SEO – The Myths

Sadly, many dentists have used  not so ethical digital agencies who promise SEO services but basically deliver nothing. If you invest £100 per month to a company that promises the #1 ranking in Google, it is almost certainly a scam.

This is not SEO!

For those dentists seeking quick and easy wins with little effort, perhaps this is the route. Indeed, there are cases of SEO wins that meet these criteria, typically when a site has easy technical issues to fix. In most other cases, SEO involves sustained effort and commitment to deliver the results and rankings your dental practice wants.

Google hates spam and if your SEO strategy is to buy volumes of cheap links then you may get a penalty. That said, Google does like proper as this is the process of producing valuable content that people want to read and share, as well as structuring your website properly from a technical and content perspective. Finally Google loves good user experiences – so if you do the above effectively not only with the search engines love you, but so will your visitors.

Google’s job is to index sites and rank them. It is not their role to optimise your content or develop contextually relevant links to your site. That is your role and the strategic objective of your SEO agency. Without doing this you will languish nowhere near the top 10 rankings.

Really? This is plain wrong.”Tricks” is what professionals call bad SEO (usually cheap) that gets your site penalised. The first a dental practice thinks about SEO it says “We need better Title Tags”.

If that’s all SEO is, it does sound like tricks. Proper SEO is about making every part of content structure and the browsing experience better. This includes:

1. Creating content based on user needs
2. Making content more discoverable, both for patients and search engines
3. Improving accessibility through site architecture and UX
4. Optimising for social sharing
5. Technical standards to help search engines serve content to the appropriate audience
6. Improving site performance through optimisations such as site speed

Everyone of these actions is valuable by themselves.

This is a common one. A web designer is either a designer or a developer. Neither are content specialists, technical search engine specialist, can do blogger outreach, has an understanding of the effects of social signals, can do link building and so on. If you do think your web designer is a SEO specialist then get a written guarantee in your contract for appearing in the results. When they don’t appear give us a call for our FREE SEO report and we will tell you what is missing.

SEO is like an other channel and requires consistent investment. Why? Google’s algorithms change, your competitors are also doing SEO too so you need to keep up. You need to understand your ROI for your investment. If you are paying £500 per month to appear for vanity terms like your dental practice name or “dentist in [city] name” you may be generating low value new patients. A more prudent strategy would be to rank for higher value terms like “dental implant in [city]” and “veneers in [city]”. We are sure if we delivered 5 new dental implant treatments every month for £500 then you would be delighted! The key is understanding strategy, competition for your term in your city and the investment.