White hat, grey hat, black hat SEO?

What does it mean and why you need to know.

I think it’s fair to say that the majority of dentists now understand the importance of good search ranking positions (i.e. Google) and most have also heard the phrase “search engine optimisation” or its abbreviation, SEO (albeit we also have a fair few clients who regularly confuse the abbreviation with “SOE” after their preferred dental practice management system!)

Another theme appears to be that many dentist believe that SEO is “a minefield” and I can understand why they might say this. Undoubtedly their inbox will be bombarded with spam emails offering SEO for $150 per month through to services offering it at 20 times this fee. All claim to be the route to Google success. As well as the email spammers, there has been a proliferation of dental marketers who have jumped on the SEO band-wagon over the last couple of years; all professing to have lots of experience with boosting their clients ranking results. In truth, few actually have any worthwhile experience and, when pushed, can’t demonstrate credible, long-term success. Most of them are simply outsourcing the service, adding a nice premium and then keeping their fingers crossed.

On top of the mind-boggling array of self-proclaimed SEO experts, there are also numerous cases where bad SEO performed on behalf of dentists has resulted in Google penalising their websites with significant adverse effect on their business. Indeed a couple of larger UK dental marketing companies who made their name through focusing on SEO for dentists 5 or 6 years ago, messed up on a large scale when Google began to introduce website penalties for over-zealous, poor quality work.

So against this backdrop it’s easy to see why dentists are confused and even scared by the prospect of undertaking a dental focused SEO campaign to improve the performance of their website.

To assist with any decision, it is useful to understand the terms “white-hat”, “grey hat”, and “black hat” SEO and the techniques falling into these categories which a company may use to try to promote your website. Employing the wrong techniques *will* land you in trouble with Google, with near-irretrievable penalties which can completely exclude your website from the search results. As we’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, Google is very strict with web authoring standards and anything which falls outside of their guidelines can easily land you in trouble.

So let’s make a quick review.

Black Hat SEO

First rule – don’t do it! This is where unscrupulous companies try to trick Google using techniques well outside of good standards. Watch out for:

• lots of low quality back-links from worthless directories purely built for SEO (hint – they don’t work anyway)
• paid links
• hidden text on your web pages
• keywords “stuffed” into your web pages, titles etc
• “doorway” pages built on-mass and designed specifically to target niche traffic sources
• sneaky re-directs from cloaked pages
• and more

These are just a few tricks which used to work before Google upped it’s game in the fight against manipulated search results.

Grey Hat SEO

As the name suggests, this is a middle ground between the black and the white methodologies. Some get away with it until they push too far and Google’s filters pick it up – and then the penalty comes. We are seeing more of this being used by UK dental marketing companies currently and they are treading a fine line with their client’s websites. Techniques to watch out for:

• worthless blog comments
• guest blog posting on low-quality, unrelated websites
• micro-site networks
• over-use of keywords in link anchor text
• false profiles set up on forum websites
• and more

Whilst some of this works to a degree, it’s not sustainable and ultimately very risky.

White Hat SEO

These are the techniques which fall completely within Google’s web publishing standards and are the hardest and most time-consuming to achieve. Hence why the majority of companies who profess to know about SEO can’t or won’t pursue them. These techniques are sustainable and include but are not limited to:

• optimising your website to be technically excellent, including elements like load speed and schema mark-up
• adding new content to your site regularly to build authority and relevance – blogging is just one technique
• publishing high quality articles with links back to your website on relevant third party websites
• seeking out bona-fide back-links from good quality third party sites
• improving user engagement by publishing compelling content including video on your web pages
• stimulating user engagement through the effective use of social media
• and more

I think it’s easy enough to see why “white hat” SEO is not easy to undertake and hence why you can’t do it for $150 or by using an unknown off-shore organisation – it’s simply not worth the risk because you can be 99% certain they won’t be operating in the white hat region.

But what of the main UK dental marketers, surely they are completely above board? Unfortunately this is not the case for most of them and it’s easy enough to evidence when you audit the SEO going on for their clients’ websites. There is still too much going on in the “grey” area and walking the risk/penalty tightrope.

What should you do?

If you are considering an SEO campaign for your website, you must ask questions, seek examples and also gain third party opinions. Companies will obviously show where they have succeeded but they won’t show the skeletons in the cupboard – if you want to know about those too, suffice to say it’s easy enough to find them if you know what to look for.

At Dental Media we have performed effective and safe marketing campaigns for dentists for many years and we’ll be pleased to help you through the minefield too. Simply call us on 01332 672548 for a transparent discussion about your objectives, our prices and strategies.