Case Study: Marketing a Dental Practice in a New Category.
Dental Practice in Durham, NC
3x
Patient flow
1 to 2 → 5 to 6 bookings/day
4x
Google reviews
23 → 93, 5.0 rating held
+40%
Non-branded organic clicks
Sep 2025 → Aug 2026
Built For
Local practices ranking outside the top 10 for their core service + city keywords, looking for measurable rank movement and patient flow growth, not just traffic.
The Challenge
What They Were Facing.
In March 2025, a freelancer-matching agency connected us with the founders of a new emergency dental clinic. They were building one of the only practices of its kind in the region. The category itself is still emerging: dental urgent care. Most patients don't know dental urgent care exists as an option, so they had their work cut out for them.
The founders had branding and a website, plus some marketing fluency of their own, but no bandwidth to execute a full marketing program alongside running a new practice. They needed a playbook their two-person team could follow, and as it turned out, eventually needed someone to take the work over entirely when the realities of running a business made self-execution impossible.
Our Approach
How We Solved It.
The engagement ran in two phases. First, we delivered a comprehensive DIY marketing playbook covering SEO, paid search, social, content, and local search, along with the measurement foundation the team needed to make informed decisions.
When it became clear the playbook wasn't being executed four months in, I stepped back in and took over hands-on execution. From September 2025 forward, I ran SEO, paid search, and content operations directly, pairing a disciplined data loop with creative bets designed to build awareness in a category most patients don't yet know exists.
Delivered a comprehensive DIY marketing playbook.
SEO guide, PPC strategy with keyword research, social content strategy and calendar, SEO-optimized landing page copy, and a review-acquisition plan built to establish authority in Google's knowledge graph.
Built the measurement stack.
Google Business Profile, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Search Console, and a Looker Studio dashboard that consolidated every channel into a single view, so decisions could happen without hopping between platforms.
Took over execution in September 2025.
Launched Google Ads, built a weekly social content calendar with the in-house dental hygienist running social, and produced video content for paid social.
Ran a disciplined review-acquisition program.
Prioritized a steady weekly cadence over bursts and protected the 5.0-star average. I wrote the practice an SOP for requesting, handling, and replying to reviews, so every review with words gets an owner response. This also covered a reputation management incident. After a procedural issue led to a negative review, I had it removed through proper channels while the clinical team handled the rest.
Kept paid search narrow and high-intent.
A small practice can't afford unqualified clicks. Ads stayed tight to emergency-intent terms and out of broader dental keywords that would burn budget on tire-kickers.
Ran a data loop through the dashboard.
When a NextDoor experiment wasn't converting, the data made the call obvious. I cut it and reallocated the budget.
Launched a creative IRL activation.
Wrapped a city bus in the practice's graphics with a QR code routing directly into the booking flow. The kind of awareness work emerging-category businesses need, since no one searches for a service they don't know exists.
"My company and I have been working with Elliott Digital for over a year and could not be more pleased. The service we have received, the creative thinking, attention to detail and the return on investment has been phenomenal. I can't recommend it highly enough."
Dr. Jeffrey West
Accidental Urgent Tooth Care
The Results
Numbers That Matter.
+40%
Non-Branded Organic Clicks Up
From 119 to 167 per month, September 2025 to August 2026. Brand-name searches are excluded, so this is new patients finding the practice for what it does, not for who it is.
4.4x
Non-Branded Search Impressions
From 4,514 to 19,754 per month. The practice now shows up for more than four times as many emergency and urgent dental searches as it did at baseline. Clicks grew slower than impressions because the site started appearing for broader regional and "near me" queries, which is the expected shape for a young site gaining reach.
22 → 16
Average Search Position
Site-wide average position across every query the practice appeared for, September 2025 to August 2026. Six spots in twelve months, for a practice that started in the low 20s.
4x
Google Reviews, 5.0 Held
From 23 to 93 reviews in twelve months, roughly six a month, with the 5.0 average intact (95 five-star, 1 four-star). 85 of 96 reviews carry an owner reply.
3x
Patient Flow Increase
The practice went from 1 to 2 bookings/walk-ins per day to 5 to 6, and is now operating on stable footing.
Methodology
Comparison window: September 2025 (engagement baseline) to August 2026, twelve months. Search figures are monthly totals from Google Search Console. Non-branded excludes any query containing the practice name. Average position is Search Console's site-wide average across all queries. Impressions grew faster than clicks over the window as the site began appearing for broader regional and near-me queries. Review counts and rating are Google's own, dated by review timestamp. Patient flow is the practice's own booking and walk-in count.
If you're ranking outside the top 10 in your local market, this is the kind of work we do.
What This Looks Like For You
How we'd approach yours.
Diagnose where rankings actually stand
Audit the site, GBP, review profile, and SERP position against local competitors. We start with the data, not assumptions.
Knock off the low-hanging fruit first
Technical fixes, schema, GBP completeness, internal linking. The work that moves rankings in weeks, not months.
Build authority on the keywords that convert
Content cadence, review systems, and local link-building targeted at the queries that actually fill chairs, not vanity volume.