Our customers tell the best success stories. That’s why we decided to kick off a brand new webinar series from Schema App—Fireside Chats—where we shine a spotlight on the successes our customers have found from structured data.
On Thursday, October 28th, we held our first Fireside Chat with Simon Yohe, the Senior Director of E-commerce and CRM at Holiday Inn Club Vacations. Prior to this role, Simon Yohe was the Director of Web Marketing Strategy at AdventHealth, which was formerly Florida Hospital and a part of the Adventis Health System. Simon was brought on to AdventHealth because they were doing a national rebrand and wanted to mitigate any loss in organic traffic during their website consolidation.
The Challenge
AdventHealth had dozens of hospitals in multiple locations scattered across nine states, and wanted to bring them all together as one health system. This would require consolidating over 800 different hospital and medical websites that were all branded differently into one AdventHealth.com domain and brand.
In order to do this, Simon and his team needed to put a system in place to help Google and other search engines be able to easily identify those legacy names without losing any organic search traffic in the process. They also wanted to ensure that customers were still able to locate the hospitals, medical pavilions, imaging centres, etc throughout the consolidation. One of the ways they solved this challenge was through the use of structured data.
The Solution
For AdventHealth, the rebranding and consolidation was one piece, but where the structured data really played to AdventHealth’s advantage was the connectedness of entities within AdventHealth’s company knowledge graph. It wasn’t simply a rebrand from the term “Florida Hospital” to “AdventHealth”; it was a complete restructure of how Google contextualized those hospitals, their geographical areas, and how they relate to this new consolidated health system.
For Holiday Inn Club Vacations, Simon and his team wanted to build out and grow their digital platform in a way that could be self-sufficient. It wasn’t just about building functionality that would allow customers to book online reservations or creating a new member portal; they were architecting ways that they could overall enhance and improve how their website is found by using structured data to inform their content strategy.
Working together with Simon and his team to understand the unique value these initiatives proposed, we were able to design customized schema markup strategies that would help them achieve these online business goals.
Structured data became a strategic opportunity to achieve these goals, but the AdventHealth team wasn’t sure how they were going to implement it and were limited in regards to their development team, as they were actively working on developing the new platforms.
Through their design agency, AdventHealth came across Schema App and loved the idea of a “plug and play” option instead of managing the software themselves. A development team can build this solution in-house, and a lot of companies do, but where it can become a struggle is that you only have a finite amount of developers.
When you’re working on different website features and functionality, it becomes harder to make sure that you have those dedicated resources focused on your structured data markup. You also have to have someone that’s knowledgeable and understanding of what you’re trying to mark up, and someone who can maintain, monitor, track and optimize it.
Why Schema App?
As a beginner, structured data can be challenging. That’s why Schema App was created in the first place: to provide a scalable solution paired with expert support so that structured data could become a more approachable practice for any SEO team.
Working with Schema App and structured data even ended up helping Simon and his team with their content strategy, and with how they organized content as they built their new consolidated website. Through schema markup and the linking of entities across your site, you’re helping Google categorize and understand your content. Two areas that really impacted AdventHealth were the facility pages and the physician profile pages.
The ability to connect physicians with their services, the physicians with their locations and the locations to the services—structured data markup gave Simon and his team a better understanding of how to structurally organize and display content on their website.
The Return on Investment
One of the most effective ways to show the impact of structured data is by looking through search engine page results (SERPs). You can visually see how adding structured data enhances your content in the SERPs, like the FAQ rich result for AdventHealth below.
The visual change is clear, but structured data also empowers your SEO team with measurable results. AdventHealth saw a 90% increase in clicks and a 40% increase in impressions that could be attributed to the addition of schema markup to their website.
Structured data is a long term investment in the success of your website. You’re building meaningful connections with Google through well-defined entities, and with your customers through enhanced content in the SERPs. By using structured data opportunities to inform your content strategy, you’re ensuring that your website is organized in a way that search engines can easily understand your content and then show that information to the right customers at the right time.
We help you leverage structured data to showcase the unique value of your health system in search. By working cross-functionally with different areas of your organization, we introduce agility to your team in the rapidly changing landscape of search engine optimization. We’ve worked with some of the top healthcare leaders in the industry, such as Sharp Healthcare, AdventHealth, and Henry Ford Health System—executing business results using our expertise and technology. Let’s start building some meaningful connections!
Martha van Berkel is the co-founder and CEO of Schema App, an end-to-end Semantic Schema Markup solution provider based in Ontario, Canada. She focuses on helping SEO teams globally understand the value of Schema Markup and how they can leverage Schema Markup to grow search performance and develop a reusable content knowledge graph that drives innovation. Before starting Schema App, Martha was a Senior Manager responsible for online support tools at Cisco. She is a Mom of two energetic kids, loves to row, and drinks bulletproof coffee.