Alderwood Psychological Services partnered with Volume Nine to turn a referral-only practice into one with a steady, trackable flow of new patient inquiries, growing leads 59% in four months and building visibility in the AI tools families now use to search.
For years, families found Alderwood Psychological Services the same way: a pediatrician mentioned it, a friend recommended it, another parent passed along the name. Dr. Joy and her team earned that reputation through great work with families across Charlotte. But word of mouth has a ceiling; it can’t be scheduled or scaled on demand, and Alderwood wanted a new way for families to find them, one that didn’t depend on someone else making the introduction first.
Referrals had carried Alderwood a long way, but relying on them almost entirely meant patient inquiries rose and fell with word of mouth, out of the practice’s control. There was no way to know which marketing efforts, if any, actually drove new patients through the door.
At the same time, the practice was largely invisible when local families searched online. Their most important service lines, including play therapy and autism evaluations, weren’t showing up for the people actively looking for them. And as more parents turned to AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find providers, Alderwood had no presence there at all.
We started where the risk was highest: tracking. Before recommending a single tactic, we set up conversion tracking so every new inquiry could be traced back to the channel that brought it in. That gave Alderwood something referrals never could, a clear, measurable view of what was actually working.
From there, we built two tracks that ran in parallel. One focused on being found:
The other focused on being understood, by people and by machines:
The result wasn’t one big fix. It was three channels working together, search, local, and AI visibility, built to earn trust the way referrals always had, just at a scale word of mouth alone couldn’t reach.
Four months after conversion tracking went live, the numbers tell a clear story.
Lead growth
Visibility gains
Service page performance
Showing up in AI search