About the Client
Akos is a Scottsdale, Arizona-based healthcare organization founded by Swaraj Singh, operating hospitals in two locations: Glendale and Avondale. With a strong focus on urgent care, Akos serves communities where patients need to find a trusted facility quickly, often in the middle of a medical situation where every minute counts.
The Challenge
When Akos approached improveFX, the leadership team laid out three clear problems.
Patient footfall was below potential. Both facilities had the capacity and the staff to serve more patients, but not enough people in Glendale and Avondale were finding Akos when they searched for care nearby.
Urgent care needed to be front and center. Urgent care is a "right now" decision. When someone searches for urgent care, they pick from whatever appears at the top of the map results and call within minutes. Akos was not winning enough of those moments.
Hospital management was fragmented. Behind the scenes, the two facilities were struggling with day-to-day operations. Appointment rescheduling was a constant pain point, patients were not receiving timely notifications, and sudden doctor unavailability created scheduling chaos that rippled through the entire day. Akos needed a centralized Hospital Information System (HIS) to bring it all under control, and in healthcare, that system had to be HIPAA compliant without compromise.
This engagement was unique because it combined two very different disciplines: growth marketing to bring patients in, and custom software development to manage them well once they arrived.
Our Approach
Step 1: Technical and On-Page SEO Foundation
We started where every sustainable result starts, with the website itself.
The site had mobile responsiveness issues, a serious problem for a healthcare provider since most urgent care searches happen on a phone. We fixed the responsiveness completely, then optimized the pages systematically:
- Implemented structured data so search engines could understand the services, locations, and medical context of every page
- Configured robots tags and canonicals to eliminate crawl and indexing issues
- Optimized heading structure so each page communicated its purpose clearly to both patients and search engines
- Compressed and optimized images for faster load times
- Restructured on-page content sequentially, so information flowed the way a patient actually reads: what the service is, where it is available, and how to get care
Step 2: Local SEO to Drive Footfall
For a hospital, local visibility is everything. A patient searching "urgent care near me" is not browsing. They are choosing.
We optimized the Google Business Profiles for both the Glendale and Avondale facilities:
- Completed every section of each profile, leaving nothing blank
- Added keyword-rich services with clear, patient-friendly descriptions
- Ensured NAP consistency (Name, Address, Phone) across the web, so search engines could trust the business information
- Built citations across relevant directories to strengthen local authority and improve rankings in location searches and the map pack
The goal was simple: whenever someone in Glendale or Avondale searched for urgent care or nearby medical services, Akos would be one of the first names they saw, with a complete, trustworthy profile that made calling or visiting the obvious next step.
Step 3: A Custom HIPAA-Compliant Hospital Information System
With patient demand growing, the operational side needed to keep pace. We designed and built a feature-rich HIS customized to how Akos actually runs its facilities, with every feature built to HIPAA compliance standards.
The system addressed each operational pain point directly:
- Appointment booking and rescheduling: Patients and staff could book, change, and manage appointments without the back-and-forth that was previously clogging phone lines
- Automated patient notifications: Reminders and updates reached patients on time, cutting down no-shows and confusion
- Doctor scheduling with calendar sync and queuing: When a doctor became unavailable, the system handled reassignment and queue management smoothly instead of throwing the day into disarray
- Patient registration: Streamlined intake for faster processing at the front desk
- Prescriptions, pharmacy, and labs: Integrated modules so clinical workflows stayed connected in one place
- Follow-up management: Systematic tracking so no patient fell through the cracks after their visit
- Customizable billing and insurance: Flexible billing built around the facilities' insurance workflows
Two hospitals, one centralized system, full visibility.
The Results
The impact showed up quickly on both fronts.
Patient footfall increased by 57% within two months. The combination of a technically sound website and dominant local visibility translated directly into more patients walking through the doors at both locations.
Urgent care calls and enquiries increased by 73%. The focus on urgent care paid off exactly where it mattered, in the high-intent moments when patients needed care immediately and chose Akos.
Google Business Profile engagement increased by 106%. More views, more clicks, more direction requests, more calls. The profiles went from passive listings to active patient acquisition channels.
Follow-ups increased by 31% month over month after one quarter. With the HIS tracking every patient journey, follow-up care stopped depending on memory and manual effort. Patients came back for the care they needed, which is better for outcomes and better for the business.
Wait times dropped significantly. Streamlined registration, smarter scheduling, and efficient queuing meant patients spent less time waiting and staff spent less time firefighting.
Doctor unavailability stopped being a crisis. What used to derail entire days became a manageable, routine adjustment handled by the system.
Why This Worked
Visibility and operations were treated as one problem. Driving more patients to a facility that cannot handle them efficiently just creates frustration. By pairing local SEO with a purpose-built HIS, we made sure growth in demand was matched by growth in capability.
Local SEO was built around patient intent. Urgent care decisions happen in the map pack, in the moment. Every optimization, from keyword-rich service descriptions to NAP consistency and citations, was aimed at winning those high-intent local searches.
The HIS was built for Akos, not adapted to it. Instead of forcing the hospitals into an off-the-shelf tool, we built the system around their real workflows and their real pain points, with HIPAA compliance embedded in every feature from day one.
Ready to Grow Your Healthcare Practice?
Akos turned its online presence into a steady stream of patients and its daily operations into a well-run system. If your practice needs more visibility, more patients, or better systems to manage them, we can help with both.
Get in touch with improveFX today for a free consultation.