Case study: Link earning and SEO content strategy

A dental studio in Northern New Jersey came to me having struggled with gaining new clients. The client stated that she had many “website clicks” but very few inquiries and leads. She stated she tried to take care of a lot of the marketing and SEO work herself and had a company doing “SEO” for her back in 2016. One of her biggest indicators that something wasn’t quite right, was that she was consistently getting inquiries about her services from outside of her service area. On the flip side, she was getting very few leads and inquiries from her service area.

The Problem

With a little research, I discovered that she had a GMB page that was suspended. She also did not have any social media pages or platforms related to her business. She had solid on page content with high-ranking keywords, however; that content wasn’t necessarily localized. When setting goals and objectives, I asked the client what an ideal number of online inquiries are in the months ahead. She responded that currently she may get 5-7 per month and ideally, she would like at least 30 per month.

The SEO Strategy

1. Identified & remediated technical/on-page issues within the framework

• Ran a full audit utilizing both Screaming Frog and SEMrush.
• Redirected broken internal links (404 errors) to other relevant pages within the website.
• Created and implemented an accurate sitemap (both XML and HTML format)
• Resized large images between best-practice parameters of 80-100kb
• Added Image ALT text to each image, as no images had them.
• Submitted the new sitemap to Google search console.
• Added a robots.txt file to disallow Google from indexing certain pages of the website including the client portal and private pages.
• Revamped H1 tags on pages by pairing ranking factors with researched keywords and services provided.
• Created internal linking with applicable anchor text in blog pages.
• Researched LSI, primary and longtail keywords with a difficulty score of 25-50. I incorporated some keywords into the content with a higher keyword difficulty score primarily due to the nature of the business.
  • For example, keywords like root canal, teeth cleaning, dental implant all had difficulty scores in the 70’s and 80’s, but I included them as well as long-tail variants and LSIs in the content.
  • The point being, we aren’t trying to compete with every national dental office, just the dental offices in Northern New Jersey.
• Researched local competition to gain insight on their link profiles, page content and services.
  • Compared the findings to the dental office content, services and gained insight for future on-page and off-page content strategy.
• Collaborated with team of copywriters to create/recreate meaningful and impactful content to the site, utilizing the keywords and competitive research.

2. Off-page SEO research, recommendations, and collaboration

• The client had a suspended Google My Business page.
  • I worked with our internal GMB team and Google to get the listing live.
  • Once the listing was live, I worked with the client to build out the GMB page with all the services she provides, relevant photos, hours of operation and service areas.
  • I spoke to the client about the importance of reviews on the GMB, she was very reluctant due to HIPPA laws.
    • The client didn’t want to ask her clients but wanted to leave her clients the option.
    • I created a QR code for the client that linked to her GMB review page.
    • She ultimately added the QR code to her CRM for appointment reminders, posted it in office and I also embedded the code into the website to give clients the choice.
  • Link earning campaign
    • Created a VERY targeted link earning campaign to drive the newly created on-page content, which focused on two fronts, authority, and relevancy.
    • We focused on dental industry-based journals, trade publications etc. We also focused on authoritative link earning with Northern New Jersey chamber of commerce’s, universities, and newspapers.
  • Client was very interested in Social Media services as she didn’t have any business-related platforms.
    • Our social media team built out a Facebook and Instagram business page for her Dental Studio.
    • I collaborated a great deal with the social media team to create captions, shared links, chunked pieces of content including keywords from our research and hashtag creation.

The Results & Conclusion

The dental studio website had a healthy number of site sessions the two months prior to working with me (February-March). The total site sessions for those months averaged 1,670, with an average bounce rate of 51%. My overall objective was to convert the site sessions into relevant leads.

Ironically, the site traffic decreased somewhat over the ensuing months (June-September) which had totals of 1,473, 1,422, 1,437 and 1,550, respectively. One of the biggest factors I attribute to this is homing in on the desired service area. Northern New Jersey is very densely populated near New York City and rural 30 miles, both south and west.

Another aspect that decreased was the bounce rate, which was down to an astounding 24% by October. On the lead generation front, there was a steady improvement altogether, July being the anomaly. June through September had results of 27,19,42 and 33 leads per month respectively.

This case study exemplifies how crucial it is to evaluate every angle of online presence and identify contributing factors for certain results and lack of results. It also illustrates the important relationships between on-page factors and off-page factors and how certain facets can make or break a business.