Case Study - "Sustainable Growth" How Smile Design Stabilized Their Future
The Story...
Smile Design Dental is a group dental practice located in Florida. They became a client with Firegang in June of 2015. At the time, they brought on just one of their five locations (located in Coral Springs, FL) to see what
results they could get from online marketing.
The practice’s #1 struggle when they partnered with Firegang was their scattered online presence. They had 5 locations, with 5 names, 5 websites, and 5 individual teams marketing and managing each location. The practice began to realize this wasn’t working. Their branding and message was inconsistent. Patients couldn’t find the right practice online since there were 5 different websites. Overall the focus of the dental practice
was scattered.
Realizing they needed to unite their 5 locations under the Smile Design Dental brand, they brought their other 4 locations into the partnership with Firegang in April of 2016. That became the turning point for the practice.
By working with Firegang to create a unified marketing strategy and single focus, each of their locations have been able to see consistent new patient growth from every marketing channel they use.
In this case study we will show exactly how Smile Design Dental continues to grow by using a consistent brand message and innovative dental marketing strategies through their partnership with Firegang.
- Over the course of 15 months, Smile Design Dental has experienced an increase in new patients at each location totaling 137/mo.
- Their Coral Springs and Margate locations have both seen more than a 23% increase while their Hallandale location has seen incredible growth at a 235% increase.
BACKGROUND:
Smile Design Dental has been able to see sustainable growth at each of their 5 locations due to:
1) Unifying their 5 locations under the one consistent Smile Design Dental brand
2) Pipelining their scattered website traffic from five different websites into one patient-friendly website
3) Fixing their local citations for each practice’s location
4) Continuing to ask their best patients to leave online reviews
RESULTS:
Steady Increase In New Patients Over Time
By pipelining Smile Design Dental’s website traffic from 5 scattered websites (one for each location) into a single website, patients were able to find the practice easily and
organic website traffic surged.
Smile Design Dental still lists organic website traffic as the #1 reason new patients book an appointment with their practice.
•Steady increase in organic website traffic beginning 3 months after all 5 practices were brought on board with Firegang.
• 81% increase of organic website traffic in 13 months. 315 (Month 1) to 1,735 (Month 13)
• 142% increase in users visiting the website over 12 months with a 216% increase in new visitors to the website over a 12-month timeframe.
METHODS FOR SUCCESS:
METHOD 1: The #1 reason Smile Design Dental has seen such continued, sustainable new patient growth across all 5 locations is because they unified those 5 locations onto one website.
Unifying the practice’s locations into one website dramatically improved their SEO rankings with Google, which led to an increase in organic traffic. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is done in order to keep a dental
practice’s website competitive. Search engines like Google group similar types of websites (i.e. dental practices) together and compare them to each other to create a ranking. The higher a site’s ranking, the easier it is for
consumers to find.
In Smile Design Dental’s case, their brand was spread across 5 different websites.
Each one of those websites was struggling to get to the top of Google’s search results and were actually competing against one another for rankings.
Once the 5 websites were combined into one, it helped Google give it a better ranking and increase website traffic overall because every patient searching for Smile Design Dental went to 1 site.
METHOD 2: Another vital step group dental practices need to take to ensure their SEO rankings aren’t damaged in the transition is correcting and maintaining online local citations.
To get the best local SEO results, multi-location dental practices need to have each location listed independently across multiple online business directories,
as well as clearly state they are all unified under one brand.
Firegang treated each of Smile Design Dental’s locations as an independent entity and start cleaning up and building at least 100 citations around each location.
“Cleaning up citations” means removing all online incorrect listings of past business names and past dentists associated with each of those locations. Each location now has it’s own local phone number and address clearly listed.
Smile Design Dental also added locations to their main practice name, which continues to be a huge factor in getting positive SEO rankings. For example, their Fort Lauderdale location officially became “Smile Design Dental of Fort Lauderdale”. This is the same formula for all of their other 5 locations. Smile Design Dental also has a Facebook page for each location as well as Twitter accounts. The practice doesn’t need to constantly post to these accounts, but they do work to add additional credibility to local citations and improve the practice’s overall SEO rankings.
There are hundreds of websites that could list your dental practice as a local business, so it’s important to make sure each of your locations is listed correctly. Otherwise, it can damage your SEO rankings.
RECOMMENDATIONS: One Brand - One Team
Smile Design Dental uses a variety of marketing methods to attract (and keep!) new patients. However, their continued success can be traced back to that one crucial change they made back in April, 2016: Unifying their 5 locations under one “Smile Design Dental” brand on 1 website.
Instead of being scattered across 5 different websites, each of their locations are clearly unified under one Smile Design Dental “umbrella”. The logos are the same, the branding message is clear and patients can easily
find what they need because of this.
The second vital decision they made was to not only unify their locations but also to bring every location in to be managed by a single marketing company. By doing this, Firegang was able to partner with Smile Design Dental and create a consistent brand message designed to attract new patients. This eliminated confusion for the practice as well as potential new patients.
At Firegang Dental Marketing, we have extensive experience in growing all types of practices during all kinds of economic situations. If you are ready to eliminate the guesswork out of growing the practice of your dreams, schedule your free Growth Acceleration Call with Firegang.
Do you want to invest in your practice marketing? You should feel prepared and confident in finding the right marketing company. Keep an open mind, and remember that your marketing is the key to your excellent and rewarding practice. Find a partner that understands that!
