I have a dirty secret: the very first client I worked with on SEO after starting my own company had an on-again, off-again relationship with us for our SEO services. He never left us to hire another company. He is still a client. He just periodically stops paying us and asks us to take a break.
His reasons are his own but I can tell you that, while we continue to work our butts off when he re-engaged us for local dentist SEO, during the off periods of our working relationship, his Google rankings never suffered.
Why Our Clients’ SEO Results Last
When I started our company, the business strategy was pretty simple, and it remains so to this day:
- Focus on client retention by building lasting value for clients
- Charge a monthly fee for services
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard dentists tell me, “Hey, if you can bring me new patients, I’m not going anywhere and I’ll pay whatever you need to do it as long as it’s making me money.” If there’s a win-win to be had where we can work together for decades, why not make that the goal? Yet, many dental marketing companies focus on the quick buck and use cheap tricks to try to gain a temporary boost in rankings. Google closed those loopholes a long time ago, but that doesn’t stop companies from selling old SEO tactics as new insights into Google algorithms.
We don’t do anything that goes against Google’s terms of service. Instead, we do everything we can to align our strategies with Google’s philosophy. By the way, did you know that Google has committed $100 M to helping with COVID-19 response? Well done, Google. I’m a fan.
Google puts its users first in all things. We try to do the same thing by putting Google’s users first in our SEO efforts. They don’t want spammy SEO in their resultsーno one likes webspam. And if we think of Google as the website’s customer and we put their crawler first, helping it do its job to understand and navigate the website, we are truly optimizing the website for the search engine (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization).
We also don’t remove our SEO work if a client decides to leave us. If we pay someone to do some work for us and then stop paying them, our expectation is that they will stop work but won’t take back the work they have done in the past. That’d be wrong and we refuse to do the same thing. Other companies don’t work that way.
So, as long as you are an awesome dentist and you pay us to work on your SEO, there’s no reason for your on-page SEO to be the cause of a rankings drop. Our SEO work holds its value because we do it well.
Our client is still #1 on Google 10 years later and we haven’t done SEO work on his website since the fall of 2019 and he’s currently only paying us for website hosting. I’d love to keep doing other work for him but he doesn’t need us, I guess. That’s okay. When he retires and sells his practice, I’m sure he will give us a good recommendation to the dentist who buys his practice. :)
If you can’t say the same thing about your past experiences with SEO, let’s talk about it. There may be other issues at work but we’ll give you a comprehensive evaluation of your website and marketing both on-site and off-site. Schedule a consultation online or call now at (970) 672-1212.
