[Case Study] How I Rank A Local Dental Clinic #1 On Google

This is an SEO case study of how I ranked my local dental clinic client #1 on Google in under 3 months for his main keywords along with other related service keywords in the local area.

There are 15 pages in total on the website, all are commercial keywords and no blogs.

Just like any other of my case studies, I’m not going to reveal the website and keywords due to security and privacy reasons. But in this article, you will find some of my overview process of how I went about achieving the results along with various screenshots proof.

Project Background

The client had just opened his new dental clinic in January 2023 in one of the provinces in Thailand and reached out to me for a web design and SEO service. The website is in Thai language, and there have been some established clinics ranking on the first page of Google.

The goal of the project was to have a fully functional website that’s responsive and easy-to-use, and to rank the website on the first page of Google within 3 months as per the budget. The client was one of the best clients I’ve worked with as he was very easy-going and cooperated with me well throughout the process.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges of this project is to rank the site within 3 months time frame, going against some of the established competitors in the niche. The area isn’t that competitive and the scale of difficulty is low-medium. But nevertheless, we had limited time and doing SEO nowadays with fixed timeframe is a challenging task.

The Campaign

Here are the overviews of how I approached the campaign:

Technical-Sound Website

Right from the beginning, I made sure the website is well-built and technical-friendly. This includes things like making sure the website is mobile-friendly and secured, making sure the site speed is lightning fast, and most importantly, making sure that the architecture of the site is easily crawlable for Googlebot and that it can crawl and index the pages easily.

On-Page Optimization

Next up is to focus on the on-page obsessively. What I mean by “obsessively” here is to optimize each and every detail to the tee.

This includes things like:

• Heading (h1,h2 & h3) optimization
• Page structure optimization and addition of sub-topics:
  
  By structuring the page in such a way that there are logical connections from one section to another. For example, I started the page with the introduction to service and company, followed by the services provided, then reasons to hire the company, etc. All these subtopics are important for service pages as they answer the questions related to the intent.
  
• Sentence-level optimization using semantically relevant keywords:
  
  By making sure that each sentence is properly optimized using semantically relevant keywords based on reverse engineering the competitors and using a proprietary tool that I created. You can use on-page tools like Surfer-SEO to help with the process.
  
• Internal links:
  
  Making sure every other page on the website is internal linked up to the main page to form a semantic connection for the overall topic on the website. For the anchor text, I mainly used the exact match keyword and partial-matched keyword.
  
• URL optimization
• Keyword count and variation optimization:
  
  Making sure that I have used the right frequency of each keyword on the page. For example, the word “cleaning”, I made sure to check the competitors’ average and see how many times I should use this word. You can again, use tools like Surfer SEO, but there’s really no hard rule for this. I’d like to keep it a little lower than the average to avoid over optimization.
  
• Entity connection establishment:
  
  This is a special tactic that I used to help Google understand the website’s entity better by essentially connecting the website to other properties via links and have a proper about us page to ensure that Google understand what the site is all about. What you can do here is have a proper about us page, with proper introduction to the business and things you do. For example, you can use the sentence like: “We are ABC and we offer XYZ”. Use a simple sentence and tell Google who you are and what you do. Another thing was to have a clear business name, address and phone number, along with the dentists information and background for EEAT.

• Design refinement and connection
  
  One thing I’ve also done after the web design process was to refine the design elements on the page to make sure they are consistent in the flow and all the sections and areas are connected without breaking the semantic connection from one area to another.

Off-Page Optimization

Once the on-page of the site is ready, next is to start looking into off-page factors.

Some of the things that I did are:

• Brand building and engagement optimization:
  
  User signals and brand engagement is one of the biggest ranking factors there is. So right from the start, I asked the client to run a cheap Google Ads campaign to quickly build brand awareness which ultimately worked well and this has brought in brand searches, engagement, and traffic signals, which have been helping the site to rank quicker.
  
• Citations from high-quality directories and social profiles
• Reviews and sentiment establishment:
  
  Off-page reviews and what people say about your site (entity) is another important ranking signal for local SEO. So, I asked the client to ask his clients to leave positive reviews on some of the big directories in the local area.
  
• Link building
  
  After a great on-page, branding and citations, the site has quickly gained a lot of rankings and all I needed in the end was a small push from some high-quality backlinks. For this project, I just focused on a few high-quality PBN links which provide enough power and link juice to skyrocket the ranking even further.

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business) was neglected from the project because the client has had some issues with the verification and address. So this will be carried out in the future.

Results

Here are some of the screenshots from Google Search Console and the testimonial video from the client

Some of the clicks and rankings for the main keywords:

Testimonial video (in Thai language):

What’s Next?

As you probably know, SEO takes at least 3-6 months to see results and could take 1 year or more to achieve great results. What we have achieved so far is already well above average. Now, the site will just keep on growing organically as more user signals will be coming along with more algorithm updates which will favor the website further.

I’ll update this case study again after 6 months period to see how much more the site has grown.

If you’re looking to rank your site #1 on Google using scientific-based methods or simply just want me to train you how to do SEO, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected]

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