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Increased Patient Engagement by 20%

using strategic calls to action

Executive Summary

In the spring of 2016, the Aurora Health Care (now Advocate Aurora) Heart and Vascular website wasn’t reflecting the high-quality care or expertise available across their healthcare system. Their stakeholders – including patients and physicians – made it clear that the website needed an overhaul.

Aha Media Group audited the content to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities to develop new content. Armed with the findings, Aha Media created a content strategy that defined how to restructure and rewrite their web pages for improved user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO). As a result, user engagement increased more than 20% after just 3 months.

The Challenge

Aurora’s website metrics showed that a majority of visitors were leaving the website after viewing just 1 page, likely because they couldn’t easily find the information they needed. This led to a higher-than-desired bounce rate. Engagement was also low: Most visitors spent less than 10 seconds on the page.

To keep visitors on the website longer and navigating through more pages, the new navigation needed to be user-friendly – regardless of device. Visitors could then easily move through the engaging content and access the information they needed.

Aha Media’s Approach

Phase 1 was a content audit: A deep-dive discovery of the existing content. A content strategist detailed the findings, explaining what was (and wasn’t) working with the existing content. Aha Media created an information architecture (IA) of the entire heart and vascular content redesign – 200 pages in total.

In phase 2, Aha Media developed custom healthcare content based on the IA. Trained writers and editors used the discovery findings, stakeholder interviews, SEO research and brand guidelines to write the full 200 pages of content using web and SEO best practices. The new content:

Highlighted Strengths

Effectively explained complex medical information and highlighted Aurora’s key strengths and differentiators.

Engaging Content

Used an empathetic and engaging tone that better related to patients.

Direct CTAs

Included strong and direct calls to action within the body copy.

Aha Media Group is the gold standard when it comes to optimizing healthcare content. The discovery process informed the content creation because they understood the vision and the goals. And, because of the detailed, spot-on information architecture Aha Media created, we were 80% finished with the project before the writing even started.

Julie T.

Manager, Digital Experience Content

The Results

A 3-month post launch analysis showed that rewritten copy with SEO enhancements had already improved organic traffic by 4%. It also led to more engagement once visitors were on the website:

Effective Content

Visitors spent 20% more time on the website and viewed 22% more pages per session due to links and content moving them through the website.

Increased Engagement

Strategic calls to action increased engagement rates by 22%. Find-a-doctor action increased by 17%, and video plays increased by 25%.

Improved Ranking

Many pages ranked so high they appeared in Google’s snippet boxes, which drove visitors to the website.

Lessons Learned

When you audit existing content and craft a roadmap for content development, you’ll get much better results.
Create an IA that’s based on UX so that patients will engage more with your content.
Writing content that tells the story of “why choose us” will help your readers immediately understand what sets you apart.