Customer Story
Located in San Diego, CA, Sharp HealthCare is a not-for-profit regional healthcare group comprising four acute-care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, three affiliated medical groups, and various other facilities and services.
With approximately 2,600 physicians and 20,000 employees, their mission is to provide ‘The Sharp Experience’, which prioritizes delivering the same level of compassionate healthcare digitally as their in-person services.
In 2018, Sharp HealthCare took a hard look at their SEO efforts when they saw some of their key pages underperforming on Google.
They had previously underinvested in SEO and wanted to prioritize it moving forward to bring the Sharp Experience to potential and existing patients in a digital format. That way, they could make their content easily accessible to their patients on the search engine results page and be the first option for their community’s healthcare needs.
Content is crucial to any successful SEO strategy and Sharp HealthCare wanted patients to be able to easily access the right information in their time of need. However, the Sharp HealthCare site had inconsistent content across different service line pages due to differences in content preferences amongst physicians and facilities.
This made it hard for users to navigate the site and find the information they needed. For instance, one of the service pages would contain an FAQ section, while another would completely omit FAQ content altogether. This meant that if a person wanted to find an answer, they had to search through multiple pages.
Sharp knew they had to work on getting consistent content across their site and utilize Schema Markup to help search engines direct searchers to the right pages. Sharp HealthCare launched the ‘One Sharp’ initiative to unify their various departments and create a seamless digital experience.
Their objective was to facilitate comprehensive access to patient queries by:
Like most other organizations, Rachael Jones, Product Manager on the Digital Experience team, attempted to implement Schema Markup on her own. It soon became clear that additional expertise was necessary, as attempting to write Schema Markup by hand proved to be complex and time-consuming.
Additionally, the lack of content consistency posed challenges in implementing Schema Markup at scale. With varying content templates, it was difficult to apply Schema Markup consistently, affecting eligibility for rich results and impacting search visibility and overall user experience.
Given the size and complex nature of their website, Sharp HealthCare needed a scalable and dynamic solution to enhance their SEO efforts, prompting them to seek the expertise of Schema App.
To start, Schema App provided Sharp HealthCare with a scalable technical solution paired with an assigned Customer Success Manager (CSM) to take care of strategy, authoring, deployment, and monitoring, while keeping the Sharp team informed and involved throughout the process.
This collaboration allowed Rachael to deepen her understanding of the technical aspects of Schema Markup while scaling to manage her numerous responsibilities.
When asked how Schema App’s focus on desired outcomes contributed to Sharp’s confidence in the partnership, Rachael stated that it was clear that “Schema App understood [their] business goals”.
It really reassured me that we were on the same page. Even though I don’t understand the ins and outs of Schema Markup, it was clear that the Schema App team understood what we were trying to do.”
Rachael Jones
Product Manager – Digital Experience
Sharp HealthCare
With regards to performance, the Schema App team was able to utilize the Schema Performance Analytics tool to assess how Sharp’s Schema Markup was performing. They would then share their insights and content recommendations with the Sharp team to improve results.
Regular communication via email and meetings kept teams aligned, gave Sharp the opportunity to ask questions, and allowed their Customer Success Manager to review content plans as per their best practices prior to Sharp making them live. The continuous recommendations and dialogue formed the basis of Sharp’s long-term content strategy and contributed to a more cohesive and scalable page structure across the organization.
With the goal of improving the customer journey and bringing specific information directly into the SERP, Schema App made a recommendation focused on Sharp’s location pages. The Customer Success Manager advised the Sharp team to incorporate an accordion-style FAQ section and add at least 3 questions that were chosen using carefully researched keywords to address the most common user queries related to the page topic.
It was also recommended that the questions flowed logically from one to another. By applying this best practice, Sharp’s location pages became eligible for FAQ rich results.
CTR increased by 648% when the FAQ rich result was awarded on location pages.
By leveraging data-driven insights provided in Schema App’s Quarterly Business Reviews, Sharp HealthCare successfully addressed stakeholder concerns and gained their trust in decision-making, facilitating better content alignment and clarity among stakeholders.
The measurable data and content recommendations from Schema Performance Analytics have been particularly beneficial when engaging with clinical stakeholders who may have initially had differing opinions about page content.
As a result, the Sharp team could use data to explain the rationale behind certain content decisions to other teams, resulting in greater stakeholder buy-in, page alignment, and better results.
FAQ Rich Result
Review Snippet with FAQ Rich Result
Review Snippet
In partnership with Schema App, Sharp HealthCare was able to implement a robust Schema Markup strategy and yield amazing results.
However, Sharp HealthCare still had an ongoing challenge to tackle. Upon reassessing their site performance, Sharp discovered limitations in their existing CMS, which led to issues such as slow site speed and poor user experience on mobile.
Alongside their goal of unifying their branches of care, Sharp aimed to improve their site’s search performance, traffic and conversions, page load times, security, and mobile user experience. To achieve these objectives and provide their content team with greater flexibility in design and functionality, they determined that migrating to a new CMS was necessary.
Migrating to a new CMS is a major project and the Sharp team knew that they would need support from the Schema App team to ensure the content on their new site was consistent and achieving rich results where applicable.
The Schema App team assessed Sharp’s existing pages and provided content recommendations based on the Schema.org vocabulary and best practices they had shared earlier in the engagement.
This enabled Sharp’s content team to optimize their pages with a scalable content model across all of their key pages. It would also prepare them to rebuild their website in a purposeful and semantic way, and stand out with rich results in the SERP when they launch any pages on their new CMS.
The learnings and best practices identified from Schema App’s implementation of Schema Markup on the original site, such as FAQ and Review Schema Markup on Sharp’s physician pages, provided valuable insights for the site migration before it even began. As the site reconstruction rolled out, this allowed Sharp to incorporate large-scale rich result best practices, while also maximizing the semantic SEO on their content and pages.
Throughout the process of building out the page sets, Schema App’s Customer Success Manager partnered with Sharp to coach and guide the Sharp team to ensure that best practices were maintained during the transition.
One of Schema App’s recommendations for Sharp’s content strategy was for each page to focus on one topic that could be represented using a Schema.org Type, for example building out Doctor Pages around Schema.org’s Physician type.
By focusing on one specific topic per page, Sharp could easily create a clear website architecture and identify the key information to include on each page. That way, users would easily find what they were looking for and search engines could clearly understand what the page was about.
During the migration process, the Sharp team applied this recommendation and made sure that each page focused clearly on a specific Schema.org Type when establishing their content structure. They also looked at the Schema.org properties for each type they had chosen and included the content for those properties.
For example, the Physician page was best categorized by Schema.org’s Physician Type. Some of the properties under the Physician Type were availableService, medicalSpecialty and openingHours.
The Sharp team structured the content on every physician page to include information about the physician’s medical specialty, services offered, FAQs about the physician, where the physician was located and reviews of the physician, if available.
By using the Schema.org vocabulary to inform content architecture, the Sharp team could ensure consistent information across different types of pages.
The work with Schema App has allowed us to reconstruct our new website in a very meaningful and strategic way. Everything we are building for services, locations and physicians is centered around Schema Markup.
Rachael Jones
Product Manager – Digital Experience
Sharp HealthCare
On top of aligning their content with available Schema.org properties, Schema App also authored Sharp’s Schema Markup to nest properties under the main Schema.org type for each page. This is a best practice we call connected Schema Markup.
For example, all Physicians worked for Sharp HealthCare. Therefore, Sharp HealthCare was nested under each Physician’s parentOrganization property. If the page also contained FAQs about a Physician, FAQPage markup would be nested using the subjectOf property.
Nesting establishes relationships between different entities on a website. That way, search engines can understand and contextualize the content on the site, and provide more accurate search results for users.
By connecting the various entities on the Sharp website through nesting and linking to external authoritative knowledge bases, Sharp was able to generate a reusable content knowledge graph.
The connected knowledge graph created through Schema Markup enabled Sharp HealthCare to inform AI search engines about the context and connectivity of their content, facilities, and services. This aligned with their goal of unifying their services as AI advancements progress and content relationships become increasingly important.
Achieving tangible results through Schema Markup has been instrumental in Sharp’s organizational decision-making.
“When we have wins from Schema Markup, they are directly tied to our larger business goals. This helps us communicate to our VP and C-Suite why this partnership is so important and why the work we’re doing is so valuable. Leadership notices the difference a strong Schema Markup strategy has made on the business as a whole,” said Rachael.
When asked what stands out to leadership specifically, they pointed out that it’s the numbers. They were able to tie the incremental clicks they achieved directly back to their Schema Markup efforts, further justifying the investment in Schema App.
The alignment of goals between Sharp HealthCare and Schema App has yielded valuable insights that have translated into actionable strategies.
FAQ Rich Result on Location Pages
When FAQ rich results were awarded on location pages, CTR increased by 648%.
FAQ Rich Results on Physician Pages
When FAQ rich results were rewarded on physician pages, CTR increased by 308%.
Review Snippets for Physician Pages
When the Review Snippets were awarded on physician pages, the CTR increased by 119%.
In addition to our Schema Markup platform, Schema App’s ongoing human-to-human support and content recommendations provide significant added value.
Schema App’s primary focus is to establish meaningful connections digitally, organizationally, and personally. In the case of the partnership with Sharp HealthCare, they successfully facilitated connections in all of these areas.
Through this partnership, Schema App and Sharp have brought the previously disjointed elements of Sharp’s team together, applied robust Schema markup at scale, and enabled the creation of a content knowledge graph. Their work together has fostered a deep connection between their teams and helped Sharp HealthCare achieve comprehensive patient care online.
“When we have wins from Schema Markup, they are directly tied to our larger business goals. This helps us communicate to our VP and C-Suite why this partnership is so important and why the work we’re doing is so valuable. Leadership notices the difference a strong Schema Markup strategy has made on the business as a whole.”
Rachael Jones
Product Manager, Digital Experience
Sharp HealthCare