Jacksonville Orthopaedic Institute (JOI)
Multi-Tiered PPC & SEO Strategy
CloudMellow Marketing & Jacksonville Orthopaedic Institute – Driving Scalable Growth and Efficiency in Healthcare PPC
Objectives & Budget
Jacksonville Orthopaedic Institute (JOI), a 5 location orthopedic practice in Northeast Florida, reached out to us with a request to help them increase their service visibility through search and paid media channels. To understand their goals, we had to do significant research into their business, customer base, and geographic healthcare needs. Once we understood how their services met the ideal customer needs, we analyzed their standard marketing strategies and outcomes.
This led us to find gaps in performance and put together an action plan that was customized to their primary objectives: to increase appointment bookings and position JOI as the leading orthopedic provider in the region.
Our strategy and challenge was to maximize the practice’s return on investment in a competitive healthcare space while ensuring HIPAA’s privacy law compliance.
Our 6 month campaign window and our allocation spending was divided into the following assets:
Target Audience & Strategy
Although JOI has previously advertised to all age groups, our research and their past marketing campaign results showed us that targeting adults between ages of 35 and 65 was going to yield the best results. Next, we decided to streamline the geographic focus on the greater Jacksonville, Florida area by understanding customer needs for proximity. In terms of search behavior, we wanted to reach individuals who were actively seeking orthopedic treatment or specialist consultations, especially those related to sports injuries, joint pain, or alternatives to surgery.
Our strategic approach was two-fold and involved positioning JOI for long-term success. First, we decided to run hyper-optimized PPC campaigns that would focus on short-term results and quick show of return on investment.
Secondly, we wanted to focus on Local SEO methods that would position JOI as a leader in local orthopedic services. By choosing to focus on organic search as a long-term strategy, we strived to build sustainable visibility and increase high-intent traffic for the long term. Overall, we wanted to tackle short-term and long-lasting strategies that were independent of each other but that could work synergistically to maximize lead to customer conversions.
This is a more descriptive summary of our approach:
Local SEO
Targeting high-intent local keywords (ex. “orthopedic surgeon near me,” “knee pain Jacksonville”) to dominate local listing searches.
LocalHyper-Optimized PPC Campaigns
Using highly vetted ad groups, precise service-oriented keywords, and audience layering to reach users in the precise moment of health decision-making.
We implemented a hybrid SEO + PPC strategy with the following key strategies:
Bid Strategy Overhaul:
Shifted from Enhanced CPC to Maximize Conversions, focusing on tangible conversions rather than impressions or clicks.
Keyword Refinement:
Continuously added and experimented with high-intent service keywords and eliminated underperforming ones.
Campaign Restructuring:
Launched geo-targeted local campaigns and paused inefficient ad groups.
Competitor Targeting:
Introduced new ad groups aimed at competitor brand keywords, which significantly boosted conversions.
Budget Prioritization:
Reallocated budget toward high-performing campaigns and ad groups to maximize ROI.
Implementation & Category:
- Category: Best Use of Search – Health
This campaign was built on a solid foundation for success due to our team’s diligence in providing detailed audits and gap analysis of previous strategies. This led to custom-built solutions instead of standard cookie-cutter tactics.
Specifically, we built campaigns that align specifically with user intent, ensuring that keywords, ad copy, and landing pages all reflected service-line search behavior.
Our expertise in web-design also helped us create user-friendly landing pages with simplified booking forms that were easy to navigate and which lead to higher conversions.
This holistic approach will help JOI become resilient to competition and marketing shifts in the long run, ensuring that our PPC and SEO efforts continue to bring in qualified leads.
Challenges & How They Were Overcome
The main challenge:
Orthopedic healthcare is competitive both in marketing and on the ground, where small healthcare businesses have to contend with local clinics and urgent care centers.
In terms of marketing, this competitive nature is further made difficult by bigger hospital systems that have vast resources to outbid smaller competitors on overlapping terms. This drives up costs for PPC healthcare marketing, in particular, making organic differentiation a challenge.
As solutions, we:
- Segmented ad campaigns by condition type and appointment urgency.
- Implemented exact-match keyword groupings to reduce waste.
- Developed location-specific SEO clusters that linked physician bios and services offered to reinforce authority.
Additional challenge:
We had to track offline conversions for phone calls and booked appointments in a HIPAA-compliant way. Marketing in healthcare is fraught with complexities, given the multiple laws governing the sale and marketing of healthcare products.
Our solution:
We overcame this by doing due diligence on our processes and integrating advanced call tracking systems that anonymized data while still allowing source attribution.
Results & Evaluation
Our collective goal of increasing conversions while lowering their cost was met, while other results truly exceeded our expectations.
The following are our campaign milestones across all service areas:
21% increase
Website traffic increased from 20,995 to 25,320 sessions
124% increase
Form submissions more than doubled, rising from 416 to 933
4.2% lift
Calls from ads grew from 4,181 to 4,358
15% decrease
Cost per result dropped from $8.70 to $7.40
15% improvement in cost-efficiency
Average CPC decreased from $1.82 to $1.55
1.72% Slight Dip
Click-through rate held strong at 12.2%, with only a slight dip of 1.72%
Service Line Highlights
Each medical service area received tailored optimizations based on prior performance and patient intent data.
These are the campaign results for each service area, as well as our approach to generating these outcomes:
Hip Services
Traffic
4,031 (+43.86%)
Calls from Ads
624 (+1.9%)
Form Submissions
134.5 (+52.2%)
Cost per Result
$11.24 (-3.6%)
Avg CPC
$2.14 (-26.05%)
CTR
12.21% (-1.72%)
Outcome
Local geo-targeting, keyword expansion, and fresh ad creative drove sharp increases in visibility and engagement.
Knee Services
Traffic
3,140 (+17%)
Calls from Ads
735 (-10%)
Form Submissions
141 (+134.3%)
Cost per Result
$8.00 (-2.21%)
Avg CPC
$2.17 (+4.44%)
CTR
12.21% (-1.72%)
Outcome
Bid strategy updated to Maximize Conversions and competitor targeting lifted form submissions substantially.
Foot & Ankle Services
Traffic
2,616 (+10.15%)
Calls from Ads
484.26 (+3.53%)
Form Submissions
19 (+72.73%)
Cost per Result
$12.71 (-5.08%)
Avg CPC
$2.45 (-9.41%)
CTR
7.49% (-12.32%)
Outcome
New ads and high-converting keywords elevate performance while reducing average cost.
Physical Therapy (PT)
Traffic
9,134 (+34.38%)
Calls from Ads
1,878.26 (-2.24%)
Form Submissions
253.02 (+264.05%)
Cost per Result
$2.99 (-7.15%)
Avg CPC
$0.70 (-26.03%)
CTR
23.58% (-14.87%)
Outcome
Efficient budget usage and refined targeting produced a massive leap in cost-effective lead generation
Rehab Services
Traffic
3,827 (+150.95%)
Calls from Ads
340.90 (+8.05%)
Form Submissions
355.65 (+23,610.04%)
Cost per Result
$8.16 (-54.28%)
Avg CPC
$1.48 (-59.97%)
CTR
12.32% (+52.94)
Outcome
A campaign relaunch coupled with higher bids on call conversions led to a record-breaking surge in leads.
Shoulder Services
Traffic
1,617 (-61.22%)
Calls from Ads
293.98 (+591.17%)
Form Submissions
19.83 (-9.85%)
Cost per Result
$14.98 (-79.32%)
Avg CPC
$2.91 (+159.32%)
CTR
5.73% (-30.46%)
Outcome
Despite lower traffic, new competitor-focused campaigns and conversion-focused bidding drove high-value call growth at dramatically reduced cost.
Overall, our results brought tangible outcomes for JOI within the 6-month campaign span. The practice experienced higher patient volume (increased sales) and more efficient marketing spend, which helped to increase its profit-margins.
Why Should Your Campaign Win?
Given the challenges of marketing in the healthcare landscape, our marketing strategies were designed to empower JOI with a multi-tiered approach that meets their immediate and long-term customer acquisition needs. Because of our experience with healthcare marketing, we also understood the power of clear and message-driven landing pages to speak to consumer pain points. By prioritizing landing-page creation, we invested in a marketing asset that will help JOI reach customers with empathy and direct assistance when they need it the most.
In an industry that is highly competitive and with complex legal parameters, we were able to navigate common marketing pitfalls by capitalizing on our knowledge of the B2B and B2C healthcare sectors. Our campaign experience further provided us with knowledge of what marketing strategies work to attract highly qualified healthcare patients, and we focused on testing and reiterating those strategies for the best results.
In an industry where timing and trust are everything, we were able to connect patients with the care they needed by seamlessly integrating SEO, PPC, and local optimization. In this win-win scenario, we helped expand JOI’s reach locally to ensure patients found the services they needed in real time.