As an SEO practitioner with many years of experience working with dentists, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I know what the “money” keywords are when it comes to securing dental search rankings<\/a>.<\/p>\n Gaining good Google positions for the main keywords is obviously important, however, it’s also key to understand that just going after a small set of very focused keywords can be detrimental and cause more difficulties than you might expect later on.<\/p>\n This is an example where a new client came to us for a website re-design which had previously been optimised solely for the term “cosmetic dentist”.<\/p>\n The site actually ranked top for this term in their particular location – however it didn’t rank for much else. Now whilst the “cosmetic” term is well-worth having, it is only one of the important ones. The more generic “dentist” term gets a lot more traffic and more targeted “implant”, “ortho” etc terms are also very well worthwhile.<\/p>\n The problems first came to light when the new client asked us to ensure that the new site would rank not just for the “cosmetic” term but also for the general dentist term along with a range of others. We could see that the existing site was “stuffed” with the cosmetic term, not just on the home page but virtually every other page of the site – so-much-so that I was surprised that the website hadn’t fallen foul of the “Panda” aspect of the Google algorithm updates which is designed to penalise such practices. However, they seemed to have escaped it.<\/p>\n So for the new website, we cleared out most of the cosmetic keyword bias and introduced a much more balanced range. The plan was to maintain the cosmetic keyword ranking but hopefully also start showing for a broader range of terms.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The site was launched around five weeks ago and has been fully indexed by Google i.e. all of the new pages are in the Google search index. From a results point-of-view, the “cosmetic” term is still solid at number one and other terms e.g. dental implants, Invisalign etc are much better. However, the general “dentist” term is still back on page two of Google despite the complete new architecture of the website. This was quite disappointing so I decided to take a much closer look at the off-site SEO (primarily back-links) to see if this could be influencing.<\/p>\n By running a link audit on the site, I was able to determine that there were lots of historical back-links all with a “cosmetic” bias. There was very little to support the other terms we were hoping for. In addition, there was a blog which was not evident in the main site navigation which was similarly biased. What this had achieved was to effectively signal to Google that these guys were “just” cosmetic dentists and consequently they had been compartmentalised as such in the Google search results.<\/p>\n I have also seen this happen on another occasion where a dentist skewed all of his on-line marketing to “ortho” phrases and then subsequently struggled to rank for anything more general when the direction of his business changed and he needed to be found for other terms too.<\/p>\n The evidence would suggest yes; Google aggregates signals from the web and allocates your place in the search results accordingly. If you create too many signals with a very specific bias, then you have to address that balance if you also want to start ranking for other things too.<\/p>\n In the case of the dentist noted above, his website was categorised by Google due to the huge amount of signals which had been generated over the years all skewed to cosmetic dentistry. Rebuilding his website and addressing the over-use of the cosmetic term is phase one; phase two involves a similar dilution of all of the signals (back-links) which are already out there on the web. This involves getting rid of the poorer ones and then adding new ones with a completely different bias. As those who know a little bit about link-building will understand, that’s easier said than done these days.<\/p>\n As we’ve seen from this example, the history associated with a website domain will have a large bearing on how it performs in the future. If you don’t plan your digital marketing strategy<\/a> carefully, then significant problems can arise further down the track.<\/p>\n If you would like a deeper insight into how your own dental website is performing in search results and ways to improve, please call the Dental Media digital marketing team for free advice on 01332 672548<\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Why too much focus on a single keyword can be detrimental As an SEO practitioner with many years of experience working with dentists, it’s perhaps unsurprising that I know what the “money” keywords are when it comes to securing dental …<\/p>\nWhat happened next?<\/h3>\n
The back-link profile<\/h3>\n
What is happening here? Is Google really compartmentalising?<\/h3>\n
What can you do to recover such a situation?<\/h3>\n
Summary<\/h3>\n