Rebuilding a Medical Website Around How Patients Think
Specialty Orthopaedic Practice | UX Strategy · SEO · Content Strategy
Patients don’t always know the name of the treatment they need. They know their knee hurts, their hip is slowing them down, or something just isn’t right. For this specialty orthopaedic practice, I helped restructure the website around that reality.
The Challenge
The practice offered specialized expertise across joint replacement, sports orthopaedics, arthritis care, and other treatments, but the website architecture didn't fully reflect the way prospective patients search for that expertise.
A patient experiencing knee pain may not know whether they need a replacement, a non-surgical treatment, or something else entirely. Organizing a medical website primarily around procedures puts the burden on the patient to understand their diagnosis before they've even made an appointment.
There was also an opportunity to build substantially more content around the physician's areas of expertise—giving patients better information while creating more ways for the practice to be discovered through search.
The challenge became bigger than rewriting pages: How could we organize the website around the patient journey instead of the provider's service list?
The Strategy
Patients don't arrive with the same vocabulary as their physician.
Instead of requiring someone to immediately identify the procedure they might need, we created pathways based on the concerns they were more likely to recognize, like knee problems, hip problems, sports injuries, and arthritis.
This gave patients an intuitive starting point regardless of how much they already understood about their condition.
The original website had an Areas of Focus hub, but the content underneath it primarily focused on treatments and procedures. There wasn't a dedicated place for patients who were still trying to understand what their symptoms might mean.
We transitioned the existing treatment-focused content into a clearer Services hub, then built a new Areas of Focus section around the concerns patients actually experience.
That created two distinct pathways into the site:
“Here’s what I’m experiencing.” → Areas of Focus
“Here’s the treatment I’m researching.” → Services
Whether a patient arrived with a symptom or already had a treatment in mind, they now had a clear place to start.
I wanted to be sure I wasn't just trying to hit a made up page count.
Each new page needed to have a job to do. Answer a specific patient question, explain an area of expertise, support a service, or create another relevant entry point from search.
The individual pages couldn't exist in isolation.
I incorporated internal pathways between related conditions, body areas, services, and treatments so patients could continue exploring without having to repeatedly return to the main navigation.
Those connections also created a stronger site structure for search engines to understand the relationships between the practice's areas of expertise.
What I Delivered
Navigation Restructure
Areas of Focus
Expanded Service Content
Reorganized the site's primary navigation to create clearer distinctions between patient concerns, areas of expertise, and specific services.
Developed patient-first content around major areas like knees, hips, sports injuries, and arthritis, giving visitors intuitive places to begin exploring.
Built out deeper pages around important procedures and treatment options, giving patients more useful information before taking the next step.
Connected related pages through intentional internal linking and search-focused content, creating greater depth around the practice's core areas of expertise.
Full Content Ecosystem
+23%
Sessions From Organic Search
Organic search sessions increased as the expanded site created more opportunities to reach patients actively looking for relevant information.
+7
Patient-Focused Pages
Seven new pages expanded the site's coverage beyond treatments to address the symptoms and concerns patients are more familiar with.
+20
New Users From New Pages
The newly created pages alone brought 20 additional first-time users to the site, reaching prospective patients through pathways that hadn't previously existed.
+55%
Views From Organic Search
More than half of views to the new content came through organic search, showing that the patient-focused topics were reaching people actively searching for answers.
The Results
In addition to increased content, the new structure created new ways for potential to find the practice in the first place.
Take a Closer Look
Want to see more than the summary? I’ve included a redacted version of the original project so you can dig into the strategy and content for yourself. Client names and identifying details have been removed to respect confidentiality, but the thinking, structure, and work are all there.
The Takeaway
Good healthcare content shouldn't require patients to speak the language of healthcare before they can use it.
This project was about closing the gap between how a specialist understands their expertise and how a patient experiences the problem. By reorganizing the website around that patient perspective, we created an experience that makes it easier to start with a question, learn along the way, and understand what to do next.
It's a good example of why I believe content strategy starts before the writing does.