Chicago Style SEO

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company.

We are one of the largest healthcare providers in the Midwest. The company is one of the nation's top 10 health systems and the largest integrated healthcare system in Illinois. The company has more than 30,000 employees, 10 acute care hospitals, two children's hospitals, and more than 6,000 affiliated physicians.

What is your role and responsibilities?

I am the manager of digital marketing. I manage the team that manages the website. I do the Internet, the intranet portal for the associates, and all of the online digital marketing. That includes anything from Google pay-per-click to social media advertising to all of our social media entities and so on.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What was your goal for working with Chicago Style SEO?

During the past five years, we have had more than a dozen projects with them. Typically, the core projects are Google AdWords campaigns and SEM [search engine marketing] campaigns. The ultimate goal of those campaigns is to increase online physician appointments. That is a direct revenue goal. It is not as integrated as ZocDoc, which is integrated with a direct online scheduling system. The patient can fill out an online form with their demographic information, which gives them the option to choose when they’d like to have an appointment and with which physician. They can search our physician database and choose a doctor that they’d like, then click a button to request an appointment. They fill out the online form, which is delivered to our call center, which is Health Advisor, where that appointment is facilitated through a third party.

They are advocates, and the advocate call center works with the physician's office and the patient to secure the appointment. There is third-party intervention, but it is an electronic appointment request.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their work.

Chicago Style has done a lot. They set up most of our higher level AdWords campaigns in Google. They provided search engine optimization consultative services to our team of Web writers for our Healthy News website, which is a journalism-focused website that is an advocate for writing articles and stories about trending health news and topics online. They have done in-services and training to our people on how best to optimize those articles for search engine optimization. They’ve done SEO analyses of our website platforms, whether it is Advocate Health, our children's hospital website, or the AMGDoctors.com website. They are working on some current social media marketing campaigns through Twitter. They have worked on various projects for us.

What was your process for selecting Chicago Style SEO with which to work?

I started working with them many years ago. I think we searched on Google. Because search engine optimization is their specialty, they came up very prominently in the search. When we reached out to them and talked with them, based on their responses we hired them. They were very knowledgeable, and we wanted to work with them to reach our goals. We have ongoing work now.

Can you provide a personnel work hour figure for the size of the work that they’ve done for you?

In work hours, it was about 2,000 work hours per project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Do you have any statistics or metrics to track improvement from the project?

We have seen a huge increase in our online appointment bookings. There has been a very large percentage increase, but I don’t have the exact figure.

How was Chicago Style SEO's general performance?

They are very attentive and knowledgeable. They are very smart when it comes to anything digital, especially Google. If we need anything through Google, we work with them. We're able to work with their resources at Google in terms of local SEO or a Google Plus Places listing. We have so many locations in the Chicagoland area that for us to be able to come up prominently and have the correct addresses and phone numbers is important for us. They have helped us with that. Their Google Analytics capabilities help with analyzing the traffic we get to our website.

I have encountered other SEO firms at conferences and other vendors that reach out to me on a daily basis, trying to get our SEO and SEM business.

Is there anything unique about them that really makes them stand out, compared to other companies?

The relationship that we have allows them to act as our advocates, and they know what we want and what we're looking for. They have a good idea of our reach in the Chicagoland market and where our ads need to show up. They are very knowledgeable about the subject, and every time I talk to them, I learn something new or they bring something new to the table. They have such good ideas. Everything that they’ve done for us, we’ve seen a direct impact in terms of increasing our conversions on our website. That is what keeps me with them, instead of going elsewhere. They are competitively priced, and we have a good working relationship. There is a trust factor with them. I know that if they’re going to do a campaign for us, it will be successful. We know they will work toward it being as successful as it can be.

Looking back on the work so far, is there any area that you think they could improve upon or that you might do differently?

During one campaign, without my direction and telling them, they do broad keyword research and give us what we ask for. We needed to be more specific in what we were looking for. When you start to research different health care-related keywords, it can be very broad and large scale. We just need to stay focused on a certain key topic. There have never been any issues with them at all.