Should You Hire a Dental SEO Company that Guarantees the First-Page Ranking on Google?

Dental SEO is both an art and science as it requires creativity, skills, and know-how to implement successfully. For the uninitiated, SEO involves several complicated processes such as:

• Creating user-friendly and search engine friendly content
• Optimizing the website
• Generating high-quality backlinks,
• Deciphering complex SEO reports making on-the-go changes to an SEO strategy.

SEO is both time-intensive and expensive. You could lose a lot of time and money by hiring a scam SEO company who perhaps just knows as much about search engine marketing as you do. Moreover, it’s not only time and money but also your reputation, which could take a hit if SEO executes incorrectly. Even more importantly, you can end up losing patients to your competitors. Ouch!

Also, a wrong SEO agency can do severe harm to your website and invite a Google penalty. And any website with a Google penalty will find it difficult to bounce back from it and invest a lot of time and money to back where they were before hiring the scam agency.  

Unfortunately, many dentists do not realize this when selecting their dental SEO company. They fall into the trap of choosing the agency that offers the cheapest package instead of selecting the one that knows how to deliver the results through fair practices.

 

A trustworthy SEO agency can help you take one step forward, but a scam agency will take you two steps backward. 

 

Why is Choosing the Right Dental SEO Company Important

The average dentist underestimates what SEO in general and local SEO can do for their practice. Dental SEO is the most cost-effective and reliable method for a dental practice to earn more new patient appointments and enjoy exponential growth. But all this would be much more likely to happen if you have a genuine, professional SEO company by your side. 

A dental SEO company can use its expertise to devise and implement a full-proof, ROI-driven SEO campaign that can create a continuous stream of patients for your practice.

The right dental SEO company can help you build and maintain a steady stream of patients and earn you dozens of new patient appointments every month. The benefits you get with the right SEO company are long term, just like the damage a scam company can cause, which is why you must choose the right one.  

 

4 Things the Right Dental SEO Company Does

Dental SEO management companies have a structured approach to the SEO project for your website. They have probably worked on several similar projects and executed them successfully and are fully aware of what to do from the get-go. Here are some of the signs that you have employed the right dental SEO company:

• SEO Strategy and Reporting

An excellent dental SEO company is aware of the activities they need to undertake at the beginning of the SEO implementation and can provide you more transparent and more specific updates that include progress reports, website audits, and identify improvement areas. Check what reports your SEO agency must provide to you before hiring one.

• Suggestions and Recommendations

The right search engine optimization company will have suggestions and recommendations for dental website optimization to improve your dental SEO ranking. Typical requests would include changes in content, social media integration, adding internal links, creating a site map, improving page load speed, and changes to robots.txt file.

• Improvement in Rankings

There is nothing that puts a stamp of approval on your dental SEO company better than an actual improvement in dental SEO ranking for your targeted keywords. Although it takes time to manifest, if you see your dental website ranking climb up on the search engine result page, you can be sure that they know their stuff. This is where you know that your SEO agency is doing a good job.

• A Drop in Traffic with an Increase in Patient Count:

It is possible that during the SEO implementation, the dental SEO agency suggests changes to your website content, which will change the traffic profile for your website. However, if the traffic drops and the patient count still goes up, you don’t need to worry much about the SEO side of things. 

In short, you are possibly getting more potential patients now than the wrong crowd, which you were attracting initially. And that’s what SEO’s ultimate goal is – driving targeted and relevant traffic to your website.

 

Resource: You can assess your current SEO company performance here.

 

 

10 Common Signs You Have Engaged a Scam SEO Company

You can always tell the difference between a skilled dentist and an amateur based on how they treat their patients, their transparency, and a host of other factors. Similarly, you can also differentiate between a genuine agency and a scam artist by looking out for some tell-tale signs. The following list of 10 such signs would be a great place to start:

 

1. We Guarantee You the Number One Ranking on Google Search Results. 

Any Dental SEO company that guarantees top ranking on google search results is a scam SEO agency. SEO is a complicated and time-consuming activity. An agency that knows their stuff realizes how competitive and demanding SEO is, and they will never make such guarantees. Even the Google CEO can’t guarantee you the first position. End of story!

 

2. Your Dental SEO Management Includes Your Website Design or Paid Advertising.

Dental SEO is a focused campaign, and it requires specialized expertise with proven credentials. Many website design firms and web hosting services that offer SEO included as a part of their hosting services do not have the relevant onboard experience and expertise to deliver outstanding results. These companies are primarily selling websites and using fake SEO guarantees to boost their website design business. Keep your distance from them. 

Like with any service that requires specialization, quality dental SEO costs some money. The SEO agency will need to employ SEO experts and buy expensive tools and software to deliver the right results through the proper means. Hence, if you come across an agency that offers a cheap SEO package, the chances are that they neither have the experts nor the tools to make your SEO complaint a success. All they are trying to do is sell a package deal that will benefit them, not you.

 

3. Your SEO Company Promises to Add Hundreds of New Links Per Month.

Any SEO agency that promises a massive number of backlinks is a fraud company. They probably achieve these links by artificially stuffing them in irrelevant blogs and websites with a low-quality score, which they control. In such cases, employing them could do more harm than good. 

After the Penguin update, Google’s search algorithm penalizes such SEO practices of building backlinks at irrelevant websites and blogs. Google algorithms only let organically acquired backlinks pass through, ensuring that the backlinks earned due to good content and credibility. Your agency must make you understand kinds of links that you must have for your website.

 

4. We Have a Secret Sauce.

By using the blanket of secrecy, they often hide their ignorance. Scammers are usually silent and secretive because either they don’t know anything about SEO or are engaging in black-hat practices, which could penalize your website in the long run.

The right dental SEO management company will never be secretive. They will be able to tell you exactly what they are doing, what they plan to do, suggest specific improvements and recommendations, and be completely transparent.

 

5. You Will Get Over 1000 Visitors to Your Website Every Day.

It is easy to get traffic to your website. However, what separates the right dental SEO company from the bad or the scam ones is traffic quality. The right dental digital marketing agency will be able to implement changes to your website, which will focus your website traffic on potential patients.

The scam SEO companies could drive irrelevant traffic using keyword stuffing or using bots to create the fake traffic, affecting your dental practice and increasing patient count.

 

6. We Can Do Everything Your Current Dental SEO Company is Doing for Less. 

This statement is a standard line from many scam dental SEO companies. It works because they are trying to replace your existing dental digital marketing agency that has already improved your website’s search engine ranking and probably even delivered good results.

The scam companies know that even if they do nothing, the search engine ranking will sustain for some time or even improve if they are fortunate because of your previous SEO company’s past efforts, which was doing the right things. It is an attempt to ride on someone else’s wave.

 

7. The Free 30-Day Trial

The age-old sales line – A 30-day free trial. It sounds quite attractive, and many do fall for it. However, you have to realize that a 30 day period is irrelevant in evaluating SEO performance. It takes a minimum of four months to one year for results to manifest in an SEO campaign. By opting for a 30-day free trial, you sign up for their services with your credit card and don’t get a chance to evaluate anything of importance.

 

8. We Submit Your Website to Hundreds of Search Engines.

When it comes to the internet, almost 99% of web searches are on three primary search engines that dominate – Google, Bing & Yahoo. Other search engines are either not used or don’t exist.

 

9. We Do the Best Link Building.

Backlinks have to be acquired organically with good content and relevance. Many scam SEO companies offer paid links under this statement. This practice could hurt your website in the long run.

Google algorithms Penguin update recognizes such malpractices of paid links and, in the worst case, could de-index your website from the Google search results altogether. You would not even know that Google has penalized you until you check or wait enough to see a significant drop in traffic, by which time it would be too late.

 

10. We Know Someone Who Works or Used to Work at Google.

This is a classic line used by scam SEO companies to gain your attention and to imply that their connections could help you in SEO. But it is not valid, and you shouldn’t fall for it. Google’s search algorithms are one of the best-kept secrets, and nobody can help you with the ins and outs of it. Some SEO companies know Google account managers, and the relationship is only limited to Google Ad sales. Google doesn’t provide any help or services for dental SEO and your dental website rankings.

 

 

Conclusion

Like with every other industry, there is no shortage of con artists in the dental digital marketing landscape. There are many malignant elements out there to make a buck at your expense. They will often make tall unattainable claims and come in irresistibly attractive packages. 

However, all scammers prey on your lack of awareness. By building awareness and learning more about spotting incompetent or scam agencies, you can effectively defend yourself from such scam SEO companies and their practices.

You must recognize the good from the bad and partner with the right dental marketing company, which has proven credentials and a reputation for delivering successful SEO projects. The right dental marketing company will provide you with the best ROI for the long term and help you build your brand in the digital space.