You know that your dental practice needs to have a web presence. And you’ve heard that an effective website with great SEO can actually bring in new patients.
But monitoring, maintaining, and optimizing your website? You’re far too busy for that.
Outsourcing your dental website to an SEO agency seems like the optimal solution.
But before you hire that flashy company with the perfect sales pitch, be sure that you do a little research. There are plenty of substandard SEO agencies out there, and some are downright dishonest. And the worst of the bunch will take your money but deliver zero new business.
How Dentists Can Hire an Ethical SEO Agency
For dentists running their own practice, finding the right Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Agency can feel daunting. When you sit down to interview SEO agencies and digital marketers, you may have several questions at the ready. However, only one question really matters: If I hire you, how many new patients will I get?
Here’s the deal with SEO. It’s much more than driving traffic to your website or increasing your rankings on a Google search. Anyone can show you a Google Analytics spreadsheet outlining traffic stats on your website. But increased web traffic is just one component of SEO.
The bottom line is will the agency’s online marketing strategy grow your dental practice?
7 Tips for Dentists Thinking about Hiring an SEO Agency
Here are 7 tips to get you started on finding the right SEO Agency for you:
1. Find someone you enjoy working with.
- Even if your SEO Agency does most of the work, you should still have input on major decisions and communicate with them frequently. You’ll need someone who inspires you, and it helps if they have similar values and style to you.
2. Make sure they are capable of providing the services you need.
- There are multiple components to a comprehensive online marketing strategy for your dental practice.
- Do you need a website built, revamped, or rewritten?
- Do you want to hire someone to write all your blogs and social media posts? Or do you love writing and just need someone to edit?
- How wide of a geographical reach do you need to draw in patients?
3. Avoid agencies offering cookie-cutter strategies.
- Your SEO partner should create an online marketing strategy, complete with expected ROIs, completely tailored your practice. They should be open about that strategy and keep you updated every step of the way.
- If they ever claim that the information is their “secret sauce” and they just can’t divulge it – run the other way. A good SEO knows that you’re handing over the keys to sensitive information about you and your business, and they’ll never hide their own business practices from you.
4. Always have access to your website admin rights.
- No exceptions. You should always have administrative logins and passwords to your website, blog, social media, and all metrics reporting tools like Google Analytics and Omniture. Even if you don’t know the first thing about the backend of your website, a good SEO will give you your login credentials for all web properties without being asked.
5. Check the agency’s reviews.
- Yelp is a good place to start – but don’t assume that glowing reviews tell the entire story. Make sure to pay attention to any negative reviews as well, especially if there are common themes in the bad feedback. Other good questions to ask of SEO agencies you’ll potentially hire include:
- Have they had past success?
- Do they have any reference accounts who you can contact?
- Do they have documentation of growing a dental practice, and if so, can the practice be contacted?
6. Read the agency’s privacy policy.
- Signing with any SEO agency gives them tons of access to your private information. Make sure to read through their privacy policy carefully and ask questions about how your information will be used. If their privacy policy states that your personal data will be bought and sold, don’t use that agency. Why? Selling customer data is big business, and if your data is anywhere other than under lock and key, chances are the agency is more interested in profiting from your personal information rather than growing your business.
- Similarly, a good SEO agency will never ask you for irrelevant personal information, such as your favorite brands, stores, organizations, patient information, or contacts.
7. They should make it sound simple, not complicated.
- Any agency that makes things sound super complex is probably using smoke and mirrors. SEO is time-consuming to learn and implement, but the practice itself isn’t rocket science. Your SEO agency should be able to explain their strategy to you at a level a 4th grader could understand, along with projected results that will be revisited within a few months of being hired.
Most dentists have a high enough Profit per Doctor Hour, so that it makes sense to outsource SEO – especially when you know that trying to do the work yourself won’t yield the same results as having an expert at the wheel.
Just remember that while a great SEO agency can help draw patients into your practice, patients still need to have an awesome customer experience once they find you and decide to call. If you have a surly receptionist, or a bad phone line that keeps disconnecting callers, even the best online marketing won’t turn web users into paying customers.
The last and best tip I can provide when choosing an SEO company for your dental practice: when in doubt, follow your gut.
If something doesn’t feel right, or doesn’t quite add up, keep looking. There are plenty of excellent companies out there, it’s important to find the right fit for your business.