Dental Practice SEO Case Study
Here we have Dental SEO case studies for two practices in the South, one is a small dentist office in South Carolina and the other is a large oral surgical center located in Georgia. Scroll down to read about the small practice below or jump to the oral surgeon’s case study.
Dentist Office in Suburbs
Located on the outskirts of Columbia, SC, this dental practice had long struggled with its online visibility. Despite serving the community for over 20 years, it could not seem to achieve local search results on Google, and the dentist who owned the practice knew that something had to change.
When he realized his dental website was getting outranked by less-established practices that simply used stronger digital marketing strategies, he reached out for white label help. I began his Dental SEO strategies in January 2022, and quickly discovered I had a lot of work to do.
Before
Website Metrics Before Dental SEO
Below are two graphs from January 2022 that show the website’s organic traffic and rankings for that month. The first graph shows total organic visitors going to this dental website from Google and other search engines. The second graph features their keyword rankings in positions #1 – #100 in the same time frame.
In January 2022, the dental practice received 437 organic visitors to its website and ranked for a total of 52 keywords on Page 1 of Google’s search results.
Strategies
Dental SEO Services Performed
Technical SEO Updates
From a technical SEO standpoint, this property restoration website featured a wide range of errors that were harming its rankability in search engines. It had long loading times, missing H1s, broken pages, and a host of internal redirects, not to mention on-page issues like less-than-stellar keyword optimization.
To begin, I addressed its many status code errors that negatively impact both Local SEO performance and user experience. After fixing broken pages, internal redirect loops and server errors on the site, I turned my attention to site speed. Oversized, non-web-friendly images are one of the biggest contributors to slow loading times, so I resized and compressed dozens of images throughout the site.
I then reworked content structures on the dental practice’s most valuable pages. Missing H1s, unoptimized headings and other issues hinder a page’s ability to rank well in search results, so improving these is a high priority. Finally, I wrote new meta titles and meta descriptions for more than half of the site’s pages to improve click-through-rates and overall visibility in organic search.
Content Optimization & Planning
On the content side, this dental website was largely under-optimized for its target markets and local neighborhoods. Despite its status as a long-established practice in Columbia, the site struggled to rank locally for high-priority keywords, such as “dentist in Columbia” or “dental implants near me.” Going through each indexable page of the website, I optimized their body content, headings, alt text and more for localized service keywords.
Next, I performed keyword research to find new data points of relevant, high-volume keywords to target with future content pieces. Once I uncovered those keywords, I created a 6-month content calendar and published those newly written pages to the site each month.
Results
SEO Results 451% Increase in Monthly Traffic
+451%
Organic Traffic
+154%
Page 1 Rankings
In January 2022, the website started the year with just over 50 keywords ranking on page 1 of Google and an estimated monthly traffic of 440. In January 2023, this dentist office gained 30 more keywords on page 1 with an estimated monthly traffic of nearly 2,000. Overall, the website ranked for more than 1,300 keywords.
Oral Surgery Center in Metro Area
This multi-office oral surgery center in Atlanta, GA enjoyed strong word-of-mouth and a community-focused referral system from its patients, but it had a small presence in local search. The practice’s owner, a surgeon himself, wanted to be more competitive against nearby oral surgical groups on Google and other search engines. After auditing the website’s technical and content specs, I began providing SEO services in Winter 2021.
Before
Website Metrics Before SEO Strategies
Below are two graphs from January 2022 that show the website’s organic traffic and rankings for that month. The first graph shows total organic visitors going to this oral surgery website from Google and other search engines. The second graph features their keyword rankings in positions #1 – #100 in the same time frame.
In January 2022, the surgical center received 755 organic visitors to its website and ranked for a total of 121 keywords on Page 1 of Google’s search results.
Strategies
SEO Strategies for Oral Surgeon Website
Technical SEO Updates
After performing a SEO audit, I learned this website had undergone multiple rebuilds in recent years by different digital marketing companies. As a result, it had dozens of broken links, duplicated content across pages, indexation issues, orphan pages and a host of other issues that significantly impacted its organic search visibility.
To begin, I went about finding and fixing old internal links that remained on the oral surgeon’s website after its latest refresh. I found broken pages and internal redirects throughout its pages and replaced them with the correct urls.
With regard to slow site speed, I removed a few old WordPress plugins that were no longer needed, and updated others that caused coding issues on the backend of the site. Then, I ran an image audit strategy to resize and compress dozens of massive images because they can significantly contribute to longer loading times.
Duplicate Content Fixes
After catching the duplicate content issue on the dental practice’s website, I made that error a top priority. It appeared that a prior agency had built new pages to target individual neighborhoods, but it simply copied and pasted the exact same content onto 10 new pages on the surgical center’s website. Because Google rewards “helpful content” and devalues duplicated copy, this situation was likely viewed as highly spammy by the search engine. I removed and redirected those unranked pages to more valuable urls that were performing for the site.
I also built a new content calendar to reflect the surgeon’s request that I target users with an interest in dental implants. The calendar included a mix of new service pages and articles, all backed by extensive keyword research.
SEO Results 211% Boost in Page 1 Rankings
+379%
Organic Traffic
+211%
Page 1 Rankings
Results
