Reaping the ROI of SEO Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics

Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics loves to take the road less traveled in how it runs its business. While its competitors stick to the conventional marketing approaches of mailers and flyers, they believe in our approach of finding new patients through organic search.

And so, we created a long-term blogging strategy that would help find, nurture, and welcome new patients into one of their seven offices. Keep reading to find out more about our SEO journey together — that continues to this day.

It didn’t take us long to discover some questionable search engine optimization practices by Gorman & Bunch’s hosting company. Rather than writing legitimate blogs and publishing them to the Gorman & Bunch website, this firm elected to post sub-par content and post it where only Google could find it. Not an honest approach, and one that put my client’s site at risk of being penalized.

The doctors at Gorman and Bunch were unaware of these practices, and we counseled them to cut ties right away. We then helped with the transition to a new hosting company, saving them money on annual hosting costs — and, more importantly, setting them up for a more legitimate SEO approach.

Then, we implemented proper SEO techniques:

Phase I – Worked on the Foundation

• Performed a backlink audit and disavowed, when necessary
• Optimized local listings for 100% accuracy
• Installed Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools
• Generated and submitted XML Sitemap to search engines
• Addressed technical SEO errors

Phase II – Fueled the SEO

• Revised and implemented metadata and heading structure
• Integrated an internal linking structure throughout the content
• Created goal tracking and a cohesive reporting dashboard in Google Analytics
• Addressed duplicate content, where necessary

Once we rebuilt their SEO framework, we began to consistently create blog content — reaching 500+ words and integrating long-tail keyword phrases — that both informed their prospects and customers and invited Google to crawl and index the website for its search engine results page (SERP) listings.

And in December 2018, we published the 50th blog on their site:

Some of our favorite blogs that garner the best Google Analytics pageview results include:

And you can see over time how the work has paid off in terms of unique pageviews. (Oh, and that spike you see in the data? That’s the result of a very successful PR campaign.)

In 2018, we turned our attention to enhancing Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics’ Local SEO stance. While we love people reading our blogs from all over the world, we really wanted to make sure we’re being found by prospects in close proximity to their seven Central Indiana offices.

And that work involved a few things:

Integrating Localized On-Page Optimization

• Adding City/Region, plus relevant keyword, within each office landing page title tag, H1 tag, URL, page content and image ALT attributes
• Embedding Google Map with business marker into each office landing page
• Adding more content to location pages

Making all NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) Listings Consistent

• Adding full NAP listings across every page of website
• Ensuring the exact same details/format were mentioned on local citations
• Adding Schema.org markup on NAP listings

Adding Google Reviews

• Running updated texting campaign to patients
• Creating incentivized (discount, drawing, etc.) campaigns
• Adding website page with step-by-step instructions on how to leave a review

In 2018, we also focused much of our SEO attention on reorganizing existing web content into content pillar pages (a.k.a., topic clusters) — a new SEO technique for ranking on a particular topic.

For Gorman & Bunch Orthodontics, we took their treatment pages (Invisalign, Braces, and Early Orthodontics) and bulked them up to 2,500+ words — integrating long-tail keyword phrases and including relevant content a prospect needs to know. Then, we linked their existing blog and social media content to a respective content pillar page, thereby bolstering the authority of the pillar pages.

In just a few months, we’ve garnered the following results.

We plan to continue monitoring analytics data to see what changes might need to be made. In fact, we’re already looking forward to enhancing the look of these pages with a new, custom website later in 2019. Stay tuned for that!