SEO Dilution

What is SEO dilution and why do you need to avoid it?

We are about to start an SEO project for a dentist who moved to our services having paid nearly a thousand pounds per month to an agency which failed to deliver. His website traffic did not improve and the reporting he was provided with did not show critical metrics such as website traffic or conversions (enquiries) – so the dentist had no real visibility of what was happening until he’d paid out around £11k; for very little.

What went wrong?

In the first instance, it should be said that the dentist was taken in by promises of quick success. He was also lured by the reputation of the dental marketing agency which on face value looked great – however, if he’d looked deeper and checked their actual performance in detail, he may well have seen that all was not quite what it seemed.

With SEO, it is essential to complete an in-depth baseline audit to understand a range of issues, including the current performance of the website, the competitive climate and also the client’s expectations. A strategy can then be developed to address the various issues and create realistic goals. Achievable SEO objectives must be defined and they must be in-line with what Google will actually allow – this clearly hadn’t been taken into account by the former SEO agency that’d developed a “strategy” which was never going to work well.

This brings me on to the topic of what I call ‘SEO Dilution’.

So what exactly is SEO dilution?

Before we delve in, it pays to understand a little bit about how Google ranks web pages. Their stated objective is to show searchers the information which best answers their search queries. So any website content which is specific, well-structured and high-quality will tend to rank better than content which is less well formed.

Additionally we also need to understand “localisation” – this is where Google preferentially presents information from businesses which are in the area where the searcher is based or is looking at – for example, someone searching for “dental implants” in Nottingham is going to see results from Nottingham dentists and very few from suppliers in Derby or Leicester. So it’s pretty pointless trying to set up organic search campaigns to try to present results outside of your own area – particularly where competition is strong. In most case it just won’t work.

In the example of the failed campaign above, the dentist was based in a particular location in London but the agency had added 3 additional locations to his website content – not only did this dilute it from Google’s perspective, but it also completely misses how search results get localised.

On checking where the dentist’s search terms were in Google, we could see that the dilution had brought his primary terms for his actual location down below half way on page one. His terms for the randomly applied additional locations were all below the top three positions – so missing the large majority of searches.

How do you avoid SEO dilution and take advantage of search localisation?

First off we must be pragmatic and understand what is and what isn’t possible when it comes to Google searches. If you ask me to rank your dental practice website for your own location and several adjacent ones, I’m going to tell you that (in most cases) it isn’t possible. For that I would discuss a mixed strategy of organic SEO and paid ads.

Knowing the above, it is hopefully clear why we always say that the first objective for dental SEO is to dominate your own area – when that is done, then try to increase the search footprint to local areas; but only where it makes sense and competition (and Google) allows.

This means making reference to your physical business in your website content, page title etc – not loading extra locations in there just in case it helps – it usually won’t. Similarly with your blogs you need to keep them targeted to a single location and treatment type and then broaden the scope where it makes sense to do so. This way you’ll provide focused content which answers user’s questions, does not confuse Google and also follows the “rules” of search localisation. It is this process we now have to go through with the new client mentioned above.

Summary

SEO isn’t going to be successful if the fundamentals aren’t understood and/or where agencies go after a fast buck. Content dilution is classic example of this and where a dentist can end up paying out lots of money with very limited chances of success. Worse is when the agency doesn’t provide transparent reporting for the dentist to see what is going wrong.

Every SEO project is different and takes careful analysis to establish the correct approach. If you need help in achieving this, please contact the team at Dental Media for impartial device on 01332 672548 or via the website contact form.