What Dentists Get When They Buy Cheap SEO
I had a conversation last week with a California dentist and his in-house marketing manager. They wanted to know how to improve their website’s visibility in the search engines and their site’s visitor conversions.
During our talk it was revealed they were considering dropping their current SEO service — and stop paying the $700. monthly recurring fee, that incidentally, had been ongoing for the last several years.
$700. dollars per month — for years and years — is a lot of cabbage; so I asked the dentist, what were they getting in return?
The answer: they didn’t really know, and they remarked how the “SEO company” continually led them along saying “we’re doing everything possible.” My analysis of his site found there had been no SEO performed — in any capacity. What positions the dentist did have were the result of his own content articles that he had written himself.
Further into the conversation, I was told the company had created a PPC (pay per click) campaign with Google and was submitting the dentist’s website to the search engines “regularly.” The Canadian-based company also stated that their SEO efforts for organic ranking were comprised of mostly “sponsored positioning.” Uh oh — big RED FLAG!!!
To the uninitiated and largely uninformed website owner, $700. per month for this “service” might seem like a good deal, however, it’s a nightmare scenario with scam written all over it.
First of all, the dentist was mislead; PPC ads are paid, sponsored ads; they have nothing to do with SEO. Search engine optimization pertains to the natural, or organic website listings found in the search engines’ results pages.
SEO is a process designed to improve website content and associate a site with its parent industry (in this case dentistry). Ultimately the goal of SEO is to transform the dentist’s website into a premium resource for both patients and the search engines.
The old scam of “search engine submissions” is a completely worthless exercise; you could submit your site to dynamic, crawler-based search engines till the sky falls — and it would have zero positive effect, in fact, submitting too much might even get your site penalized.
In this instance I suspect the dentist was looking for a cheap way to better position his site and benefit his practice. In the end though he’s lost thousands of dollars and received nothing in return. Unfortunately, this is a common situation experienced by dentists everyday.
FYI, you can create your own PPC campaign with Google, quickly in a few minutes; you do not need to pay a third party monthly on-going fees for the privilege. An SEO campaign might be compared with a building project, e.g. you should have a plan, well-defined goals and receive frequent progress reports.
I also suggest that dentists do not pay for SEO until the results are first delivered as promised — sometimes referred to as a “performance guarantee.”
In the end, cheap does not mean a better deal. Writing exceptional, original content and conducting a safe, legitimate SEO campaign takes months of time and hard work. Quality-driven, dental marketing professionals are not cheap and the really good ones are in very short supply.
To avoid an SEO scam, know who you’re dealing with and don’t be afraid to ask for references and examples of their work.
For The Visible Dentist, I’m John Barremore.
