
Increase appointment requests and improve mobile performance

Problem Statement
Heartland Dental is the nations largest Dental Service Organization (DSO). The marketing department manages and maintains over 1,000 individually branded dental practice websites.
These websites were dramatically underperforming expectations, or in the case of mobile devices not working at all.
Goals
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Increase appointment requests
-
Improve mobile performance
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Improve organic SEO performance
Initial Problem Discovery
No clear CTA for the user
Upon initial review the websites had no clear CTA.
Where one would expect the Primary CTA to be was instead a box labeled “Virtual Office Tour”.
The ‘preferred’ user action, ‘Make an Appointment’ is located in the top right, and is styled identically to the ‘office hours’ button next to it, and the ‘New Patient Resources’ and ‘Insurance & Finances’ buttons.

Initial Problem Discovery
Bloated Navigation
After an initial audit of the primary navigation, it was discovered that the average practice had over 65 items in their primary navigation.
Dental Jargon/ Duplicate navigation
The audit also uncovered multiple instances where one office used one term, while another office used another, however because the descriptions were identical, the offices were choosing to list both.
There was also a significant number of terms being used for navigation that were specific to the dental professionals and unknown outside of those groups.

Research findings
98% of ALL traffic visited 4 pages

competitive analysis
Heartland’s nearest competitor represents approximately 300 dental offices.

Aspen Dental
The next closest competitor but unfortunately they have an entirely different business model. All Aspen practices are branded as “Aspen Dental”.

Pacific Dental
Pacific Dental practices were going with the ‘Kitchen sink’ approach. They had even more navigation than the Heartland practices.

Western Dental
Western websites were also corporate branded like the Aspen practices.
personas
Heartland had previously hired the research firm of Buxton to provide more patient insight.
At the overall patient level, Buxton found prevalent traits among your patients’ households including:
- Age Range of 35 to 64 years
- 2 to 6 of Persons in the Household
- Length of Residency of 6 to over 16 years
- Annual income of over $50,000
- Presence of Children

user journey
Regardless of persona group, our user journey was pretty clear.

content cleanup
Bloated navigation & Dental Jargon/ duplicate navigation
To address these issues I took a multi-step approach, each employing 1 of 3 key groups

SEO/
Content Writers
Working with the SEO/Content team to sort through the previous navigational/ service terms we matched them to high value SEO terms when possible and preferrably to more common non-technical terms when we could.

Regional Market Representatives
The RMS’ were responsible for communicating between the dentists and the marketing department.
We asked the RMS team to take part in card sorting excerises with our new SEO friendly terms and services.

Dentists
(1,400+ nationwide)
Taking the results from the card sorting exercise with the RMS team I created a google forms survey asking each dentist to identify the services they wanted to offer along with any they were unfamiliar with.
sitemap
Finding compromise between the users and the ‘stakeholders’
- Users were clear in their goals – and they weren’t interested in ‘information’ that the dentists considered ‘vital’.
- Almost to a person, the stakeholder dentists thought the information presented was far more important to prospective patients than any information the patients were clearly coming for.
- As a compromise, I removed the 60+ services from the primary navigation and created a content block on the home page that would list all the offices current services. The information was still prominent, but it was no longer blocking users from their goals.

wireframes
Initial Wireframes
After multiple sketches and conversations an initial wireframe emerged.

wireframes revised
A few tweaks after a round of guerilla user testing at Starbucks
- Users were having a hard time identifying the ‘New Patients’ item when it was separated by the office address.
- It was frustrating to some users in testing to not see the actual address before clicking directions. They could determine by addressing whether or not it was worth pursuing.

annotated wireframe
Pre-wiring for change
To help with the transition, before any final mockups were sent out I created an annotated wireframe for the RMS team to distribute and pre-wire the dentists for the upcoming changes.

final design
The end result

summary
Results
73%
+40% Organic SEO Traffic
30%
-60% Mobile Bounce Rate
18%
-60% PPC Traffic
200%
Increase in Appointment Requests YoY