How Ascendance Grew Backlinks By 357% For A Clear Aligner Specialist

What’s the difference between do-it-yourself SEO and a fully-managed program offered by a digital agency like Ascendance?

The answer is a 357% increase in backlinks!

That’s what we earned for an orthodontics practice with our fully managed SEO program.

Our client went from earning about 15 backlinks per year for nine years to earning 500 new links in six months.

There’s no secret to making significant gains like these, it’s all about choosing the right SEO services and building a comprehensive strategy alongside an experienced SEO expert.

The following case study will cover how we helped this orthodontics practice increase its links, ranking keywords, and organic traffic to get over 10,000 visitors each month.

Start scrolling to learn how we did it.

Orthodontics SEO Overview

Campaign Length – 6 Months

Monthly Budget – $1,000

Backlinks Increase – 357%

Monthly Visitors – 10,000+

Ranking Keyword Increase – 186%

ascendance-website-solutions-orthodontics-seo-backlinks

Background

Ascendance was contacted by a Texas orthodontics provider in 2017 to help increase web traffic and sign more customers.

They offer several types of braces, but the clinic specializes in clear aligners. In fact, they are one of the top clear aligner providers in the world.

With three separate offices in Texas, this orthodontics practice also provides bilingual services because half of its patients speak Spanish.

They identified having several local competitors providing similar services and their target audience is mostly female, between the ages of 30-50.

These customers are more likely to seek braces for themselves or their children.

We also checked out their website and found that it was in great shape. Visitors can easily navigate their options, access educational resources, activate a live chat function, and find contact information to make an appointment.

The practice even offers virtual consultations to make it even easier for prospective customers.

Even though their website looked great, we needed to take a deep dive into their orthodontics SEO.

The SEO Audit

An SEO audit tells us everything we need to know about a new client.

Where does their traffic come from? What’s the most popular content? Does it have high-performing keywords? Are visitors signing up for consultations?

Our team won’t be able to devise a new SEO strategy until we understand this practice’s strengths and weaknesses.

Think of our SEO audit as looking under the hood. We do it every time a new client orders our services.

The practice was getting about 3,000 monthly visitors when they first enrolled in our fully-managed SEO program. They also ranked for about 1,400 keywords at this point.

Referring domains or backlinks had been growing slightly since their site first launched. They had approximately 140 links.

What was interesting about this site is that it featured content in Spanish.

The client stated that half of their customers were Spanish-speaking so the SEO needed to work for them.

“Easy Wins” Keyword Analysis

As soon as our team finishes a client’s SEO audit, we have an understanding of what they need in the short term and long term.

SEO is a long-term process. Unlike paid ads, it can take months for SEO efforts to start bearing fruit.

But, what about businesses who don’t want to wait that long for more traffic?

Our team can help them set up some short-term paid advertising to tie them over but an effective way of boosting their traffic is by utilizing “easy win” keywords.

These are keywords the client is already ranking for in positions 4-30.

We can take those keywords the clients are already ranking for and increase the number of times they appear in content or web copy. That way, they’ll start appearing in more search results.

This client had a whopping 3,121 “easy win” keywords! All we had to do was sift through this massive list and determine the best ones to use.

Here were some examples:

  • “should I get invisalign”
  • “reason for braces”
  • “overbite correction”
  • “braces for cheap””
  • “how to care for braces”

The list above is a small sampling but you can see how easy it would be to incorporate those keywords into new content.

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Competitive Gap Analysis

Understanding your competition is the key to running a successful business.

To do that, we need to conduct a competitive gap analysis to find out the top keywords being used and any special features that may benefit our client.

Our research indicated that 48 domains were in direct competition with the orthodontics practice.

It was important to study each domain because not every competitor was a perfect match for our client. Some were very similar while others were completely different.

We’d want to focus on competitors that were very similar to our client.

One such direct competitor shared 253 keywords with our competitor. Even more, they ranked for an additional 1,263 keywords that our client didn’t.

These included keywords like “underbite,” “floss for braces,” “braces pain,” and “average invisalign price.”

The Ascendance team would collect all of the relevant keywords and include them as part of our client’s new orthodontics SEO campaign.

Keep reading below to find out what we created for them!

SEO Campaign

Now the moment our client was waiting for: a brand new, shiny, killer SEO campaign!

We explained above that the client spent a while ordering our services a la carte before they decided to enroll in our fully managed SEO program, in December 2018.

Our managed SEO program makes it easier for us to build a new SEO campaign from the ground up because it gives access to all of our best-selling services at the same time.

Clients in this program are also assigned a dedicated campaign manager who can keep track of everything for them.

Once they were in our managed SEO program, the orthodontics practice focused on building up their content with Blog Posts and Guest Posts.

Blog Posts are our most popular service that provides SEO-optimized blog posts for a client’s website and Guest Posts secures them a high-quality link from a reputable external site.

Both programs are operated by professional writers who specialize in the client’s niche.

Wondering what topics we covered for them? We wrote blogs about overcoming dental anxiety, warning signs you need to see a dentist, and tips for finding the perfect dentist for your family.

The guest posts we published for them on external sites discussed topics like how to maintain a healthy smile and finding dentists in your local city. Each guest post also provided our client with a backlink to help rank on page 1 of Google.

After updating all of their content with SEO-optimized blogs, the client also took advantage of Content Syndication to send high-performing blog posts to over 300+ high authority publishers.

Syndication increases your brand awareness but also earns you some additional backlinks.

Understanding the importance of backlinks, we also used Link Boost to power up their backlinks.

Sometimes links can come from new pages with low domain authority but our Link Boost service can power up that page.

More recently, the orthodontics practice also requested Web Copy to optimize specific pages for conversions (signing up for consultations, booking an appointment, or purchasing clear aligners).

Our writers can optimize home pages, sales pages, about pages, product pages, service area pages and local services pages.

We created a ton of new content for this client, earning them ranking keywords and backlinks along the way.

Now let’s take a look at how this orthodontics SEO campaign performed. Scroll below to find out!

Results

This client’s website had been growing steadily for years but it skyrocketed once they enrolled in our managed SEO program and we built a new campaign for them.

Let’s take a look at all of the results this client has experienced since mid-2021.

First of all, backlinks are a top-ranking factor and we grew their links from approximately 140 to 640 in six months.

That’s a 357% growth and more than they had experienced since first launching their site!

Identifying “easy win” keywords and conducting a competitive gap analysis helped us to generate a list of high-performing keywords for our client. That was part of our orthodontics SEO strategy.

But, we never stopped researching new keyword opportunities and increased their keywords from 1,400 in August 2021 to over 4,000 in January 2022. Check out the results below!
You can see how much growth we made in keyword positions 1-3 and 4-10.

This orthodontics practice had originally reached out to us for help with generating more traffic.

Higher traffic means more leads and more conversions for clients. They started with about 3,000 monthly visitors but once they enrolled in our managed SEO program that amount ballooned to over 10,000.

Our team was so excited to share these amazing results with the client after only six months!

Conclusion

All of our SEO services will help to grow your business but you’ll have to enroll in our managed SEO program to see the kind of results discussed in this case study.

That’s because our managed SEO clients get full access to all of our products. The client featured in this case study had everything they needed to boost their orthodontics SEO.

They also work directly with a dedicated campaign manager who uses their experience and knowledge to select the right products at the right time for the best results.

Clients also appreciate our full campaign transparency and their campaign manager sends them regular updates. There are never any surprises about how a campaign is doing.

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