This article was written for Greystone.Net by Jessica Levco, a freelance healthcare writer and event strategist.

Healthcare organizations with multiple locations face a difficult question: 

How do you help patients find care close to home when your physical footprint spans hundreds of miles, dozens of facilities and countless services — all while making sure Google (and AI search engines) can find you?

At the Healthcare Interactive Conference (HCIC) in Las Vegas, Billings Clinic shared how they tackled this challenge after 11 years without a major website redesign. The presentation was led by Mandi Graham, Application Analyst IV at Billings Clinic; Jeff Giffin, Digital Marketing Liaison at Billings Clinic; and Ben Dillon, CEO at Geonetric.

The Montana-based health system serves a 250,000 square mile geographic area where patients might drive hours for care and need to know exactly what services are available before getting in the car.

The goal of updating the location services was two-fold:

1. Make sure the pages structured on the backend were found more easily by web crawlers, algorithms and AI.
2. Present the information to website users in a way where they could easily find it and understand it.

What the Website Audit Showed

During an audit of the location-focused content, the team found 16 location types scattered across the site. Some facilities consistently used the Billings Clinic name; others didn’t. Some included city names before the facility name; others put it after. Some content lived in the location directory, some on landing pages and some had migrated to service pages or physician profiles.

It was a mess.

“Content sometimes lived in places that we didn’t want it to,” Giffin says. “In some cases, location directory didn’t support the complexity of a particular facility that was acquired or built later on.”

Another problem? The inconsistency was breaking the site’s automated features. Within Sitecore, “smart panels” were supposed to automatically pull in related information, like locations related to a particular service line. But not all the locations’ information lived in the actual location directory, so that automatic system wasn’t always working.

Plus, a third-party provider directory was generating location pages that Google was indexing, sometimes with conflicting data. This meant the team was competing against itself from an SEO perspective.

But some good news: Analytics showed that people were finding locations through organic search, but not the competitive, expensive searches that Billings Clinic needed to win.

People were successful when searching for “Billings Clinic Bozeman” (branded terms the organization naturally owns), but often didn’t find the Billings Clinic site when searching for “same day care options near me” or “Billings OBGYN” (competitive searches where they needed better visibility).

“It can be hard sometimes to make the case for investments in projects like this, so tangible benefits can be helpful,” Dillon says. “If you want to be competitive for SEO, you’ve got to do things the right way.”

How to Create Better Service Location Sites

Once the audit was finished, Billings Clinic developed guidelines on what they needed to do next: Create a service location if consumers will engage with it directly, if it has its own phone number and different hours, or if they want it to display in “related locations” from service pages.

Billings Clinic’s approach centered on creating a clear hierarchy: “parent locations” (like Billings Clinic Bozeman, their western Montana hub) with “service locations” nested underneath. For example, Billings Clinic Bozeman became the parent location, with 32 individual services — cardiology, dermatology, orthopedics — pulled out as separate “service locations.”

Each service location received its own page with relevant information: specific phone numbers, hours, customized calls to action and photos. Each service location links back to the “parent location” and connects circularly to related service pages on the main site.

“On each one of these ‘child’ pages, the very first option will say ‘it’s located inside’ with a header so that people know that this particular service is located inside the ‘parent location’,” Graham says. “We're trying to link everything back to itself and help people navigate the site better.”

To keep it manageable, they didn’t create locations for areas or departments that patients and health consumers don’t make appointments with, skipping areas like administration offices, HR departments, chaplaincy services and registration desks.

How Patients Benefit From the New Layout

The new site asks users for their location, but allows manual override at any point. Search results automatically reorder based on proximity, with filtering options to narrow by specialty or distance. The team also added quick links to the most commonly visited regional hubs directly in the search interface.

Since launching in September 2025, the data has been promising:

• Page views for location-related content nearly doubled
• Sessions using location-related content increased 17%
• Organic search traffic to locations jumped more than 20%

“We’ve learned through this process that our digital footprint keeps expanding, whether we planned for it or not,” Giffin says. “Every year, there are going to be more and more decisions that we need to make. A lot of other hospitals are in the same position we were in. If you don’t actively manage your locations, your patients won’t be able to find you.”