/ Houston, we have a problem

The Vallance Dental Centre is based in Manchester City Centre and offers a variety of private and NHS dental treatments. They approached us to help build their online presence for a core set of dental treatment keywords.

There were only a couple of service pages on Vallance’s website. This meant Google, and Vallance’s potential patients, didn’t know all of the services they offered!

The client had no backlinks and a lower website authority than their competitors in Manchester. This meant that Google didn’t want to rank their website because they didn’t see them as an authoritative source.

The website was slow to load and had key technical issues that needed to be fixed. These problems impacted the website’s performance and harmed the user experience.

/ Our mission plan

SEO Strategy
With all of our dental SEO campaigns, it begins with an SEO strategy.

To us, an SEO strategy is an actionable plan with key deliverables that will improve the performance of the website against a set of KPIs. Deliverables are assigned a due date and an owner for accountability.

This was all put into one document and shared with the client’s team and our team.

Technical SEO Audit
One key piece of work that we carry out for any client is a technical SEO audit. Our 200+ point checklist looks at the same factors search engines use to rank a website.

After analysing the Vallance website, we noticed some issues relating to page speed and mobile usability. These issues were holding the website back and the fixes fed into our SEO strategy. It helped us prioritise key bits of work first before doing anything else.

Keyword Research
An important aspect of any SEO campaign is targeting the right keywords. In short, how are your customers searching for your services and how can we appear for those searches?

And in an industry such as dentistry, what you may name a treatment, the customer could search using another term. This made the keyword research an important stage.

This was going to be a focussed SEO campaign, so we had to ensure we targeted the best keywords. We pulled a range of data points, such as local search volume and keyword difficulty scores, and then we analysed the search results for each keyword.

From this, we decided on a group of keywords to target to get the best return. These were ‘Invisalign’ and ‘dentures’.

Content Briefs
Once we knew what keywords we were targeting, we had to build new pages for ‘Invisalign’ and ‘private dentures’. Vallance didn’t have many treatment pages which meant they couldn’t rank for keywords.

For any new page that we create, we produce a detailed content brief. This outlines exactly what primary and secondary keywords we will target. It also looks at the sections needed on the page to rank and it provides a great insight into what the competition is doing.

We want our pages to be better than the competition so that users and Google favours them. This makes the research that goes into the content brief a priceless step.

Link Building
When we first spoke to houseUP, all of their competitors had more authoritative websites. Meaning Google was rewarding them with better rankings.

We needed to carry out a link building campaign to try and build houseUP’s website authority and to catch up with the competition.

Link prospecting was carried out to find suitable websites to gain links from. All of the target websites are ranked by how authoritative they are and the aim is to get links from these first.

Spaced handled all of the link building, from dealing with the target websites to negotiating on terms. This allowed houseUP to work on their business whilst we worked on the website.

Website Redesign
One key problem we found with the website during the technical audit was how it was built. The website loaded slowly, there wasn’t a blog section, and there were some pages the client couldn’t update easily.

When you redesign a website, SEO needs to be thought of the whole way through. We worked closely with the design and development team to ensure no traffic or rankings were lost.