The client
Pantai Hospital Malaysia is a private hospital group whose international patient centre serves patients travelling from across the region.
More detail on the client
Its specialist centres — oncology, heart and vascular, orthopaedics and fertility — are the services international patients research longest before they travel, and they research them in search.
For a hospital, international patient marketing is a different job from domestic marketing. The reader is abroad, compares hospitals across countries, often reads in their own language, and converts through a tele-consultation or a treatment-estimate request rather than a walk-in.
The problem
International patients were reaching the hospital through paid channels and medical tourism aggregators more than through the hospital's own pages.
More detail on the problem
The specialty pages were not structured for how overseas patients search, the site was not localised for the main source markets, and the medical content had to meet the standard Google applies to health information before it could rank.
What we did
The programme was cross-border healthcare SEO, built around the International Patient Centre.
More detail on what we did
More detail on what we did
- Travel-medical keyword mapping.
- Specialist-reviewed medical content.
- Technical and multilingual build.
- Measured as appointments.
- Travel-medical keyword mapping. Non-branded specialty and procedure queries from each source market mapped to the page that should answer them, with localised search intent rather than translated Malaysian keywords.
- Specialist-reviewed medical content. Treatment guides, procedure overviews and doctor profiles authored and reviewed by the hospital's consultants and international patient team, with author markup, so the content meets the quality bar for health information.
- Technical and multilingual build. MedicalClinic, Physician and MedicalProcedure schema, hreflang for Bahasa Indonesia, English and Chinese, and Core Web Vitals work for fast mobile loading overseas.
- Measured as appointments. GA4 international events tied to the International Patient Centre's own desk records, so the result is bookings and consultations, not visits.
Advertising and content for a licensed private hospital in Malaysia sit under Act 586 and the KKM guidelines — see the healthcare advertising guidelines. Our KKM rule set, with sources, is published openly (opens in a new tab).
