Data-Driven SEO-Optimized Website Redesign
Nicklaus Children's Hospital
Nicklaus Children's Hospital is South Florida's only licensed specialty hospital exclusively for children, with nearly 800 attending physicians and more than 475 pediatric subspecialists. The 309-bed hospital, known as Miami Children's Hospital from 1983 through 2014, is renowned for excellence in all aspects of pediatric medicine, with many programs routinely ranked among the nation's best by U.S. News & World Report, since 2008. The hospital is also home to the largest pediatric teaching program in the southeastern United States and has been designated an American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) Magnet facility, the nursing profession's most prestigious institutional honor.
The Challenge
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital wanted to maximize organic visibility, ensure crawlability and indexability, and ultimately drive conversions through the development of a more search-friendly website.
The Strategy
To improve the overall performance of the website, Rise developed a comprehensive website migration strategy focused on 4 main areas:
- Data-Driven Navigation Development: Rise’s SEO and UX teams determined which sections of the site carried the most opportunities for SEO improvement by analyzing traffic and conversion data as well as Voice of Customer. Through their findings, they recommended increasing the searchability of the Find a Physician category, as this priority category is vital to the site’s overall conversions. Moving it up to the primary navigation allows users to more easily find the section. It also enables search engines to have better access to important, relevant content, which helps distribute authority and improve ranking potential.
- Content Restructure: By assessing key metrics like organic traffic and engagement between 2016-2018 for over 300,000 web pages, as well as incorporating Nicklaus’ business priorities, Rise recommended a streamlined content structure to create a user-friendly and SEO-optimized site. For pages migrated to the new site, Rise’s SEO and copy-editing teams worked together with the Nicklaus Children’s team to optimize the content and make it more engaging to help improve performance.
- Technical Optimizations: Rise created a comprehensive URL taxonomy and redirect plan based on the new site architecture. This plan helped to focus the site on key traffic-driving pages and carefully manage multiple versions of pages. This approach helps communicate to search engine crawlers the relationship between pages, improves user experience, and effectively passes authority through the site—which, in turn, improves overall visibility, traffic, and conversions.
- Continuous Website Support & Performance Monitoring: Rise teams provided 24-hour support from pre-launch staging reviews through launch-day for a seamless and successful migration. Knowing rankings and traffic are likely to fluctuate even after a successful launch, due to the time it takes engines to re-crawl a site, Rise monitored performance post-launch to check that priority pages were ranking for the proper keywords and that all traffic-driving pages were correctly redirecting.
