Can SEO Hurt My Dental Practice?
That’s my question today. I’m the Justin Morgan, the dental marketing guy. Here to talk to you about some of the dangers involved in doing SEO for your dental practice.
First, it’s important to recognize that SEO can be broken down into two major factors. “ Content and links. “ I’m not actually a big fan of the maximum “content is king”. Does this mean that if you just blog once per day for 3 years, you’ll automatically rank? Probably not by that effort alone. But what I would rather say is that really useful, engaging content tends to rank.
There are certain dangers in hiring a non-dental SEO company to create your content, however. Some cheap SEO companies might use duplicate content they found somewhere on the internet. Cheap SEO companies might also use what’s called “spun” content, which is duplicate content that is run through some software called a “spinner.” A little history: these “content spinners” as they’re called developed as a result of Google Bing and Yahoo’s dislike of duplicate content. Websites would rank because of someone else’s valuable content and the algorithms squashed this tactic, and so spun content began. It’s basically horrible re-writing, usually in broken English and still in many ways a form of plagiarism. These cheap SEO practices are actually something which can get your website a Google penalty. So avoid them at all costs. A less severe reaction might be that your dental SEO Company is writing decent content, but they don’t know the psychology of the prospective dental patient well enough to understand searcher intent and how to increase case acceptance with the content on your website. The real danger for you in this case is that the unrealized new patients and unrealized big case acceptance rates you that dropped as a results of not understanding the psychology of your target audience.
Links are especially tricky because they can be irrelevant and actually very harmful to your website. Some cheap SEO companies can actually rank your website with links that create a temporary lift of your website’s search engine rankings, but can create serious irreversible Google penalties in the long run. Be sure to work with someone you trust as an expert in long term rankings for clients. And it may behoove you to ask for references of clients they’ve worked for in the dental industry for years.
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