NYC Orthodontist SEO Case Study: Page One in 6 Months (WITH ACTIONABLE STEPS)

First a little background story. We typically, amongst other things, analyse the difficulty in ranking a website based on the niche and the location. Needless to say, New York City and the dental niche combined is one of the toughest combinations going! Our client is a leading orthodontist based in New York a few days per week (which presents more of a challenge), with no previous sustained rankings for this satellite office, either via Google search or maps. For the most part, terms were all on page four or nowhere to be seen.

• Increased traffic
• If you have your page set up correctly, more email sign-ups
• With correct conversion analysis implementations, more bookings and calls
• A general perception with patients of you being the leader in your field. This is especially true when combined with a killer review acquisition strategy that we also implemented with this case study simultaneously

So without further ado, we are going to share the first segment of the strategies we used.

We all want results yesterday, but there are a lot of factors to consider, such as the age of your website and it’s existing backlink profile. Both can speed up this process. BUT we have to look at the bigger picture. We are not advocating paying a bad SEO agency for months upon months based on false promises, just bear in mind good things come to those who wait.

In fact, let’s rewind – First off,  employ a good SEO agency!Preferably with case studies in your niche. There is often a misconception that the person/agency has to be based locally to do a good job, which is totally flawed. You can read about why here.  And believe us when we say cheap SEO is expensive in the long run, we have had to pick up the pieces on more than one occasion, when a client’s patients friends, sons, cousin decides he can rank websites with no real prior real-world experience.

Unfortunately, the barrier of entry into this game is low, and you have to be very careful who you’re handing your lifeline keys over to. Websites can be de-indexed, as in you can lose 100% of your traffic, it’s not something you want to wake up to! Rant over.

Alternatively, if you have a marketing specialist you can do this internally. We have a total bias, but more often than not internal staff are good with social media and terrible at SEO, so be wary of taking that course of action, if they are not proficient. But if they have any questions they can always run them past us via the Private Facebook Support Group for that piece of mind.

Okay so back to patience… things take time. I would allow 6-12 months for keywords to rank for moderately competitive niches and cities, and probably add another 6 for cities such as Chicago, New York and the like. It’s case-specific so don’t take the above timelines as gospel but as a general rule of thumb.

So let’s get into some quick-fire implementations we used, and you can also use for your dental office. Please note most tasks require a web developer and someone who is computer savvy.

There is more than one way to obtain gains, so we went about getting some quick leads in while we worked on the website.

After the maps listing, you can see that we have numerous non-brick and directory/review websites. These will all be getting a good percentage of the traffic, so make sure you are listed and try and make your listing stand out as much a possible with a detailed description, good quality photos, and reviews if applicable. Easy right?

Then examine other results on page one. Do they explain the service better? Is the site easier to navigate? Once you have curated some notes you can go about editing your own website accordingly, so it’s essentially a better version.

When you do reach page one, you want to make sure you are getting the majority of clicks, so ensure your page title and meta description entices the action of clicking through to your web page. It’s not uncommon for lower results to ‘jack’ a lot of the traffic from websites ranking above by making this small tweak.

You can see below that the highlighted website has custom information, as opposed to Google’s default data. Which one would you click?

Conversion Rate Optimisation 

Difficulty level – Low

We decided to take this step first as we wanted to ensure any traffic that went from the site from day one was converting, to produce a quick ROI for our client.

As the majority of the search is now on mobile devices, the following implementations were of paramount importance.

We also ensured the call to action buttons were in direct contrast to the main colours of the website. So if your website is blue and white, your best call to action button is likely to be green, as they are at different ends of the colour spectrum. It varies for every niche, so it’s key to test and split test variations. Google offers a free tool to run A/B split tests.

Difficulty Level –  Low

Most aspiring marketers are familiar with XML sitemaps, but HTML site maps are often overlooked. Whilst they are mixed opinions on their effectiveness. We believe from our testing that it helps Google and other search engines crawl all your pages more effectively. They are also easy to make and implement. If your website is on WordPress there are numerous plugins to accomplish this.

Plugins do slow down and bloat websites, so if you can go without one (see below) all the better.

If your website happens to be on another CRM, you can ask your web developer to make one, or go to a service provider such as Fiverr. But make sure you vet the seller. Please note that this will still need implementing on your website by a developer. The best place to add a sitemap will be in the footer of your website.

An example of an HTML sitemap can be seen here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/h/sitemap

Treat Each Page as its Own Website/Entity 

Difficulty Level – Medium

• Orthodontist NYC
• NYC orthodontist
• Best Orthodontist NYC
• Orthodontist New York
• Top orthodontist in NYC

• Upper East Side orthodontist
• Upper East Side orthodontics

We clustered the following Keywords:

• Lingual braces NYC
• Invisible braces NYC
• Hidden braces NYC
• Incognito braces NYC

• Plug your own website URL  in SEMRush, ensure domain overview is selected, and see what you are already ranking for.

• Click on the blue button names ‘Full Report’ then on pages click on any of the URL’s (pages) keywords you want to review.

Now we have identified some pillar pages and the associated keywords, we can post blogs post that supports said pages. We pulled together five blog posts titles using the data below and hired a writer. You pay for what you get so always try and find a writer with past medical writing experience/knowledge, or better still do this in-house, as you are the specialist after all. Quality over quantity here, our blogs are typically 1200 words or longer in length. 500-word mini-articles we see online achieve little. If you already have blog posts, you could always revisit these and improve them, before making more in longer formats.