What Questions Should Dentists Ask Before Hiring a Dental SEO Company?

“The best place to hide a dead body is the second page of Google.”

If you have ever done the slightest bit of research about SEO, you’d have heard this quote. No one knows who first said this, but no other statement can describe the importance of Search Engine Optimization. You’d argue that it is done to death, and you are right, but it is true. 

With the right search engine optimization tactics, you can attract many patients to your practice organically. However, to effectively boost your prospects and online visibility, it is simply not enough to just do SEO; you have to do it THE RIGHT WAY! And to do that, you need to partner with the right dental SEO company. 

But how exactly do we identify and choose the right SEO agency?” 

The answer to that isn’t too complicated, either. There are a lot of characteristics common to most good agencies. The right SEO agency would

• Never guarantee a spot on the first page of Google (If it does, you can check this article)
• Be transparent in its pricing.
• Build quality content and backlinks (Learn about quality links on and towards your website)
• Be up to date with all the algorithmic changes and have the latest SEO tools.
• Have no problems explaining their processes and techniques to you

This list is not exhaustive by any means, but it would be a great place to start.

There are thousands of SEO companies in the United States, but which one can be the right one for your dentistry. Let’s assume your dental practice locates in LA, and you may want to work with a dental SEO agency near you.

There are hundreds of SEO companies in Los Angeles. You can only select one of them to partner with at any given point in time, so you must make a smart decision. Several SEO agencies want you to believe that dental website optimization is some sort of rocket science that only they can understand and do not provide you with a clear idea about their SEO process and how they do it.

These agencies often make extreme claims and extract high fees but hardly deliver valuable results. You must try to steer clear of any such dental digital marketing agency, choose to trust the ones that make realistic claims, are transparent with their services, and have past work details to show to back up their expertise and expertise.

This article shall discuss the most overlooked of these qualities – explaining SEO processes and techniques to clients.

 

Questions You Must Ask a Dental SEO Company.

To achieve the best results regarding dental SEO, you must choose to hire a competent agency whose goals, expertise, and philosophy aligns with your own. Hence, when going through selecting the ideal SEO agency for your practice, you need to ask tough questions and carefully listen to the answers provided by them. Any dental marketing company that refuses to answer these questions should not be trusted. It would indicate that they either have something to hide or are not confident enough in their abilities.

Here are some of the questions you must ask a dental SEO company before hiring them:

 

1. Can You Explain Dental Digital Marketing and SEO to Me?

Any partnership, including the one between you and your SEO agency, must begin with trust. However, to establish this trust, you must know whether they are knowledgeable enough to handle your SEO campaign. To gain a better insight into this, you should ask them about their approach towards digital marketing and SEO, including the processes they carry out related to it and how they expect to reach their goal. The right SEO firm will answer these queries clearly and precisely, without simply confusing you with technical jargon.

2. Who Owns the Work You Do?

The content is written, social media pages created, AdWords campaigns and backlinks created by a dental marketing company should be yours to keep or ‘own’ forever. You must not have to start over from scratch if you decide to stop working with the agency in the future. You should also have control of:

• The domain name of your website
• The hosting of your website
• All social media accounts and web properties of your practice

While the SEO agency you are working with should have access to these accounts, they must not fully control them or own them. An SEO company that tries to maintain control of your valuable online assets would not have your best interests at heart unless they provide other dental marketing services to your practice or hosting your website.

3. Do You Only Work with Dentists?

A digital marketing company solely working on dental SEO would be more likely to deliver the best possible results for your practice than the ones catering to a magnitude of industries. The SEO agencies only working with dentists shall have all the industry insights needed to draw patients from a specific geographic area. To further understand this, you can check the article on why dental agency must be selected for your dental SEO.

4. What Dental Marketing Strategy Would You Employ for My Practice?

Any trustworthy dental marketing company would be affront about the tactics and techniques they would be employing for your practice; this may include:

• Creating Original, SEO optimized content
• Making technical changes to your website structure to improve your search engine ranking
• Building valuable backlinks
• Carrying out thorough, location-specific keyword research

These were just some of the tasks that your SEO agency may carry out. The critical point is that they must tell you about the techniques and strategies they will carry out to improve your rankings. 

They must not be secretive about the tactics they will use or provide just vague statements like ‘industry-leading techniques’ and ‘guaranteed methods.’ You must only trust a dental digital marketing agency that provides you with a clear idea about their strategies, which should ideally be developed based on your current online presence, goals, and key growth metrics, as well as local competition.

5. How Much Work Will I Have To Do?

The relationship between you and your SEO agency must be of a partnership. While you may not have to do anything as such, the agency must ask for your approval and feedback before publishing any new content on your website. They must also consult you about the budget of your campaign. As a dentist, you might be too busy treating patients to be dealing with these elements, and hence you can have your office manager or some other go-to person in your practice to act as a point-person who can work with your dental SEO agency.

 

5 Tell-Tale Signs of a Good Dental Marketing Company

Proper Dental SEO management is essential for elevating your dental SEO ranking and driving high-quality leads to your website. To achieve this, you must hire a competent SEO agency that understands the nuts and bolts of digital marketing and uses proven SEO tactics to deliver results. Unfortunately, many digital marketing agencies operating today do not have the skills, experience, and expertise needed to implement SEO strategies effectively. The overall SEO client satisfaction in the US is decidedly low. Only 30% of people would recommend their current SEO company to a friend or colleague.

The following pointers underline a few features and qualities of competent SEO agencies that can help in improving the search engine ranking of your website:

Tell what exactly they can do for you: No SEO agency can outright promise that it would get you to the number 1 spot on the Google search result pages. However, they must be able to illustrate what exactly they would do for you, such as:

• Perform an audit of your website, content, and link profile
• Send a monthly report of your website rankings (Check the SEO reports that a good dental agency will provide)
• Add plugins that can augment your SEO efforts.
• Implement internal linking across web pages
• Provide ongoing website maintenance services to maintain the rankings
• Improves the reputation of your practice on Yelp, social media platforms, and other such platforms

The more specific an agency is about its dental SEO services, the more knowledge and expertise it probably has. You must avoid agencies that make vague claims and trust those whose services are more transparent and set realistic goals.

Make a Real and Honest Commitment: A good dental marketing company shall make realistic commitments, rather than over compromising with their claims and faltering at the end. It is no way easy to get a website to the SERPs’ top page, and any seasoned SEO firm would be aware of this fact. 

There might be multinational dental care chains gunning for the top stop alongside you. Effectively beating them at the search engine ranking game and securing a place in the first search result page of Google is possible, but it would not be easy, cheap, and most importantly, fast. SEO results take time, and an experienced agency shall assure a gradual and sustained improvement in rankings.

Consistently Reaches Out to You: Any right SEO agency shall need certain things from you, beyond the keys to your dental website and admin access to your Google Analytics account. They would be required to have a constant dialogue with you about your critical online challenges and goals. They should consistently reach out to you to talk about the strategies they are implementing and the results they are delivering.

Has the Right Level of Industry Experience: It would be smart to hire an SEO agency specializing in dental SEO and has an adequate level of expertise in this domain. Their knowledge and expertise shall ensure that they have a good understanding of your industry and target audience. 

Hence, they shall be able to deliver commendable SEO campaigns and results that benefit your practice. An excellent dental SEO company should ideally have a good idea about the local markets’ dynamics and connect with the prospective patients in your neighborhood.

Employs the Latest Tools and Techniques: The sphere of digital marketing is continually expanding, and the most prominent SEO techniques and tactics are consistently evolving as well. A competent SEO agency shall try to watch out for the latest updates, changes, and trends related to SEO techniques. They subsequently shall analyze these techniques and evaluate whether they can be employed to improve your dental SEO ranking.

 

Conclusion:

According to 65% of marketers, improving SEO and growing organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority. However, the SEO agency you select would have a considerable impact on ensuring that your marketing strategy ultimately reaps any results or not. 

You must be thorough and systematic in your approach when identifying the best service provider for dental SEO. Asking the essential questions, going through their past work and results, and gaining details about their methods are some of the ways you can zero in on the dental marketing company on whom you can place your trust. 

What are the questions you would like to ask a dental SEO company before hiring them? 

You can also assess your current SEO company by answering a few short questions here.