Customer Story
Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Florida is a not-for-profit, locally-owned regional healthcare system serving the Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia area. It is made up of six nationally-accredited hospitals, including Wolfson Children’s Hospital, more than 200 primary care and specialty physician practices, children’s specialty clinics, home health care, behavioural health, occupational health, rehabilitation services, urgent care and oncology services.
In an ever-changing digital marketing landscape, the health systems in the United States are constantly in search of new and effective marketing strategies worth investing in to drive results and stay ahead of the competition.
While the digital marketing team at Baptist Health was aware of schema markup, the team really began to focus their efforts with the launch of their new website in 2020. They knew this SEO strategy would help the organization stay up-to-date and compete on search. And with the website redesign underway, this was the perfect time to start investing in Schema.
In addition, the team frequently found themselves disputing incorrect search results, mistaking their brand with others. Google had a difficult time distinguishing Baptist Health in Jacksonville from the multitude of other, unaffiliated organizations across the United States with the same name. Since Baptist Health is already a well-known and reputable brand in the North Florida area, the marketing team saw schema markup as a great way to provide Google with more clarity about their organization and the services it offers.
It’s no secret that schema markup is a complicated SEO strategy and the Baptist Health team did not have an in-house expert to write the code or develop a robust strategy.
Under the direction of Baptist Health’s Senior Vice President and Chief Consumer Officer Melanie Husk, the team set to work enhancing their technical SEO strategies.
We knew we wanted to invest in schema markup because we had been hearing about its value and wanted to stay up to date with where search is going, but we didn’t know how to implement it on our site because we didn’t have anyone in-house who knew both the nuances of schema and the ability to code.”
– Lauren Anderson, Digital Content Strategist, Baptist Health
They took a first stab by trying to write the schema markup on their own, but without the proper expertise, they didn’t have confidence in the accuracy of their markup. With limited time and resources, having a schema markup expert in-house was off the table. “I could maybe learn all the intricacies of schema – that is a steep learning curve I could possibly climb – but also learn how to write the JSON-LD code as a non-developer and deploy it on every page as we add and change content; our team does not have time for that along with our other marketing responsibilities,” Lauren said.
To overcome their coding problem, the Baptist Health team decided to look for an external vendor to lend them their expertise.
The team started with an external vendor to help them write the schema markup for each page and manually add it to their site. However, this solution proved to be expensive and not scalable.
Baptist Health has over 8000 URLs on its main website alone and it was impossible for the marketing team to manually update the content on each page. Instead, most of the organization’s content was being fed dynamically from their system to ensure a single source of truth. This included provider profile pages, job listings, clinical trials, locations, and reviews – to name a few.
But the schema markup added to the site by the external vendor was static – which meant that someone had to update the schema markup code manually whenever the content on a page changed to avoid schema drift issues. With so many URLs and constant content updates, the Baptist Health team could not maintain their schema markup manually. The search for a schema markup solution continued.
After their earlier attempts, the Baptist Health team knew that they needed a solution that could:
At the end of 2020, the team chanced upon Schema App at a conference and upon enquiry, found out that Schema App checked all their boxes for their needs in a schema markup solution.
In 2021, Baptist Health brought on Schema App to manage its schema markup strategy.
Baptist Health kicked off its engagement with Schema App by working with a Schema App Customer Success Manager (CSM) to customize a strategy based on the organization’s business goals.
Together, they identified the key page sets they wanted to drive traffic to and which rich results they should target for those page sets.
The Schema App CSM then created schema markup templates for key page sets (i.e. physician, career, location, service lines, etc.) using the Schema App Highlighter, and deployed the markup to those pages dynamically. That way, anytime the content on those key pages changed, the schema markup would update accordingly.
“When we first started working with Schema App, we wanted to be able to roll things out quickly and easily. The fact that we didn’t have to know any code and that it is automated and updated dynamically was great,” said Lauren. “The level of expertise is really helpful because it saves us from climbing the learning curve.”
Within weeks, Baptist Health had accurate and connected schema markup across thousands of pages on their sites. The health system achieved review snippets for their physician profile pages, and job listing rich results for their job postings.
Baptist Health is also constantly launching new pages on its sites. Whenever the health system employs a new physician, the digital team launches a provider profile page and a review page for the physician straight from the database.
The Schema App CSM provided Baptist Health’s digital content team with guidelines on how the content should be formatted on each page so that the relevant schema markup would automatically be deployed to those new pages when launched.
“Our team can go in and add FAQs to a page, and as long as it’s formatted in a certain way, we can automatically achieve eligibility for an FAQ rich result,” said Lauren.
Schema markup is not a one-and-done strategy. After the initial implementation, the Schema App CSM continued to meet with the Baptist Health team on a weekly basis to report on how their schema markup was performing.
During these meetings, they would also suggest new ways for Baptist Health to leverage schema markup, provide content recommendations and work with their content team to find more strategic opportunities to drive results.
“From a broader perspective, the initiatives have really grown from this baseline of trying to get markup everywhere we can to now enhancing the content and getting even more strategic with where we want to drive results.”
One of Baptist Health’s business goals is to drive more traffic to its physician pages and increase bookings.
Even though the team was able to achieve review snippets on their physician page in the initial implementation, they wanted to see if they could also achieve FAQ rich results to drive even more traffic and engagement to those pages.
1. Adding real, unique FAQ content to the page
To achieve an FAQ rich result, you need to have FAQ content that you can markup on your page and Baptist Health didn’t have that on its physician pages. The Schema App CSM suggested the team look at the top user queries on their system and include those queries as FAQ content on their physician pages to achieve the rich result.
Furthermore, Google will only show one instance of an FAQ if the content is repetitive on a site. If Baptist Health had an identical set of FAQs on each physician page, the organization wouldn’t achieve a rich result for each page. To overcome this issue, the Schema App CSM recommended Baptist Health add the physician’s name to every FAQ and customize the content, which Baptist was able to do dynamically from its database.
This change allowed more physician pages to achieve an FAQ rich result in search. After making these content changes, the FAQ rich result for that quarter accounted for 70% of clicks to the physician pages in comparison to 52% in the previous quarter. Physician pages with a FAQ rich result also had a click-through rate of 8%, while physician pages without any rich results had a CTR of 3%.
2. Diversifying the FAQs on a page
A few months after implementing the FAQ content on their pages, Baptist Health could clearly see pages with an FAQ rich result had a higher CTR than those without. However, Google will only display an FAQ rich result if the FAQ is perceived to be relevant to the user’s search query.
Baptist Health wanted a way to increase the number of instances of their physician pages achieving an FAQ rich result. As such, the Schema App CSM proposed adding up to 5 FAQs on the physician pages. That way, the chances of a physician page showing up with an FAQ rich result would be higher and Baptist Health can also delight more customers from the start of their healthcare journey.
These are just some of the many recommendations Schema App has provided Baptist Health on its schema markup journey to date. The agility of the Baptist Health marketing team was another key attribute to the success of this relationship.
Baptist Health’s ability to make quick content changes combined with Schema App’s ongoing recommendations and dynamic tools has allowed them to achieve swift results from their schema markup strategy. They could also easily run experiments and pivot their strategy to ensure their schema markup is as optimized as it can be.
At Schema App, we understand the importance of measurable results. For SEO teams to get buy-in and budget for their strategies, they need to be able to clearly show the return on investment.
Baptist Health is no different. Every quarter, the Schema App CSM conducts a Quarterly Business Review to showcase the impact of their latest improvements to Baptist Health’s schema markup. Baptist’s digital content team can then report back to other key stakeholders in the organization on the ROI of the strategy.
The Quarterly Business Reviews also gave the marketing department the data needed to convince different teams across the organization to prioritize and provide the content required to achieve a rich result, including helping persuade physicians to participate in the patient reviews program.
FAQ Rich Result
Job Posting Rich Result
Review Snippet with FAQ Rich Result
Review snippet
Baptist Health saw tremendous results after working with Schema App. To date, Schema App has helped Baptist Health optimize over 6,500 pages on its site and expand to over 5 different types of rich results. In the past year, the Baptistjax.com site achieved:
Review Snippet Results
Physician pages with a review snippet also had a 491% increase in CTR in comparison to physician pages without a review snippet.
FAQ Results
Schema App’s ongoing improvements to their FAQ rich results have also led to a 147% increase in CTR for physician pages with a FAQ rich result. The instances of FAQ rich results being awarded also grew by 37%.
Job Posting Results
When the job posting rich result is awarded, it increased the CTR by 1194%. This was a major win for the Baptist team as recruitment is currently a major initiative.
What started as a mere means to implement Schema Markup dynamically and at scale, has now transformed into a strategic partnership that supports Baptist Health’s business goals. Through the ongoing support provided by the Schema App Customer Success team, Baptist Health was able to maximize its investment in schema markup to drive tangible value for their business.
Our experience with Schema App has been overwhelmingly pleasant. We are huge fans of not only the solution but also the people at Schema App. We love working with them!
Lauren Anderson
Digital Content and Marketing Strategist
Baptist Health