Is your SEO company using doorway pages on your dental website?
What are doorway pages and why are they bad news?
I never thought I’d have to write a blog explaining what doorway pages are in the context of search engine optimisation and why they are a very poor idea these days. However, I’m prompted to raise awareness again after a client was recently poached by another company offering the ‘moon on a stick’ for his Google rankings.
Why did the client move?
The backdrop is quite disappointing for our SEO team particularly as the website is quite new. In a few short months we had elevated the client’s ranking positions so that he was in the top three for many important searches in his competitive location in London. Several key search terms were actually top. His website traffic had also increased markedly but unfortunately he still elected to move on the back of promises made by another company and incorrect interpretation of data.
In terms of his website enquiries, these had also ramped up very quickly as the Google positions improved, however he had noted a small reduction as the summer holiday period approached. This is not atypical and there will always be blips, some of them outside of a marketing company’s direct control. For example, general cost of living rises alongside non-competitive treatment fees can be difficult to counter.
As part of our closing discussions we advised that step changes in Google traffic were now not possible, simply because he was already very well placed in the search rankings. Incremental improvement would be possible but not at the rate of the first five or six months.
It seems that the new company advised that his website could also rank top for locations outside of his area, but of course, this is not really possible due to Google’s localisation policies. All of this was duly explained but it appears the promises made elsewhere were irresistible.
The effect of Google Consent Mode
Over the last 6 months or so we have been implementing new cookie and general tracking control features on our client’s websites. This is effectively mandatory and you can read more about it in our recent blogs. The upshot of this implementation is that website users can easily opt out of being tracked as soon as they land on a website which then knocks through to analytics data etc.
Step changes in “apparent” website usage can result as you might expect and even though this is easy enough to explain, it still causes unease for some website owners. It appears that this also happened here, so even through it was simple to demonstrate that website traffic had not decreased by looking at raw server data, the client was still fixated on changes in his Google Analytics data which of course was reflecting the new tracking controls.
The result of all of this was the client elected to move unfortunately, but what is worse is the techniques he revealed that his new supplier proposes to use – and this bring me on to “doorway pages”.
Doorway pages and why you should not use them
As part of our closing discussion, the client identified that the new supplier wanted to flood his website with new content, so supplementary new pages about the “same treatments but written to include lots of additional keywords”. Hearing this made my heart sink somewhat as it will for anyone reading this who has an understanding of SEO.
Doorway pages are pages written with the sole intention of trying to manipulate Google and are formally well outside of Google’s publishing guidelines and hence their use can and likely will be penalised. They are also generally counter-productive these days, simply because Google is far more adept at identifying the subject of a web page rather than specifically looking for keyword patterns.
So not only is the technique increasingly pointless, it’s dangerous too. I was somewhat shocked to hear the client saying all of this but I guess some SEO companies are still stuck trying to use techniques from 7 or 8 years ago and seemingly with little regard for their client’s websites.
We advised the client to avoid this at all cost and to concentrate on specific, high-quality, engaging dental website content for his treatments. This coupled with ethical SEO techniques, blogging and technical amendments when needed, are much more sustainable, zero risk and ultimately better for users and Google rankings.
There were other questionable techniques also mentioned but I’ll save that for another time.
Interestingly, the client has noted that he’ll give the new company 3 or 4 months to make a substantial impact and then potentially come back to us! Unfortunately if he does what he indicated to his website, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to accept him back as his site may have been compromised beyond recovery; we’ll see soon enough.
Summary and take-aways
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere in our blog, the world of dental marketing can be a murky one with new depths being plumbed as companies try anything to gain new patients for their dentist clients. However, some of these techniques are not only defunct but dangerous too, potentially resulting in websites being penalised for falling outside of Google’s accepted guidelines.
Whilst the promises made by some companies might seem irresistible, more often than not they are too good to be true. The danger is of course, that the uninitiated won’t realise until too late and hence why SEO generally has a bad name. There are too many ‘cowboy’ companies still operating and clouding perceptions unfortunately.
I may revisit this topic in 5 or 6 months’ time but for now, please take care when you are evaluating dental marketing proposals – if they seem to be too good to be true, then they probably are!
If you’d like no-obligation advice regarding ethical, proven SEO for dentists, please contact the team at Dental Media on 01332 672548 for a friendly discussion.