Website quality and marketing ethics….

 ….and how they relate to SEO

Over the last few weeks we’ve turned down several potential new SEO clients. Whilst turning clients away is not a regular feature of our business, there are some occasions where, ethically, if you feel you can’t add value, then you need to politely walk away. Now given that we have a very good reputation for search optimisation and it’s a core part of our business, why did we elect to decline these particular opportunities?

Ethical competition

In a couple of cases, the dentists who approached us operated in regions that overlapped with existing clients. A quick discussion revealed that they were seeking to improve their ranking positions for similar search terms – so a conflict of interest and a definite non-starter. This is something to check very closely if you are seeking SEO services as some dental design and marketing companies will optimise for neighbouring practices without apparent concern. It’s pretty easy to check this if you look closely in Google.

Poor quality websites

The second reason for politely declining these opportunities resulted from the poor quality of the enquirer’s websites. In all of the cases, the sites concerned were built using outdated technology which was beyond retrieval or built using DIY dental practice website building tools. This meant that the framework of the website would never be suitable to establish a solid foundation for ongoing SEO work.

So why is the website structure so important for SEO?

Two main components affect where a website appears in Google’s search results – the “on-site” and “off-site” search factors. On-site covers all of the elements which relate to how the site is structured; off-site refers to all of the 3rd party factors which refer or relate to your site, for example back-links, social signals, reviews etc.

It used to be the case that off-site factors dominated ranking signals, in fact historically, it was possible to rank poorly constructed websites quite well  by compensating with good off-site SEO. However, more recently, Google appears to have shifted the balance back to on-site factors to the point where it is now essential to have a good website infrastructure. Without this, it is very difficult to rank well unless the site already has a high domain authority.

On-site ranking factors

This is not an exhaustive list but the following on-page factors need to be optimised first to form a good foundation for ongoing off-site work:

• good quality, well written and unique content
• appropriate use of keywords – these need to be the words/phrases which you expect searchers to use. Do not overuse (“stuff”) them!
• page titles
• meta descriptions (not used directly for search but where they appear in Google, can affect click-through rates)
• file names used in web addresses (urls)
• html heading tags – used by Google to identify data hierarchy and relevance
• page load speed – Google penalises slow loading pages
• inter-site linking

There are other factors but if you address the above correctly, you are well set.

Where we were unable to help the guys that approached us for SEO services, several or most of the factors above could not be addressed without completely re-building the websites concerned. It would have been unethical and likely ineffective to start off-site SEO in those cases.

Summary

A professional SEO practitioner will look at several factors before agreeing to take on work. If there is a conflict of interest, e.g. two dental practices optimising for similar terms in the same location, then this should be a non-starter. Another key consideration will be to establish if the website can actually be optimised in the first place. Where it cannot, for example as is the case with many DIY practice builder websites or outdated coding, then SEO is likely to fail.

If you would like your website assessed for suitability for SEO, please contact Dental Media on 01332 672548.