More Deceptive Dental Website Sales Tactics

In a post last week, I mentioned some of the contradictory search-engine rankings information being promoted by so-called Internet “experts” as fact.

Elsewhere, I’ve also discussed how unscrupulous webmasters and website development companies prey on dentists’ lack of understanding about how online marketing works, to sell them dental websites that have virtually no chance of ever being profitable… and how you can protect yourself from these shameful sales tactics, by becoming wise to them.

Unfortunately, there are so many other devious ways that webmasters can use to hoodwink dentists into paying thousands of dollars for a basically useless dental website. Sure, these unprincipled website developers can perhaps make a few extra sales in the short term… but it inevitably comes back to destroy their reputations, as clients learn (the hard way) that their websites suck.

Today, I’ll expose another “scam” some dental website developers use, to trick dentists into believing that their websites could generate real-live dental traffic from the search engines…

Beware of This Deceptive Sales Tactic…Some dentists have already caught on to the fact that merely having their new dental websites submitted to the search engines won’t get them any traffic.

So some cunning dental webmasters have started to devise a new smart-sounding sales ploy: They’ll perform keyword research for you, and even guarantee Top 10 rankings for those keywords.

Sounds good, doesn’t it?!

But here’s the catch (actually, there are 2 catches)…

First, “keyword research” is essentially a fancy-sounding term for finding keywords that don’t have much competition from other websites… and are thus fairly easy to get Top 10 rankings for. Unfortunately, not many people search on them either… so while it may sound impressive to have a top ranking, it doesn’t in reality translate into all that much traffic.

Secondly, unless these are LOCAL search keywords, your traffic will be even further diluted by the fact that fewer than 1% of these website visitors will in fact be local to you. While keyword research may have at least some value for non-local, global websites, it’s pretty well useless for a local, dental website.

Now, if you point these facts out to these webmasters, they might then try to convince you to “monetize” the non-local traffic with ads to other websites. I strongly advice against this tactic…

• ads detract from your website, and typically lower your conversion rates (the percentage of website visitors that actually call your office for an appointment); and
• the most popular ad network, Google’s AdSense, is in fact a negative ranking factor… meaning, that placing these ads on your website, could make it even tougher for your site to get a top ranking.

Luckily, there is a better way…

The fact is, if you can get you website to rank well for your primary keywords (ie. {your city} dentist; etc.), then you’ll pretty well automatically also rank well for many, many local secondary keywords. So instead of investing lots of time researching and optimizing for dozens (or even hundreds) of secondary keywords, your website inevitably ranks well for them, without any additional effort or expense!

As an example to prove this, let’s look at one website that I created. While I won’t reveal my dental clients’ websites or rankings — for obvious competitive reasons — I don’t mind disclosing a small sampling of my non-dental-related sites…

For the site www.asiandiabetes.org, I optimized it for only 2 primary keywords: “asian diabetes” and “asian diabetes association”. I’ve already revealed the rankings in a previous post, but you can review them once again here (they’re about half-way down the page).

What I didn’t reveal at that time, was the fact that the website also ranks well for a ton of other secondary keywords, (without my having to do any additional work). Here are just a few of these keyword phrases, along with their rankings on Google, MSN and Yahoo, and the number of other competing websites for those keywords:

asian diabetes drugs Google: #1 (out of 1,750,000) MSN: #1 (out of 3,400,000) Yahoo: #1,#2 (out of 1,660,000)asian diabetes cure Google: #6,#7 (out of 1,790,000) MSN: #6,#7 (out of 1,650,000) Yahoo: #8,#9 (out of 946,000) asian diabetes epidemic Google: #5 (out of 467,000) MSN: #5 (out of 305,000) Yahoo: #5,#8 (out of 549,000) asian diabetes research Google: #1,#2 (out of 257,000) MSN: #5,#6 (out of 4,030,000) Yahoo: #4,#10 (out of 3,000,000) asian diabetes prevention Google: #2 (out of 199,000) MSN: #1 (out of 2,850,000) Yahoo: #8 (out of 1,610,000) asian diabetes rates Google: #1 (out of 198,000) MSN: #6,#7 (out of 1,650,000) Yahoo: #2,#10 (out of 2,420,000) asian diabetes project Google: #1 (out of 181,000) MSN: #9 (out of 2,500,000) Yahoo: #9 (out of 1,880,000) asian diabetes statistics Google: #2 (out of 144,000) MSN: #4 (out of 1,780,000) Yahoo: #8 (out of 1,150,000) asian diabetes facts Google: #6 (out of 93,700) MSN: #8 (out of 2,250,000) Yahoo: #17 (out of 817,000) asian herbal diabetes products Google: #3 (out of 81,200) MSN: #2,#3 (out of 688,000) Yahoo: #1,#4 (out of 444,000)

As you can see from the above example, it makes much more sense to get Top 10 rankings for your primary local search term(s) — and also get many of the secondary search terms as a bonus — instead of merely chasing after a few essentially useless, low-traffic search terms.

Plus, in an upcoming posting, I’ll also show you how you can get the local traffic from literally tens of thousands of non-local search engine keywords… all without any effort on your part.

Stay tuned! (You can make sure you get a brief email notification whenever I add a new posting here, simply by subscribing your email address in the form at the top-right of this page.)

- Tom N.