so related to the past, present or future care. While HHS softened this language in the 2024 update to the guidance, the actions required to meet with the standard did not change as a result. 

Overview of the summary judgment 

Much of the 31-page summary judgment wrestles with somewhat esoteric procedural issues surrounding the case, such as if the plaintiffs have standing and if such informal guidance documents are subject to judicial review.  To sum it up: the judge explains that the case is valid, that he has the authority to act here, and that a summary judgment is warranted. 

In the end, the judge declared unlawful the fact that the Prescribed Combination (IP address and URL) is IIHI and effectively rolls back the guidance.  

What does this mean for healthcare organizations’ efforts to improve their privacy posture in response to the guidance? 

Healthcare organizations should not simply abandon the new tools and tactics they’ve adopted to better protect consumer privacy. Even with reduced regulatory risks, this event should act as a wake-up call for all of us to put consumer privacy first.  

There are a number of reasons to continue down the consumer privacy path: 

1. It’s likely this isn’t the last we’ll hear about these issues from HHS. For starters, they have the option to appeal the judgment. And while the judgment rolls back the guidance, it denied the AHA’s request for a permanent injunction on this matter. So, the agency could pursue a similar set of rules like those imposed by the 2022 guidance by following a more appropriate rulemaking path (as we’ve always believed they should). We would expect this process to include a detailed explanation of the new rules and their legal obligations, an open comment period, and a timeline for implementation by Covered Entities and Business Associates.
2. Regulatory compliance is only one of the risks healthcare organizations have faced on these issues, and it’s less clear if this decision will have much impact on the ever-growing list of class action suits claiming breaches of consumers’ health information. Many of these lawsuits were in the works prior to the 2022 guidance, so its revocation is no guarantee that they will also go away. Many of the class action suits also involve state privacy laws where the bar may be different than under current HIPAA legislation. 
3. The judgment leaves open the potential that, in some circumstances, sharing data with non-HIPAA-compliant organizations from your web properties could still represent a breach under the HIPAA Privacy Rule. This could apply to some patient portals, for example, where online interactions are presumed to be for the logged-in individual. There are also less obvious scenarios that could prove problematic. The summary judgment cites the scenario where an organization “greets visitors with a dropdown box requesting their subjective motive for visiting the page”. While the summary judgment notes that this seems unlikely, this could be the case on websites that have a visitor survey or when the visitor selects their role (patient, caregiver, provider, jobseeker, etc.) from a list for the purpose of personalizing their online experience.  
4. Lastly, protecting consumer privacy is important to all of us and a robust process to do so must be a priority going forward. 

Where does this leave us? 

Even if the guidance doesn’t re-emerge in some form, this has been an eye-opener for all of us due to the sheer amount of information being shared with third parties. We encourage you to proceed forward with the same level of caution and oversight that you’ve been applying to marketing technology decisions over the past year and a half: 

• Continue to vet tools and vendors through your data governance and vendor assessment processes to understand what information they’re receiving and the strength of their regulatory compliance processes. 

• Don’t make any knee-jerk moves when it comes to the changes you’ve made to improve compliance until we better understand what the status quo is likely to look like on these issues. 

• Keep the dialogue going between marketing, IT, legal and compliance to clearly articulate your organization’s position related to these health consumer privacy issues. 

Geonetric will continue to share information and insights that you can use to help your organization make important HPIAA-related decisions. If you could use assistance regarding your organization’s compliance goals or how Geonetric Privacy Filter can help, reach out to our team today! 

In honor of Geonetric’s 25th anniversary, we’re sharing the stories and successes of just a few of our healthcare clients across the United States. Some have been with us for decades, others just a few years; some are major health systems, others just one standalone hospital. But one common thread ties them all together: Geonetric has helped them take their digital marketing programs to new heights.  

Rutland Regional Medical Center is a 144-bed hospital in Rutland, VT, serving patients in southern and central Vermont and eastern New York. It is the second-largest hospital and one of the largest employers in the area, employing more than 1,800 people and offering 43 areas of specialty.   

We began working with Rutland Regional in September 2011, when the hospital was in need of a partner to redesign its website.   

“We had a dated website that didn’t function well, and the organization made the decision to do a complete overhaul and redo of our website,” explained Rowan Muelling-Auer, Rutland Regional’s Web & Production Specialist. “We try to keep our dollars in our community and our geographic location as much as we can, but after doing a lot of research, we decided to look for a vendor with an expertise in healthcare which brought us to Geonetric.” 

In the years since, we’ve worked with the Rutland Regional team on various projects centered around conveying that patients didn’t need to leave the area to get the best medical care possible — world-class physicians were located right in their own backyard in Rutland.  

Recent work  

The Rutland Regional site’s most recent update took place in 2023, with a focus on showcasing the hospital’s brand, services and physicians. Prior to that, the last Rutland Regional redesign took place in 2016, meaning the site was starting to become outdated from both a design and a functionality perspective. Website design technology had greatly improved and opened up new possibilities since then, making it the perfect time to update the site’s templates and color palettes as well. 

Features like the new He@lthy Together blog, advanced search function, and multiple pathways to the provider directory helped build both patient and staff trust in the Rutland Regional brand.   

Collaboration between Geonetric and Rutland Regional kept the project on track, and helped set the site up for success after its June 2023 launch.  

“[With] the redesign, there was a great amount of collaboration that went into that project that ultimately led to that being so successful,” explained Client Services Director Ashley Nost. “That’s a project that just worked well from start to finish.”  

In the months following the initial launch of the redesigned site, Rutland Regional saw a 44% increase in the engagement rate of its provider profile pages, a 42.5% increase in the engagement rate of its service line pages, and a 16.7% increase in total sessions for its location profile pages.  

One major aspect of the redesign that stands out to Muelling-Auer was the site design itself, which brought to life Rutland Regional’s branding through elements that “really stand out as ours.”  

“Christina [Hoge, design director] did such a beautiful job taking our branding and our materials and making it into a website that is recognizably us while also still feeling fresh and current and really attractive,” she said.  

Muelling-Auer has heard from internal staff, volunteers and community members alike that the new site isn’t just warm and engaging but easier to navigate as well.  

“I’ve certainly heard from outside of our organization where people are saying, ‘You know, I could never find this before, and now I can.’ It’s pretty great.”  

Leveraging VitalSite®  

Rutland Regional has also established itself as a “super user” of our VitalSite® content management system. With a small in-house team, Rutland Regional needs to be able to do as much site maintenance as it can on their own, and VitalSite empowers Muelling-Auer to do just that through features like branded page templates and content scheduling.  

“What I really enjoy about VitalSite is how intuitive it is. It allows you a lot more flexibility in terms of how you build content, and I think it ultimately just makes it better for end users,” Muelling-Auer explained. “Especially in a role like mine where I’m the only person in my organization who does anything with VitalSite, having the ability to publish content in advance and know it’s going to appear when I need it to be is just one example of a really helpful tool that Geonetric’s built.”  

Muelling-Auer acknowledges that even when she runs into a capability VitalSite doesn’t have yet, the Geonetric team is on hand to listen to her concerns.  

“They hear your problems; they hear the things that you would like to see. They work on building those into future planning for the CMS,” she said. “That’s something that’s worth its weight in gold. No program is going to do everything, but when you have a team behind you who is dedicated to making you successful, that’s everything right there.”  

Redesign recognition  

Rutland Regional’s 2023 redesign earned a Platinum Award for Best Website Redesign at the 2023 MarCom Awards, as well as a Silver Award for Best Overall Internet Site and a Gold Award for Best Provider Directory in the 2023 eHealthcare Leadership Awards.  

Our work with Rutland Regional also earned an Outstanding Achievement award in the 2017 Interactive Media Awards.  

A commitment to customer success  

Muelling-Auer credits Rutland Regional’s nearly 13 years of partnership with Geonetric to the relationships she’s been able to build with the team handling her account and the open communication they’ve established.  

“My constant refrain when it comes to Geonetric is the extraordinary customer service, day in and day out. It really makes a relationship feel like it matters between both parties,” she said.  

Another benefit Rutland Regional has enjoyed since working with Geonetric is knowing there’s a team working behind the scenes to react to any changes in analytics, HIPAA regulations, marketing technology, and the ever-evolving state of the digital landscape.  

“I don’t think you can stress enough how important that is for the kind of company that Geonetric is,” Muelling-Auer explained. “Whether it’s how responsive websites are changing, the switch over to GA4, changing rules around HIPAA — it’s all of those parts and pieces that really help to make Geonetric a partner in your digital management of your assets and your presence online.”   

Ready to experience the Geonetric difference?  

If your organization could use a digital partner with 25 years of experience, a healthcare-specific content management system, and a team that’s always keeping tabs on the latest in healthcare digital marketing, let’s talk. Contact Geonetric today to learn more about how we can help your organization! 

Getting a peak behind the curtain at Google’s search algorithm has long been on digital marketers’ wish lists. Late last month, we got exactly that in the form of a then-anonymous leak that revealed previously unknown details of Google’s algorithm and how it collects data from users. 

Among the algorithm factors included in the leaked documents are API references, internal memos, and development notes that all solidify one message: high-quality, authoritative content is still king (when paired with a comprehensive SEO strategy, of course). 

So, how can healthcare marketers tap into this trove of knowledge without having to sift through more than 2,500 pages of API data? Here’s a high-level overview of the leaked information and how you can apply it to your organization’s content and SEO strategies.  

Critical Algorithm Factors 

The data released in the leak confirmed many of the things we assumed were important to Google regarding ranking content. 

Search Engine Optimization 

The leak provided several insights into some of the critical factors that play into how Google ranks content. 

First, the algorithm places a significant focus on user intent, trying to understand and deliver results that line up with what users are trying to accomplish.  

Next — and this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise — the quality of the content factors into how the algorithm ranks sites. Google still emphasizes high-quality, authoritative content, as well as E-A-T, or the expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of a piece of content.  

Finally, in the SEO realm, the quality and relevance of any backlinks in a piece of content remain critical to how well that site performs.

Entity-Based Search

The leak also released information about how the algorithm prioritizes entity recognition, in which entities like people, places, and things rank better than simple keywords.  

We also learned more about the role the Knowledge Graph — Google’s database of billions of facts about people, places, and things —  plays in connecting entity-based searches and providing contextual relevance.  

Publisher Reputation

Another leaked data point that isn’t a shock but that marketers still need to prioritize is reputation. Google prefers content from reputable publishers and recognized authors, as well as information published with clear editorial oversight. 

Content Strategy

One part of the leak that we were especially excited to read up on was the data surrounding content strategy. 

The leak showed that in-depth content — longer, more detailed articles — ends up performing better than content that’s short and to the point. Integrating multimedia elements like images, videos, and infographics can also enrich the content and help it perform better in search rankings. 

Technical Insights

The leaked data indicated that page speed metrics are more nuanced than many had assumed, considering factors beyond simple load time.  

Google’s prioritization of mobile-friendly content is still ongoing, and it’s placing an increased importance on schema markup and rich snippets. 

User Experience

The leaked information revealed that core web vitals play an enhanced role in ranking, with a focus on load time, interactivity, and visual stability. Google is now also considering bounce rate in context with other engagement metrics. 

Strategic Recommendations 

Let’s break the information in the leak down into recommendations you can put into practice today to help your website or blog perform better in Google’s search results. 

Content Refreshing

Make it a habit to regularly update and expand your website content to maintain its relevance. The only content that search engines like more than relevant, user-friendly content is relevant, user-friendly content that has been updated recently. 

This may require some advanced governance or tracking on your end to ensure that content available online for a certain amount of time is flagged for revision. Thankfully, depending on the content itself, this refresh could be as simple as minor updates or as complex as a thorough rewrite. 

Intentional Structure

You can create content clusters — content that’s organized around a certain theme to boost its relevance — by building or restructuring sections of your website and creating internal links to each piece of content. By interconnected relevant pages you can create a web of content that’s not only easy for search engines to crawl, but for users to navigate as well. 

Expertise

Help build up your editorial authority and oversight by highlighting the author of your blog posts and news articles. Whether you have an in-house editorial staff or are ghostwriting articles for providers, sharing information about who wrote what through author panels and schema can help drive your articles to the top of relevant local results. 

Schema

Speaking of schema, adding industry-specific schema structured data (such as frequently asked questions, reviews, ratings, etc.) to your service lines, providers, locations, and article pages will ensure that search engine algorithms and artificial intelligence have an easily understandable cheat sheet when crawling your site.  

Topic Authority

You can build comprehensive resources and become an authority on specific topics with intentional internal and external linking. A combination of robust service line sections and linked articles will provide compounding authority, showing users and search engines alike that your organization has the expertise they’re looking for. 

Local Authority

You can also rely on local relevance by optimizing with providers, locations, and distinct services in mind. You may need to rethink your current provider and location profile strategies to make sure crucial information and conversion points are included, but optimizing them for search can help you overtake your competition’s search engine real estate. 

Expert Help 

If your organization could use a hand applying overall SEO practices and the information from the Google leak to your website strategies, Geonetric is here to help.  

We have 25 years of experience navigating changes in Google’s algorithms, and our team is ready to put that expertise to work for your organization. Contact us today to learn more! 

Geonetric was founded in 1999, and as you can expect for any company that’s been around 25 years, things looked very different back then. 

When it first started, Geonetric specialized in creating websites and web applications for companies in a variety of industries — not just healthcare. Marketers didn’t have to worry about what their website looked like on a smartphone, how many followers they had on Facebook or LinkedIn, or their search engine rankings.  

The last 25 years have brought with them a tidal wave of new technologies that impact not only our team but also the digital marketing and healthcare industries as a whole.  

To celebrate Geonetric’s 25th anniversary and to showcase just how far we’ve come since 1999, we’re kicking off a blog series highlighting some of the most significant technology breakthroughs and trends we’ve encountered, with thoughts from Geonetric CEO Ben Dillon on how these concepts have shaped the work we do as an agency today. 

1999 

Geonetric’s first year in business was an interesting one in the digital world. The potential Y2K bug loomed large, and the concept of search engine optimization — tailoring the content on a website to make it easier for people to find it — was starting to gain steam. 

While Geonetric was primarily a technology company at the time and hadn’t started providing marketing or SEO services, “the idea that things had to be findable was definitely starting to emerge,” Dillon said. 

“[It was] nothing like the sophistication we have now, in terms of understanding what people are looking for when they come to find your site, or understanding what the search engines were doing,” Dillon explained. “Early on, it was really about ‘How do we present this data?'” 

2000 

The first year of the New Millennium saw the launch of Google AdWords. While it wasn’t the first search advertising platform to exist, AdWords’ cost-per-thousand impressions model returned an impressive $70 million by the end of its first year. 

That number wasn’t enough for AdWords to financially overtake Overture, a pioneer in pay-per-click (PPC) advertising that had launched in 1998. But AdWords’ competition with Overture planted the seeds for Google to shake up the PPC game in just a couple of years. 

2001 

The first cell phones with 3G internet access were released in 2001, but the prohibitive cost of data meant that many consumers wouldn’t use the feature for years.  

“The web was still, in a lot of ways, relatively new, relatively niche… mobile was not a big consideration for a long time,” Dillon said. “But it did grow from that point. Those were all steps along the road to say, ‘Ok, the phone can actually be a fully functional front end to this internet thing.'” 

2002 

Google AdWords officially adopted a PPC model in 2002, bringing with it an increased focus on targeting and ad relevance. AdWords’ Quality Score metric didn’t just award ad position based on the company’s bid amount, but also on how relevant the ad was to the user’s search query.  

This shift meant that both large and small companies could compete for ad space with relevant, high-quality ads and even target consumers by their home country or language. 

Today, AdWords plays a key role in both search engine optimization and search engine marketing, services Geonetric provides for many of its clients. AdWords allows us to launch display ads that help build our clients’ brand awareness and target consumers while they browse the web, watch YouTube videos, check their email, and more. 

2003 

WordPress came on the scene in 2003 as one of the first dedicated blogging platforms, and Geonetric utilized it to host blogs for a number of its website clients. 

It would be years before WordPress grew into the content management platform it is today, but its launch heralded the start of a shift toward organizations connecting with consumers more through content marketing and thought leadership. It was a change that did meet with some resistance, Dillon explained, as many corporate websites at this time defaulted to “a very formal voice and tone” and weren’t used to having to regularly write content.  

“At the time, lots of organizations looked at it as this thing to put cute little blog posts up. We worked to convince organizations that they should have their CEO do a blog, or you should have a corporate blog to talk about health issues, or talk about things going on in the organization.  There was never a place for content like this to live before blogs came about,” Dillon said.  

“A lot of organizations struggled with ‘What should we write about every week?’ And we’re like, ‘What we’re seeing is the ones that are successful are actually putting things out several times a week. You might have to write more than one post a week for this thing to work out.” 

Since initially working with WordPress sites, Geonetric has since developed its own proprietary content management system, VitalSite. VitalSite is designed specifically for healthcare organizations, with HIPAA privacy regulations and end-user privacy in mind.

What’s next? 

Our 25th anniversary trip down memory lane continues in two weeks with our look at 2004 through 2008, an era that launched social media marketing, personalized search results, and more. 

If you’re looking to leverage today’s marketing tech trends and Geonetric’s 25 years of experience to propel your organization into the future, contact us today!

Our team is ready to put their decades of experience to use to help you navigate the ever-changing digital marketing landscape and prepare you for whatever’s coming next.