Independent marketer triples conversions for a dental clinic through blog posts in 6 months
About Mark Oborn Ltd.:
Mark Oborn Ltd. is a dedicated digital dental marketing agency and has been helping dentists attract more of the right type of patient into their practice for the last 12 years. He is located on the south coast of the UK in West Dorset but works with clients around the world.
Business Challenge: driving conversions to a local dentistry client with blog content
When this Oxford-based dental clinic came to Mark Oborn, they had a decent amount of traffic for a local practice – 1,300 visitors a month - but it wasn’t bringing in enough patients. Mark’s goal was to focus on digital conversion optimization and drive more business (requests for appointments, phone calls, and online bookings) to the clinic.
The marketer chose blog traffic growth as the key to delivering the results: high blog traffic and backlinks increase the overall domain authority of the site. While this alone won’t bring a local client to the clinic, its website will have a much higher chance of ranking for keywords like “dentist in Oxford” - and that’s when the conversion comes in.
Solution: creating highly effective blog posts
1. Identifying the seed keyword
When onboarding a client, Mark finds out if there is a particular service they want to promote, like teeth whitening, dental implants, etc. Whatever client names becomes the seed (or general) keyword.
If they don’t have an answer, Mark sets up a Semrush project and starts tracking various dental services and the client’s geographical location as key phrases in the Position Tracking tool. He then identifies the queries the client’s website isn’t ranking well for.
An example is if the client was looking to promote teeth whitening.
2. Checking the keyword volume and difficulty
Next, Mark enters the seed phrase in the Keyword Magic Tool, makes sure the location is correct for the client and looks at its monthly search volume and keyword difficulty. The latter one reflects how easy it would be to rank at the top of Google search for a given keyword.
The seed phrase is usually highly competitive. Although the client will want it, his job is to explain that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit under it – that’s what they should go for. While “teeth whitening” has a staggering monthly volume, its keyword difficulty won’t allow fast results.
3. Finding the optimal blog post title
Next, Mark narrows down the seed phrase to questions, as it's a very natural query form for most users. He looks for a trade-off between keyword difficulty and volume. As seen in the example below, “how much is teeth whitening” is a clear winner: a 68% keyword difficulty with 1,900 monthly searches.
4. Choosing effective paragraph topics
Mark puts the chosen question into the Topic Research tool. He looks at the trending posts first, browses through the rest of the cards, choosing around six most relevant subtopics with high volume.
5. Writing the blog post
Mark takes his H1 and H2’s to the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant tool and creates a template with the chosen title:
“I start writing the article without looking at the semantically related keywords suggestions from the tool first,” he explains. “After that, I’ll look on the right-hand side to see what Semrush is saying on the keywords I’ve missed out. I then modify the blog post slightly to incorporate those keywords. Very often it will just be small tweaks and rephrasing.”
Mark also uses the SEO Content Template to get the recommended length. In this case, it’s 923 words, so he makes sure to write at least this much. He pushes the template through to the client’s blog, which is usually on WordPress, with the Semrush SEO Writing Assistant plugin.
6. Internal and external linking
Mark will then link the finished blog post to the sales page on the client’s website. Any technical terms, like hydrogen peroxide, are linked to trusted informational resources. He aims at having two or three links to the client’s site and a couple linking to other resources, all with “follow” tags so the page looks natural.
The blog post is accompanied by a headline image with the title as the alt tag. After that, the post is done.
Next, Mark shares it on a few social media streams and shares it via the email list he’s built.
Sometimes he will place backlinks through bloggers he collaborates with but generally, he doesn’t worry about it:
“Backlinks get created because people like the content. It snowballs: after publication, it takes a while for Google to recognize it. Once it does, Google says ‘hey, I like this, I’m going to send people there’ and it just sends more and more,” he concludes.
Results
- 19,000 organic visits to the blog post per month
Published on December 10th, 2019, the blog post received just 13 hits that month. It took four months to gain traction and reach 780 visits in March 2020; by September 2020, the blog post received 19,000 organic visits.
- 300% conversion growth
By producing similar blog posts once a month, Mark was able to nearly triple the number of digital conversions (contact forms filled out on the website) between April and July 2020.
