CASE STUDY

Banner Health Makes Services Easier to Access with Optimized Website Search

SearchStax powers more efficient content and service discovery of Banner’s broad network website experiences

“I’m a firm believer that search is navigation. Navigation used to be menus, but now we find that it’s really driven by search.”

Chris Pace | Senior Director of Digital Marketing

Banner Health Needs Unified Information Discovery for Their Patients

Banner Health is a leading non-profit healthcare provider with the core mission of “Making healthcare easier, so life can be better.” They operate in six states across the U.S., including Arizona, where they are the state’s largest employer. Banner is a top 20 healthcare website and has grown to one of the largest healthcare organizations in the country with 33 hospitals and an expanding network of centers and clinics.

As a non-profit, Banner Health reinvests every dollar earned into new hospital beds, equipment and facilities maintenance, patient and physician services expansion and new technologies to improve their patient experience.

The organization’s website plays a critical role in serving current and prospective patients with the information and services they need. The Banner Health team is constantly seeking new and innovative ways to tackle one of their biggest digital challenges: delivering the right information, at the right time to their website visitors, across a vast network of website experiences with thousands of published pages.

Finding the Right Information Across Thousands of Pages and Key Resources

Banner Health’s ethos of making healthcare accessible and easy for their patients underscores the importance of delivering a superior website experience. Their audience is increasingly online and technologically savvy, so the Banner team is constantly striving to deliver on those needs.

They want to empower their visitors to easily access services and quickly find relevant information.

“85% of consumers start their healthcare journey on Google. We do a good job at positioning, SEO and developing content that’s relevant and written in a way that’s easy to understand for our patients. I think where it gets a little challenging is inside of our domain; we have roughly 5,000 to 10,000 pages of content.”

Chris Pace | Senior Director of Digital Marketing

In the face of these challenges, Banner Health needed to implement a search solution across their entire domain and broad collection of content. Their aim was to create a unified search experience that would empower content and service discovery as well as close the gap between patients landing on their site and taking desired actions like scheduling appointments, paying bills and registering for classes.

Implementing Omni Search Experience Across the Entire Banner Health Domain

Banner Health implemented SearchStax Site Search solution to improve the search experience across their domain.

“I think search is at the core of anything. Unless our users can find something within one, maybe two clicks, they’re going to jump to the search.”

Colleen Weiss-Ramirez | Director, Digital Engagement and Web Development

Site Search implementation was the optimal route for the Banner team due to its flexibility for deployment with any CMS, DXP or custom solution. Banner Health has instances that sit in Sitecore as well as custom third-party experiences built by their team, so they required flexibility in their search solution. Implementing Site Search has allowed them to deliver an elevated experience with accuracy and continuity for patients, regardless of the entry point of their search.

Banner’s omni search – the main search bar in their global header – now provides a unified search experience and is set up to display content from various sources like their blog, services, locations, events and more.

Modernizing Discovery for High-Intent Visitors

As part of Banner Health’s broader effort to improve the digital experience, the team took a fresh look at one of the most critical parts of the patient journey: the location finder. By redesigning this tool with an e-commerce mindset, they transformed a static outdated experience into a dynamic and conversion-focused interface.

The new design includes customizable calls to action that change depending on the care setting—such as urgent care, primary care or specialty services. For urgent care visits, for example, appointment availability is now displayed directly within the search result card. This allows users to see open time slots and take action faster. Once on a location page, a sticky CTA widget follows the user’s scroll, making it easy to book an appointment, make a call or get directions without losing their place.

This updated approach to content discovery is backed by smarter site search and more relevant results. The goal was to reduce friction in moments of high intent, helping users get the information and actions they need without extra steps.

The impact? Banner Health is now seeing more than 1 million visits to its location pages every month—a strong indicator that better design, paired with better discovery powered by site search, leads to better outcomes for both patients and the organization.

Improved Patient Engagement - Visible in Site Search Analytics

We see the impact of these search optimizations reflected in some exceptional improvements in their site search analytics, including:

1.7 searches per session, which shows that most visitors find exactly what they need within 1-2 searches issued. That is an ideal search standard in any industry and is particularly impressive given the scale of Banner Health’s website and large number of content-rich pages.

An average click position of 2.1, which is an indication that their search is surfacing the right content that visitors are looking for within the first three search results. This means that Banner Health is efficiently delivering relevant content and not requiring the visitor to scroll down the page; the deeper a visitor scrolls in their search for content, the higher their likelihood of leaving your website and bouncing back to Google or AI search engines for answers.

Both of these improvements are direct impacts of their SearchStax Site Search implementation and represent search best practice benchmarks for content discovery.

The Banner Health team can now rely on their search as a key navigation tool and value driver for visitors to land on the right content and service pages with increased efficiency. Their emphasis on search as a primary element in their digital patient journey sets them up to better meet the needs of their patients who want to interact with Banner Health online.

Product

Site Search

Platform

Custom, Sitecore

Location

North America

Industry

Healthcare

Let’s talk about how you can drive better site search experiences and gain insights with SearchStax