Executive Summary
The Gole Dental Group* has been a pillar of the Hastings, MI community for over 40 years. They are a full service dental office with additional specialties such as cosmetic dentistry, emergency dentistry, pediatric services, braces, implants and more. The Gole Dental Group is a second-generation dental office owned and operated by brothers and partners Dr. Jason Gole and Dr. Philip Gole.
In August 2016 we were contacted by Dr. Phil Gole to help with some digital marketing initiatives. The company had recently completed many significant office renovations, and shoring up their web presence was next on their list of priorities. They were interested in using the web to generate more leads and inquiries for their dental services.
At the time Dr. Gole first made contact, their site was in what can only be described a state of disrepair, and after a brief analysis it was quite clear that the company would be well served by developing a new website on WordPress. It was also determined that the time that they were also not measuring the results of existing marketing efforts or tracking traffic to the site in any way.
After developing and publishing a brand-new website and tactical implementation of a content strategy designed to raise awareness and increase the site’s overall authority in the eyes of search engines, in one year the site achieved incredible results.
**Name and specific published with permission from Dr. Phil Gole.
**This is based on the lifetime value of a patient discussed on page 11 of this document.
Over 1,000 visitors per month from organic search – that’s free traffic!
Search engine placement for hundreds of different keyword phrases.
A Million Dollars worth of NEW revenue in the first year!**
The Diagnosis
The first step in any digital marketing campaign is to take an in-depth look at the current situation with respect to the goals of the organization. This phase is commonly referred to as a ‘discovery process’, and is used to review digital assets such as the website itself, content elements, analyze any current or previous marketing tactics, etc.
The purpose of this phase is to get an idea of what we have to work with and why the current website is underperforming. Once we’ve had a chance to analyze everything from a diagnostic perspective, we can then cultivate a plan for implementation in order for the company to achieve their goals.
In the case of Gole Dental Group, the reason their website wasn’t producing any leads is because their site was quite deficient in many fundamental areas of website design and messaging.
A brief review of their existing site revealed among other things:
- An out of date copyright year;
- The site in general lacked content;
- No Google Analytics or other traffic tracking code installed;
- Extremely slow page loading time;
- Poor mobile experience;
- Broken header images;
- The site’s platform (Joomla) was several versions out of date;
- The site lacked implementation of the fundamental elements of search engine optimization (SEO).
After the costs were calculated to make all of the necessary improvements and corrections to the existing site, it was determined that for roughly the same costs, a brand new website could be published on a modern platform.
The Goals of the Project
As the digital marketing project began, these goals were outlined by Dr. Gole.
- Acquire new patients for the Gole Dental Group practice.
- Redesign the website for better user experience.
- Redesign the website to serve as a better visual representation of the practice, their core offerings, and the office itself.
- Move the website to the WordPress platform.
- Potentially incorporate client facing 3rd party software into new site.
- Optimize the site for better search engine placement for prominent keywords.
- Install Google Analytics tracking code.
- Optimize and maintain the Gole Dental Group’s overall web presence for better website traffic and lead generation.
- Explore new avenues for better allocation of marketing budget.
Tactical Implementation
A Brand New Website
After our initial analysis, the obvious first step in Gole Dental Group’s Digital Marketing Campaign was to build a new website for the company. The new website was built on the WordPress content management system. There are numerous reasons to choose WordPress for your website needs.
Why Should You Choose WordPress?
WordPress is among the most dynamic platforms on the Web today. Between the ease of use and the flexibility to host a variety of different types of sites, WordPress is the most popular content management system on the Web today (source) by a wide margin.
- Best platform for search engine optimization
- Extremely user friendly interface
- Easy for clients to manage themselves
- Can host unlimited amounts of content
- Highly stable
- Open source
- Ability to have multiple users and contributors with varying levels of administrative access
- 10’s of thousands of themes to choose from for design and functionality
- 10’s of thousands of plugins for improved functionality (source)
WordPress supports many different types of sites
- Corporate sites
- Brochure sites
- Sales/lead capture sites
- E-commerce sites
- Blogging
- Forums
- Much More!
***All efforts have been made to ensure that use of the WordPress logo and the WordPress name on this website are in accordance to the WordPress Trademark Policy. MoxieMen Incorporated makes no claim implied or otherwise of any direct affiliation with or endorsement by the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress open source project.***
Ongoing Content Initiative
Blogging
Once the new website was live on an SEO friendly platform with fresh content that was properly optimized for organic search, the Gole Dental Group website began to acquire some traffic.
In fact, within only a couple months of launching, traffic volume to the new site increased substantially due to MoxieMen’s AdWords and organic search initiatives!
At first it started to trickle in to the tune of about a few hundred visitors per month, but within 3 months of launching the new site the Gole Dental Group website was consistently receiving over 4,000 visitors per month.
The goal was to drive organic traffic to the site through organic search. And boy did we ever!
The result was an increase in the number of new patients to the office. We achieved this by driving targeted traffic to the site through organic search and paid initiatives. After launching the new website, Gole Dental Group began to see an immediate uptick in inquiries and new patients.
Why Blogging Had Such a Profound Effect on Organic Search Rankings
The clinical definition of search engine optimization (SEO) is the act of modifying the elements of a site’s presence on the Web in order to achieve favorable search engine placement for keyword phrases relevant to the content of the site.
Search engines are designed to serve a specific purpose: to deliver the most relevant links to content with respect to the keyword(s) being queried – and more important – the perceived intent of the person searching.
When done correctly, having a blog on your website is a very effective way to build an authoritative web presence, increase engagement with your audience, and increase your site’s visibility in search engines which will in time lead to an increase in traffic.
The consistent creation and publication of unique, valuable content that demonstrates your business’s ability to understand and solve the problems your potential clients may be seeking solutions to is a sure path to increasing traffic and conversions.
What is a Blog?
Ask 10 different people to define a blog and you’re likely to get 10 different answers.
A blog is a collection of content created with the purpose of engaging an audience. So therefore ‘blogging’ is the art of creating content for consumption.
Content created for consumption.
Think about that for a minute. It’s not content for content’s sake. That won’t get you anywhere. Not only will it bore your audience, but it won’t do your site any favors with respect to search engine placement, either. The content published, whether it’s written,
audio or video based, needs to be valuable and relevant to your target audience.
The Results
This is really what you came here for, right?
The SEO campaign for the Gole Dental Group over the past 12 months has been very successful in driving traffic to the site and generating new income for the business.
The blogging and on-page-content tactics we implemented over time allowed their website to become visible in search engines for hundreds of keyword phrases.
Between paid and organic search tactics, we’ve driven in excess of 40,000 visitors to the site from Google organic and paid search initiatives alone.
Over the course of the 2017 calendar year, organic search has been responsible for over 8,000 visitors to the Gole Dental Group’s Website!
Why is Organic Traffic so Important?
The important thing to realize is that organic traffic is free traffic. They didn’t have to pay search engines for any of this.
To put that in perspective, consider what it would cost to get traffic from these keywords via paid search.
(source: SEMRush.com)
Even if the cost per click were as low as $3.70 for the average keyword phrase that sent traffic to Gole Dental Group’s website, the cost to the company to advertise for those keywords would have been almost $30,000!
Instead they got it for free.
Note: This is not to imply that all the site’s organic visitors came from these keywords, or that the site ranks organically for all these terms. This is just to illustrate the high costs of pay-per-click advertising for some industry-related keyword phrases.
| Keyword | Estimated Cost per Click |
|---|---|
| Hastings Dentist | $8.06 |
| Dentist Hastings | $5.96 |
| Dentist Hastings MI | $5.86 |
| Dentist in Hastings MI | $4.56 |
| Dentist in Hastings | $3.70 |
| Hastings Dental Associates | $13.12 |
| Hastings Family Dental Care | $8.16 |
| Hastings Dental | $4.79 |
Keyword Diversification
Over time, a blogging strategy is a very good tactic for increasing the amount of keywords that drives traffic to your website.
The number of keywords is an important metric for a variety of reasons – most notably that it’s not always immediately feasible to predict which keyword phrases your site is going to rank for, especially right away.
For this reason, we focused on creating relevant, valuable content that covers a wide variety of industry topics.
In the case of Gole Dental Group, the results gradually grew more and more diverse over time, as illustrated in the 12-month period prior to this report.
The site made organic impressions for hundreds different phrases (source: SEMrush.com), many of which were on the first page of Google’s organic search results.
This ultimately led to over 8,000 visitors to the site from organic search over the course of 2017.
This is a very good result for a site that was only launched 12 months prior to this report. Growth rate projections are that the Gole Dental Group site will attract over 12,000 organic visitors in 2018!
| Gole Dental Group | Position |
|---|---|
| Dr Gole Hastings MI | 1 |
| Dr Gole | 1 |
| Emergency Toothache Relief | 1 |
| Gole Dental Group | 2 |
| Dr Gole Hastings MI | 2 |
| Dentist Hastings MI | 2 |
| Dentist in Hastings MI | 3 |
| Gole Dental Group | 3 |
| Pulpal Debridement | 3 |
| Braces Types and Cost | 3 |
| Emergency Toothache Pain Relief | 7 |
| Dentist in Hastings | 7 |
| Hasting Dental | 7 |
As far as the industry is concerned:
The average monetary value of a patient to the Gole Dental Group is $1,000 annually*.
The average length of a patient’s patronage to the Gole Dental Group is 10 years*.
*Source: Dr. Phil Gole
So the way the math works out, the average lifetime value of a patient to a dental office is:
$1,000 x 10 years = $10,000
And this figure doesn’t take into account the potential for referrals, which is very important to any service-based business.
Actual Patient Acquisition
Traffic is great. Targeted traffic is even better. But is it really worth it if that traffic doesn’t convert to revenue for your company?
The PRIMARY GOAL of the digital marketing campaign for the Gole Dental Group is to acquire new patients for the practice. Failing to meet this objective would mean that the campaign was not a success.
In preparation of this report, we conducted an interview with Dr. Phil Gole. We specifically asked him how many new patients they’ve acquired as a result of our work, since this is something that the office staff tracks internally. His response:
“We’ve consistent gotten between 6 and 10 new patients every month that we wouldn’t otherwise have attracted as a result of MoxieMen’s efforts.”
He went on to say: “MoxieMen was hired to modernize my dental office website and improve the practice digital online presence. Mike and his associates have exceeded all our expectations. MoxieMen has been very professional, accessible, and provided exceptional work in a timely manner. I would highly recommend MoxieMen to any company looking to improve their digital communication and marketing needs.” -Dr. Phil Gole
8 new patients per month X $10,000 lifetime value = $960,000 in projected revenue.
And when you consider that at least some of these new patients will eventually refer new business as well, this number grows well past $1,000,000!
Key Takeaways & Conclusion
In conclusion, here are a few items that are especially noteworthy.
- Patience is a virtue with any SEO campaign. While Year 1 of the SEO campaign for Gole Dental Group showed promising results, we fully expect 2018 to be considerably better.
- As with many SEO campaigns, once things start moving in the right direction, they tend to grow more rapidly.
- This was the result of blogging and the general publication of good content on a consistent basis.
- These results were achieved with exactly no link-building or link-earning efforts outside of a few directory submissions.
- The outstanding results that we were able to achieve were at least in part influenced by the geographic location of the business.
- Content topics initially were chosen based on common sense and questions asked by customers.
- Once some traffic started coming in, we began to create more content based on the keywords people were using to find the site. This served to bolster the authority of the site and solidify the site’s position in the search results.
