User Experience & SEO Strategy Double Local Business Organic Traffic

Phase 1 – Problem Identification: Larger Dental Office Requires an Influx of New Patients

Midtown Dental, Sacramento’s leading Dental Practice, moved to a new office that allowed them to double the number of patients they can treat on a daily basis. Dr. Jenny Apekian, D.D.S. understood that their new office was one of the most technologically advanced dental offices in the nation, which allows their staff to provide a high-quality care for their current patients.

Their question was, “how can we let the rest of the Sacramento area know about our new expansion?” After weighing their marketing options, Midtown Dental turned to the User Experience Team at Capitol Tech Solutions to design and implement a carefully developed strategy.

Phase 3 – Strategic & Technical User Experience Process

Developing an understanding of a business’ needs and goals is always the first step of our process when meeting with new partners. This insight is vital to understanding the strengths and weakness of a business, which allows our team to best utilize those strengths and minimize the weakness. Through a series of in person meetings and office visits with Midtown Dental, we learned what set them apart from the competition as a Dental Practice.

By understanding their unique selling proposition, we were able to create a series of focal points within the new User Experience Strategy. From there, we crafted a strategy and content guidelines document that would help attract new users to their website, convert them into leads, and eventually new patients with an office visit. The steps that we follow to ensure our successful User Experience process include:

• Meeting face to face at client’s location to understand their business
• Conduct Technical SEO Audit
• Backlink Profile Analysis
• Site Structure and Content Review with key business leaders
• Implement a successful website launch.

User Experience Only Works By Understanding Your Customers’ Business Needs

We have found that the best way to fully understand our partner’s business needs and goals is to conduct a face-to-face meeting. We visited Midtown Dental’s office during the construction stage and met with Dr. Jenny Apekian, D.D.S., to get a better understanding of the new office features. In our conversations with Dr. Apekian, we learned:

• Their office is one of the most technically advanced Dental offices in the United States.
• Each operatory provides privacy for their patients.
• Quality of Care is paramount to their business.
• Art is a hobby of Dr. Apekian, and their marketing needed to reflect that artistic passion.

Through the initial meetings, our team was able to fully comprehend the goals of Midtown Dental as a business. That information was used as the foundation for the new User Experience Strategy. Our first objective was to create a beautifully designed website that reflected the modern office space. Another element they wanted our Web Design Team to create was to promote was the great value in customer service that Midtown is known for conducting.

Conduct a Technical Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit.

Every User Experience Strategy our team conducts includes a thorough Technical and Strategic SEO Analysis, followed with careful implementation. We have found that establishing the best practices of SEO produces one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing that builds long-term value. Due to its value, we’ve emphasized its importance to a number of our clients.

Building a new website takes time, and in the process of this development phase, our meetings with Midtown Dental’s team placed both parties on the same page. While our Website Design Team worked through rendering the design and code on the new site, our marketing team wasted no time in working towards improving Midtown Dental’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP) Rankings. We started improving basic information on the existing site to improve its ranking in anticipation of the new website launch. We kicked-off our audit by completing an in-depth Keyword Research and Analysis method that included asking the following questions, as well as answering them:

• How often are certain Keywords searched for?
• What are Midtown’s most profitable services and do the Keywords on the website reflect those services?
• What have competitors done for content for each of the keywords?
• Is the current site’s HTML structure optimized for SEO?
• Is there content on the current site not relevant to existing business practices?
• What is the current customer conversion process, and is it being tracked?

Our initial analysis takes the answers from the questions above into consideration when developing the framework for the site. We found that Midtown Dental was nowhere to be found on the first page for the highest searched Key term: “Dentist Sacramento”. By identifying a weakness that we knew could be strengthened, this new insight provided the marketing team a great place to start while CTS’ web development team began designing the new website.

Backlink Profile Analysis

Once the keyword analysis and on-page technical audit was completed, we reviewed Midtown Dental’s current business profile on the web. Their backlink profile gave us the insight of how many other websites reference the domain. We also received information on the quality of those sites, which is imperative to know while conducting an analysis on a backlink profile. Backlinks continue to be a major ranking factor for Google and other search engines.

Our results showed that Midtown Dental lacked a strong backlink profile compared to their competitors. If we were to help them create more buzz on the Internet by pushing new content, creating a social media sharing schedule, and engaging with their audience, we knew their rankings could see an immense improvement over time. Our team was able to perform part of this is work but in order to be truly successful, we needed to educate the Midtown Dental team on how to effectively using social media to promote their practice.

Existing Website Content Review Conducted

The next step in our initial process included researching and understanding each service Midtown Dental offered to make sure it was highlighted appropriately on the website. The current site had about 20 services listed in the navigation. However, after careful review, we found that they actually offered closer to 60 unique services that users may search for in what a dental practice can provide. This required a significant amount of new content be developed for their new website.

Content is critical for business to be found online, as users may search a variety of terms before find what they are actually looking for. According to Google search experts, increasing the amount of quality content on a website allows the business a chance to outrank their competitor to relevant key terms being searched.

At the completion of the content meeting, our team developed a Site Map, which outlined every page of the website. The creation of a new Site Map provided our team with a high overview where content needed to be created. In order to obtain the greatest return on investment for Midtown Dental’s content efforts, we ordered their list of services based on the value. This provided the Midtown Dental team guidance on which services required carefully curated content for their desired audience.

Our plan was to launch the site with the current content along with any new content they were able to finish. Once all of the content was finished, our Web Design Team updated the website with the newly written content.

A key area of improvement that we uncovered was the inability for each page to convert a site visitor. The existing site talked about a service, but didn’t ask the user to contact the office or fill out a form. Each additional click can lead to a lost customer, so making the process easy for customers to contact the office was an important feature needed for the new website.