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
+33%
Non-branded organic clicks
Sep 2025 → Mar 2026
10
Core keywords in top 3
Including rank 15 → 4.5 movement
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 and protected the 5.0-star average over chasing volume. 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.
+33%
Non-Branded Organic Clicks Up
From 138 to 184 (September 2025 to March 2026). Impressions more than doubled over the same window, from 4,713 to 11,497.
+50%
Branded Search Impressions Up
From 199 to 300 per month. A clean signal of growing brand awareness tied directly to the IRL and content work.
10
Core Organic Keywords in the Top 3
"Emergency dentist" + local modifier moved from rank 15 to 4.5. "Emergency dental" + local modifier from 5 to 2.5. "Urgent care dentist" from 12 to 6.
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 March 2026. Branded vs. non-branded splits use Google Search Console queries; rank tracking uses month-end averages, not single-day pulls.
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.