Keppel Dental website copy case study
The brief
Keppel Dental are a family run dental practice in Yeppoon, Queensland. They’ve been helping local residents and fly in, fly out patients take care of their oral health since 1977.
In the 40 years since principal dentist John Christensen opened Keppel Dental, a lot has changed. Not just in the world of dentistry, but in marketing, too.
Word-of-mouth referrals are still important to the health industry. But so is location and ease of accessibility. When searching for nearby services, people tend to ‘have a quick Google’ to find what they’re looking for.
With this in mind, the Keppel Dental team were keen to broaden their reach and update their marketing strategy. Attracting new patients was the primary aim, but the dental team also needed to promote the range of services offered and have somewhere online to home useful practice information and good oral health advice.
What Keppel Dental needed was a slick, well-organised website that reflected the practice’s values and communicated the same welcoming vibes online, as patients experience when visiting Keppel Dental. With this in mind, the Keppel Dental owners invested in my copywriting services, to:
- Identify tone of voice
- Write effective, SEO website copy
- Tell the company’s story on the about page
- Capture the different personalities within the Keppel Dental team
- Write and structure multiple service pages
- Create a template for the client to manage the creation of their own case studies.
A lot of copy was required. Version management and working around the client’s schedule was just one challenge. By far the most enjoyable part of the project though, was getting to know the personality of this really strong, well established, offline company.
Bottling that for online was the real test.
What we did
The first briefing meeting made clear that these folks were the perfect balance of fun, friendly and professional. A great fit for my approach to copy. The care and comfort of patients was at the centre of everything they did — from their chair-side manner, through to installing Netflix to entertain patients during long procedures.
During my research, I learnt a lot about nervous patients and stress associated with dental trips. This is a serious audience pain point that needed to be acknowledged in the copy. The solution to transferring Keppel Dental’s personality online and putting nervous patients at ease, was making the dentists talk in the copy.
Competitor research kept returning the trend that website copy would talk about the dentists. What I wanted to do was help patients get to know the dentists by feeling like they were having a conversation with them already on this site.
Really, people want to meet the dentist. This is someone who’s going to be all up in their face. Literally. Showing the human, friendly, calm, non-dentist side of the team was as equally important as listing their qualifications when building trust.
Thankfully, I was given a fairly long leash to experiment with how to remove the barrier of the screen and work out the tone of voice. From the briefing meeting and bearing the main audience pain points in mind, the best approach was to create alight-hearted, conversational tone that included speech and direct quote wherever possible.
The idea was to take phrases and language the dentists and staff at Keppel Dental use when speaking to patients — both during treatment,but also when they’re chatting in the waiting room. This approach can be most strongly seen in the homepage headline, the team page and service pages where I use direct quotes from the dentists so their voice is captured.
The result
Although a long project (around 18 months in total, with design time and technical accuracy checks), both myself and the client are so proud of the outcome.
The site offers good UX structure with easy navigation. This is, in part, thanks to Studio 1 Design and their forever-helpful team.
From a copy point of view, we’ve achieved a good level of human. Client feedback has indicated that patients are even parroting words and phrases they’ve read on the website.
The new content and design only launched November 2018, but early results show a month-on-month increase of unique page views (up 107%), increased time on page to nearly two and a half minutes, and considerably lower bounce and exit rates.
Kind words from the Keppel Dental team
“The only painful thing about working with Rose is that she’s a hard
Rose helped us with website copy, copy editing
With Rose on board, I quickly saw the impact of her writing style on the content we were producing. She has a talent for creating a friendly and approachable tone consistently, across all our content. The voice she creates is fresh and actively speaks to our audience.
Our bounce rate and session duration instantly improved and clients started to explore our site further.
One thing I liked about working with Rose is that she made the whole process fun and enjoyable. She is a great listener and asks the right questions to find out what makes us different. As a result, I found the whole experience a lot easier than I had expected. I had never worked with a copywriter before — should have started years ago!
I would recommend Rose to businesses who need a fresh and conversational voice in their content, that appeals to a broad population.”
“We hired Rose to help us with our website copy. As a dental practice, we wanted our copy to look professional, but also when dentists write about dental topics it’s very easy to get too jargony and
The outcome of working with Rose is a website that looks professional and includes content that I think people will actually read, understand and get something out of.
During our
I found the whole experience to be great! Having never worked with a copywriter before, I had no idea the difference it could make to the end product. With that said, I would recommend Rose to businesses who need copy that stands out, that’s not boring or run of the mill.”
Do you need website content?
Give the copy on your business website the attention it deserves and the information consumers need. It all starts with a no-strings attached chat.
