The world of dental SEO can be quite murky as some of the dentists reading this blog will be only too aware. There are more stories of bad work and banned websites than good unfortunately and over the years I\u2019ve tried to highlight some of the many pitfalls and ‘gotchas’ in this blog.<\/p>\n
Last week we took on two new dental SEO clients<\/a> who came to us explaining how they\u2019d fallen foul of unscrupulous SEO practices which left them high and dry with effectively zero Google presence. It\u2019s prompted me to revisit the subject in today\u2019s blog where we\u2019ll look at the top five things your SEO agency don\u2019t want you to know. The more dentists know about these potential pitfalls when choosing an optimisation partner, the less likely that they\u2019ll get caught out by poor work down the track.<\/p>\n This may sound odd but lots of dentists are actually paying for SEO when there is no, or extremely limited, work happening on their behalf. That\u2019s right, in many cases they\u2019re paying for nothing. This is usually the case when a marketing company insists that a client takes a monthly maintenance contract and then sweetens it by claiming that SEO is also included. But SEO in the real sense of the word i.e. a proactive campaign to significantly improve rankings, isn\u2019t being done at all. At best, the dentist gets an automatically generated report each month and maybe the odd quick adjustment of web page titles. This certainly isn\u2019t sufficient to move the Google dial.<\/p>\n If you need SEO, this isn\u2019t for you, so please don\u2019t waste your money on those misleading offers.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many dental marketing agencies in the UK are outsourcing some or all of their SEO work to off-shore companies. They do this to take advantage of cheap labour rates in certain overseas countries.<\/p>\n The key concern here is one of quality control and this is increasingly important now that Google comes down heavily on SEO work which contravenes their stringent guidelines. Take for example link-building. There are lots of overseas SEO companies who still insist on creating lots of really bad back-links which, given time, will simply get a website penalised. Yet UK agencies still outsource the service whilst disclaiming any responsibility in their small print.<\/p>\n Ideally any SEO work should be done in-house in the UK with complete transparency \u2013 if yours isn\u2019t, then there could be trouble down the track.<\/p>\n Keywords are important for defining an SEO campaign but nowhere near as important as high-quality traffic and conversions (enquiries). Yet lots of agencies still sell SEO based on keyword lists, with many of those keywords actually irrelevant and easy to get to the top of Google. Dentists are still falling for this unfortunately.<\/p>\n If your SEO team is still running your campaign solely based on keyword positions, you need to ask why and get more appropriate metrics in place.<\/p>\n This is a particularly interesting example and really common unfortunately. Google serves personalised search results with a heavy reference to websites you\u2019ve already visited. So if you\u2019ve visited your own site (and many do of course) then unless you clear your browser, launch incognito mode and other technical tricks, you may well see yourself at the top of Google. But in reality you\u2019re not and this isn\u2019t what your users will see either!<\/p>\nThere isn\u2019t any SEO happening<\/h3>\n
The work is being outsourced<\/h3>\n
The keywords smoke screen<\/h3>\n
Localisation \u2013 thinking you\u2019re top of Google (but you\u2019re not)<\/h3>\n