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) \u2013 so the dentist had no real visibility of what was happening until he\u2019d paid out around \u00a311k; for very little.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 however, if he\u2019d looked deeper and checked their actual performance in detail, he may well have seen that all was not quite what it seemed.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s expectations. A strategy can then be developed to address the various issues and create realistic goals. Achievable SEO objectives<\/a> must be defined and they must be in-line with what Google will actually allow \u2013 this clearly hadn\u2019t been taken into account by the former SEO agency that\u2019d developed a \u201cstrategy\u201d which was never going to work well.<\/p>\n This brings me on to the topic of what I call \u2018SEO Dilution\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Additionally we also need to understand \u201clocalisation\u201d \u2013 this is where Google preferentially presents information from businesses which are in the area where the searcher is based or is looking at \u2013 for example, someone searching for \u201cdental implants\u201d in Nottingham is going to see results from Nottingham dentists and very few from suppliers in Derby or Leicester. So it\u2019s pretty pointless trying to set up organic search campaigns to try to present results outside of your own area \u2013 particularly where competition is strong. In most case it just won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 not only did this dilute it from Google\u2019s perspective, but it also completely misses how search results get localised.<\/p>\n On checking where the dentist\u2019s 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 \u2013 so missing the large majority of searches.<\/p>\nSo what exactly is SEO dilution?<\/h3>\n
How do you avoid SEO dilution and take advantage of search localisation?<\/h3>\n