Yorkshire Dental Suite · Private dentistry

The rebrand that looked incredible but lost money

Yorkshire Dental Suite rebranded. The new site looked beautiful. Paid conversions fell, and nobody could agree by how much or why. Here is how we found out, fixed it, and tripled their Google Ads conversions.

3x conversions, before vs after

Where it started

The new site was, on the face of it, lovely. Clean, confident, the sort of thing that wins internal praise. The trouble was that conversions from paid advertising had dropped, and the reporting could not say by how much.

The headline showed a 31% fall in key events, but that number was confounded by a big shift in traffic: paid social cut by 59%, paid search scaled up nearly 700%, direct down 69%. Comparing blended rates across two completely different audiences tells you almost nothing.

The Teardown

The outcomes were the easy bit. They came out of a deep diagnostic pass with six strands of analysis, each one feeding the next. Each one valuable in its own right.

Measurement and attribution audit

Traced the drop to a shift in traffic mix and not exclusively the new site. When isolated by source, conversion in some areas had held up. We stopped them solving for a problem that was not there.

Tag and tracking crawl

Crawled the tag setup across 44 pages and found cookie-rejection and cross-domain errors that were corrupting the data, then specced every fix.

Funnel and form analysis

The new site doubled form starts and halved completions.

We pinned the cause to field count and showed exactly where people gave up.

Verbatim enquiry analysis

We analysed what people actually wrote at enquiry stage.

Price was a dominant concern at 25%, finance a separate barrier again, and there was a huge emotional driver that was invisible in search but very loud here.

Intent-stage comparison

We compared search-stage worries against enquiry-stage worries to learn what the page resolved and what it ignored.

It fell down at the transactional bottom of the funnel.

Heuristic UX review

Armed with our other insights, we ran a heuristic pass. There were a lot of minor issues that, when together, were likely to be fatiguing. Five different areas described the same action, and the page front-loaded proof on the user whilst simultaneously delaying almost every chance to convert.

What we found

Before touching the site, we traced every data source back to its inputs, recommended a set of tagging fixes, and showed the team the contradictions sitting in their own analytics.

Once the measurement was honest, the real issues were much clearer and we got to work.

The redesign had decided what to show people, and what to ask of them and when, based on how the brand wanted to look rather than on what a customer needs or wants in order to choose. The form asked for more, earlier, and gave less back. Form starts had doubled but completions had halved.

Price, the one thing people most wanted spelled out, was the most common question in enquiry, and the new site deferred pricing information to a lower position on the pages, and tried to encourage users to contact in order to confirm exact pricing.

What we changed, and what happened

The recommendations were unglamorous and built around empathy for the user.

Ask for less, ask later, and be honest about why.
Put pricing in plain sight.
Reassure people on the things that worry them and stop them booking.
That's the process, the timescales and the pain.

Help them look past the treatment to the outcome they want. The client shipped a large share of it in early March 2026.

3x
Landing page conversions, measured before the changes vs after.

First as a rescue and then as a programme

This was a launch, not a controlled test, so we won't pretend to know which single change pulled the most weight. We are comfortable claiming the result, because none of it was on the table before we diagnosed the problem and set the direction.

What we built next takes the guesswork out: a healthy and lasting experimentation programme, so our next big decisions get tested against evidence rather than taste, and we all get sharper at listening to what our customers are saying.

“He isn't afraid to challenge a landing page you're convinced is the bees knees. Jon is about performance and user experience, not just what looks nice.”

Joe Whiteman, PPC Manager, Smile White and Yorkshire Dental Suite

Worried a redesign is costing you more than it should?

Let's find out before it costs you another quarter. We will trace it, prove it, and fix it.

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