[Case Study] SEO and Social Media Marketing Brushes Up Success for Local Dental Clinic

Have you ever thought about what digital marketing has to do with healthcare practices? Think about it. What do you do when you’re looking for a new doctor? Cue the internet! 

Keeping an updated website and social media presence is a vital part of showing up for relevant internet searches, and that’s how we supported one local dental practice.

The Challenge

In May 2023, Dental Care Associates wanted to expand their client base and promote their brand in the Sioux Falls area — where they face competition from dozens of other dental clinics. 

After rebuilding their website and bringing new dentists onto their team, they were ready to try new marketing tactics to grow their business and get more patients. That’s when they turned to us.

The Strategy

After diving into their new website and the marketing strategies they’d used before, we found a couple new opportunities to help the Dental Care Associates team achieve their goals.

Search Engine Optimization

A new website is a great start when it comes to relaunching a business — but you also have to make sure that the content on your website is polished up to match the new site look and feel. 

Dental Care Associates had a great base to their website, but they needed some work to improve their user experience and their local SEO.

The Language They Used

Healthcare can be a tricky topic to write about. You want to sound professional and knowledgeable — but you also need to think about what your patients will be searching for online. (That’s how Google knows which website to serve — what site best matches a user’s search.) 

Keyword research showed us what users were searching for in the dental world. Google values when you answer questions people are asking, so optimizing their service pages was a no-brainer to help them rank higher on search engines and expand their brand reach.

The Length of Web Pages

When you’re browsing on a desktop, how long a web page is doesn’t make a huge difference for users. On smartphones, however, that length can really make a user rethink the amount of time they spend on your site. 

With nearly 80% of their traffic coming from mobile devices, it was important to improve that user experience. This involved:

• Rewriting and consolidating some information — without sacrificing the quality of their website content.
• Splitting pages with too much content or not enough focus into multiple pages. 
• Shortening paragraphs and varying up sentence length to make the content easier to read online. 

These improvements kept the scroll time shorter, so people on mobile devices could find what they were looking for faster. They also made the content more readable, keeping people on the website longer.

Meta Advertising

Even when they’re booked out for months, healthcare practices still need to focus their online marketing efforts toward:

1. Maintaining a current patient base
2. Attracting new patients
3. Educating their communities

Dental Care Associates needed a digital ads strategy to focus on these goals and continue to expand their reach to more people in the Sioux Falls area on Facebook and Instagram.

Their monthly advertising strategy consisted of one promotional campaign with four ads in it – three of those ads promoted their available services, and the fourth was a brand-focused ad to build more awareness of their dental clinic. 

Each month, after analyzing the performance of the month’s campaign, we collaborated with the client to decide which services to promote based on the clinic’s appointment availability.

As their campaigns helped them gain new clients, they eventually needed more staff to keep up with appointments. We pivoted their campaign strategy to focus on hiring when they needed it, and pivoted back once they had.

The Results

Meta Advertising Increases Conversions

In the first three months (May to end of July 2023) of advertising on Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), the Dental Care Associates team saw:

• 145,303 total impressions
• 3,594 total link clicks
  • 3,046 unique link clicks 
• $0.25 cost per unique click
• 201 total website conversions

As of January 2024, the team at Dental Care Associates was booked out until August 2024, only accepting emergency dental appointments and oral surgeries.

They also brought on another dental hygienist after two months of advertising their job opening online. When we ran the employment campaigns, we added a specific call-to-action to the Contact Us page on their site with instructions to follow for those who were interested in applying.

After making that adjustment, we saw their website session duration increase by more than 50%, and the hygienist that was hired specifically referenced seeing their ad on Facebook! 

SEO Delivers Improved Rankings

While SEO is something that provides results over a longer period of time, they’re already seeing great improvements in the quality of their website traffic. When we compared their website performance from April to October 2023 to the performance of October 2023 to April 2024, we saw:

• 33% more website visitors
• 4% more completed conversions on site
• Nearly 3 minute average session duration

It’s Your Turn to Find Patients Online

At 9 Clouds, we’re passionate about helping our clients find quality customers and nurture their businesses. With more than a decade of experience, we’re here to help you generate leads online and achieve your marketing goals.

Request your free digital marketing assessment to find opportunities to reach new patients, hire new employees, and boost awareness of your brand with SEO and social media.

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