Patient enquiries up 2.9x for a Lucknow hospital, beyond referrals and aggregators.

The challenge

Patients from towns across Uttar Pradesh travelled to a Lucknow multi-specialty hospital for procedures unavailable closer to home, but most of that traffic arrived through a doctor's referral or a healthcare aggregator app that charged the hospital for every booking it sent.

A family in Gorakhpur or Bareilly deciding where to go for a procedure searched for the department and the specific treatment long before they picked a hospital name. The hospital's website covered its departments in general terms but rarely answered what a patient searches when comparing where to go, so aggregators kept capturing that research and billing the hospital to hand it back. Every booking routed through an aggregator carried a fee the hospital had no way to avoid.

The approach

Patient search behaviour across Uttar Pradesh came first: Semrush and Google Search Console data identified the procedure, condition and department terms driving traffic to aggregator listings instead of the hospital's own site.

The team built procedure and condition pages under each department, written to answer what a patient outside Lucknow needs before committing to the trip: what the treatment involves, which specialists handle it, and what to expect on arrival. Department pages were restructured around how a patient searches, not how the hospital's org chart was drawn.

Google Business Profile and local SEO work strengthened the hospital's presence for searches from surrounding UP towns, so it appeared alongside the aggregator listings a patient would otherwise click first.

Technical SEO fixed mobile load times, since most of this research happens on a phone in a district town with an inconsistent connection, and call tracking tied enquiries back to the specific procedure page that produced them.

The results

Patient enquiries from organic grew 2.9x over eight months. The hospital's own procedure pages began converting the research that aggregator listings used to intercept.

28 procedure terms reached the top three results, covering the specific treatments and conditions patients search before choosing where to go. Enquiries arrived already aware of the department and specialist they needed.

40% of enquiries now come from outside Lucknow, from the district towns across UP the hospital had previously reached only through referrals or a paid aggregator listing. That reach no longer carries a per-lead fee.

The stack behind it

• SeSemrushSearch
• GSGoogle Search ConsoleSearch
• GAGA4Analytics
• CTCall trackingReporting
• GBGoogle Business ProfileLocal