Big Dental SEO Fails!
If your SEO team proposes anything like this, move on….
Regular readers of our blog will know that one of our key objectives is to share useful information to help the dental community get the most from their digital marketing. One topic we try to cover is where dentists have been let down with poor marketing advice and service so that others can avoid similar pitfalls.
Today we’ll take a quick look at a couple of cases where clients came to us having experienced issues with SEO and were not getting the results they were promised by their suppliers; even after spending a lot of money.
Let’s take a look at two cases from this past week alone.
SEO sold on keywords without traffic or conversions analysis
It appears to be a recurring theme where certain dental marketing companies provide web optimisation services based purely on a set of keywords and then trying to advance searches for those keywords in Google. I’ll explain why this alone is hugely inadequate in a moment.
In this particular example, a client was recommended to us for search engine optimisation as his existing supplier was not delivering. We carried out our usual audit to see what was failing and made a set of recommendations. There were significant technical issues with his website but also the SEO campaign was ill thought out and executed really badly.
Essentially the dentist had been sold SEO based on a set of keywords which on analysis, were only minimally useful. There were a lot of keywords which were unrealistic to try to optimise in the first place as they were for searches too far away from where his practice was located. In addition, some of the keywords in the list were practically useless as they would have yielded very little traffic even if top of the search results.
What is possibly worse is that the marketing company was not monitoring anything other than the progress of those keywords compared to the last month. There was no use of Google Analytics to assess traffic to the website, no analysis of conversions (actual enquiries) or indeed any other metrics needed to assess the true performance of a website.
The charge for that failing service? £950 + vat per month! The dentist only realised 18 months down the track when his inflow of new patients was no different. He’d paid over £8k for the website and well over double that for ‘SEO’ that had delivered very little, if indeed anything at all. Looking into his own analytics account, we could see that the organic traffic to his website was actually worse than when the campaign started 18 months previously.
It’s difficult to know whether the marketing company was providing the bare minimum deliberately or whether they were just incompetent. I won’t name them but suffice to say that they are very well known and on face value, highly rated. But of course you need to look much deeper than a few articles in the dental press, lots of self-promotion and questionable reviews.
Sadly lots of dentists are in the same boat but haven’t realised yet.
3 practice websites combined into one and search results tanked
This was actually a dental business which worked with us previously and for whom we achieved good ranking results with very low budget campaigns.
A new practice manager joined and convinced the principle dentist to move to a different marketing company – we are fortunate enough to have minimal churn when it comes to clients but very occasionally it happens due to a change of management in a case like this. It’s disappointing but we move on and wish them success.
However, in this case, just over a year down the track, the principle dentist contacted us to say that the results with the new company were far worse than he’d been led to believe and could we take a look to see what was going on.
It quickly became obvious that the new practice manager had recommended that the three websites for the three practice locations be combined into one and that a lot of money and admin time could be saved. This was done by the new web company but what happened next is that all of the search results tanked. There are a number of reasons for this but suffice to say that it’s much harder to get a single website representing several locations to rank compared to having a single website per location. This is particularly so where the practices are a reasonable distance from each other and where competition is quite high.
Clearly no-one had done any analysis to validate moving to a single website and the results were awful. Of course you will potentially pay more to maintain and optimise several websites compared to one, but the payback from much better ranking results and new patient enquiries eclipses this.
We are currently in the process of bringing this client back on board and sorting out the mess.
Summary
Launching digital marketing campaigns whether it’s SEO, Google Ads or social media, takes careful evaluation and know-how. Much of it fails for a variety of reasons, ranging from suppliers simply offering poor services to the unwise, through to members of the local team thinking they know what’s best based on poor information and bad advice.
It pays to do plenty of homework before you step in and to avoid disappointment in the longer term.
For experienced, impartial advice please contact the Dental Media team on 01332 672548. We’ll only provide you with services we genuinely feel have a great chance of delivering, at sensible fees and with full transparency.