Too many pediatric dentists are spending far too much money on marketing efforts that do little to help their practice attract new patients. One of the guiding principles at Smile Savvy is that we never sell our customers anything they don’t need. This has helped us develop over 15 years of trust in the pediatric dental community. Unfortunately, there are a lot of internet marketing companies that don’t hold those values.
SEO isn’t wizardry.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies intentionally mystify what they do, and overcharge for those services. In spite of what SEO sales reps may say, SEO is not wizardry. In fact, moving websites higher in search engine results involves following a standard set of industry best practices, knowing your market and using proven techniques. New Smile Savvy websites usually need very little additional SEO for the first few years past their initial setup. In fact, we generally recommend ongoing SEO only in highly competitive markets or for websites that are showing some age.
SEO companies either charge you for work they don’t perform, or use tactics that will hurt your website.
SEO companies that charge dentists high monthly fees for SEO are essentially scamming their customers. They will either collect monthly fees without truly providing any ongoing services or, in some cases, use techniques that can actually harm your website’s rank. For example, some SEO companies rely on artificial link building for their ongoing SEO services. While intentionally building quality links on established and trusted websites, can be effective for boosting your website search ranking, some link building campaigns can involve artificially listing your website address on hundreds of other low quality websites. For businesses with a local focus, aggressive link building has little overall effect on local search results. Further, Google continually tracks down websites that use these “black hat” techniques and can punish your website with negative search rankings.
SEO for dentists should be performed by someone with experience and proven results with dental websites.
In truth, quality SEO usually involves small incremental changes to coding and content that require time and testing. If too many items are changed at one time, or if SEO is constantly being adjusted, it’s impossible to know what worked! For our website customers that need an extra boost, Smile Savvy offers ongoing SEO as part of our Ultra Practice Promoter for only $99/month. If you’re paying much more than that, you’re probably paying too much.
Contact us to see how we can help you gain new patients through internet marketing that’s affordable and effective.
