One of our dental clients opened his own dental practice in Santa Clarita, CA, rented an office, and purchased dental equipment.

Now it was time for him to get his first client in the door and give his newly created business a kick start.

The problem was, (as it always happens), there were other dentists in the area with established practices.

Our client decided to make a bold move. He realized the importance of building a solid brand that would distinguish his dental practice from others in the Santa Clarita community. A colleague advised him to contact us to help him grow his practice, and that seemed to make a lot of sense. Both the client and our agency grew up in the digital age, and they shared common views on marketing in the era of rapid and unpredictable changes in Google’s ranking algorithm.

We suggested a new, unorthodox approach to Search Engine Optimization.

We suggested to build not a service, but a brand.

We had recently attended SMX West, the top conference on SEO practices, and we realized the importance of a unique, custom approach to marketing any business.

We have done SEO since 2007. Like many SEO professionals, we started with link building, an SEO strategy that was quite challenging to implement. We cut our teeth in SEO by implementing strategies for more than 200 websites, including ADA.org.

Here is what we suggested our client to do:

“First of all, I’d like you to start getting local coverage from the local press. Let’s win the hearts and minds of community residents. Sponsor local events. See if you can get a coverage from local online news sites. Sign up with the local Chamber of Commerce and get a link from their website.”

And together they did that, and even more.

But there was something else that they did, which yielded our client’s website more than 40,000 organic visitors from Google and brought patients to him from all over the United States.

Around a year prior to the day when our client and Oceana Marketing began working on our client’s website, another Google’s algorithm came into play. Google had already launched its infamous Panda and Penguin updates. Then Hummingbird, its latest update, was introduced. While some could predict the consequences for business websites, no one had come up with an SEO strategy that would work effectively with the update.

Slava immediately saw an opportunity. He suggested that our client use the principles of the Google Hummingbird update and produce content that would answer logical questions people would ask, such as, “What food can I eat with dental veneers?” and “How long do dental bridges last?” Together, they created a series of articles answering these questions, and posted them on our client’s website. Soon, his web traffic started growing.

This strategy has proven to be the right one. To date, our client’s website has received more than 200,000 organic visitors from Google along, plus those from other marketing channels. Many of his site’s visitors became his patients, and a good deal of those satisfied patients referred their friends and relatives to our client. Because of our client’s unique approach to marketing and his unparalleled patient care, as well as his smart choices in marketing strategy, he grew his business and targeted his practice toward four additional local regions. But that’s another story.

Slava continues to help companies all over the country by providing custom and holistic marketing strategies. You can find out more about him and his services from his website, oceanahq.com