Overseas procedure enquiries up 3.2x for a Chennai hospital, from its medical-hub position.

The challenge

A Chennai multi-specialty hospital had built a reputation as part of the city's medical hub, drawing patients from across India as well as overseas. For international cases specifically, though, almost every patient arrived through a medical tourism agent who took a placement fee on top of the treatment cost.

Overseas and NRI patients researching treatment in India typically compare hospitals, procedures and costs for weeks before they book travel, often from time zones and browsers the hospital's site was never built to serve well. Treatment-cost detail, in particular, was missing, and patients doing that comparison online had no way to reach the hospital directly, so agents kept controlling the relationship.

The approach

Webzenia's first step was identifying the procedure, condition and cost searches overseas and NRI patients actually run before choosing a hospital in India, prioritising terms with clear medical-tourism intent using Ahrefs and Google Search Console.

Procedure and treatment-cost content followed, addressing what an international patient needs before booking travel: what a procedure involves, expected costs in terms familiar to an overseas reader, and what the recovery and travel logistics look like.

Because those patients searched from different countries and in different currencies and conventions, hreflang directed Gulf, Southeast Asian and other overseas readers to the regionally relevant version of each page, so the content matched how each market actually searched.

Call tracking tied to GA4 let the team see which procedure and cost pages were converting into international enquiry calls, distinguishing genuine overseas interest from domestic traffic on the same pages.

The results

Overseas and NRI procedure enquiries grew 3.2x over 9 months. International patients began reaching the hospital directly instead of exclusively through a medical tourism agent.

28% of enquiries now come from the Gulf and Southeast Asia, the regions hreflang was built to serve, confirming the content reached the patients it was written for rather than just adding domestic traffic.

36 procedure terms reached the top three results. Patients comparing a specific procedure and its cost found the hospital directly during the research phase, arriving at the enquiry call already informed.

The first international enquiry arrived within 10 weeks. That early signal let the hospital start capturing overseas interest well before the 9-month programme was complete, compounding as more procedure pages ranked.

The stack behind it

• AhAhrefsSearch
• GSGoogle Search ConsoleSearch
• GAGA4Analytics
• LSLooker StudioReporting