Does SEO really work?

Yes but $300/month won't get you shite. Good SEO starts at $1k/month minimum with better companies charging $2k/month

I'd setup your practice on Google Business and throw a small amount of money on Google Adwords to do targeted ads on a 20 mile radius of your practice.

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A dental office is very regional. My $.02 is that you should spend that $300 a month and go spend an hour at business parks handing out cards or doing other forms of advertising.

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I'd setup your practice on Google Business and throw a small amount of money on Google Adwords to do targeted ads on a 20 mile radius of your practice.

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This, that, and set up a facebook page and post on there a lot.

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$2k/month

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Need a lot more than this to go from 0 to Hero. Also need about 3 years.

Good SEOs are worth their weight in gold and are paid handsomely if you can lure them away from their existing high-paying gig or personal websites.

Bad SEOs are rampant for $2k/mo or sold to you as an add-on from a newspaper website or a web hosting company. ANd useless.

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Good SEO starts at $1k/month minimum with better companies charging $2k/month

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that all depends on just how much work you want done in terms of content/backlinks

i previously used a highly rated national SEO firm and spent between $800/1200/mo. scale matters, and a local dentist doesn't need $2k/mo worth of backlinks and blogs

My advice to you is to make sure all the fundamentals are covered. Things like page titles, things that negatively affect page load times (image size).... and relevant content. Your location relative to potential patients is important, so make sure you’re onboard with “Google My Business”. Also, make sure any text copy mentions the nature of your business and your city.

I think SEO consultants are way more important for large, national conglomerates than they are for local small businesses. Just cover the fundamentals…

Lose the “experts”; buy the book: LINK

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Also need about 3 years.

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It’s my understanding that Google exposes you to the internet world in baby steps. They are very concerned about going all in on a new business only to find out they are not “relevant“ to google users. Your website needs to age. Google is obsessed in returning search results to its users that are “relevant”. Google lives and dies by this one word: RELEVANT

Web developer here, and yes, SEO does work.

For it to work really well, as others have said, takes time and a good investment in both time and money.

However, there are things that you can do that can help and not go crazy with it.

Make sure the site is mobile friendly. If not built with a mobile first philosophy, at least make it responsive design. That is becoming a big thing with Google, as now >50% of page views and searches are coming from phones and tablets.

Make sure you use meta tags on every page. The two most important are the page title (keep it to between 50 and 65 characters; have a keyword at the first part of the title tag, and the brand name at the end; title tags should be descriptive of the page's content) and description (145 to 165 characters; put targeted keywords in the description; this is the "blurb" that will pull up on a search engine result page).

Search engines pretty much ignore the meta keyword tag these days, so don't spend much time, if any, on those.

Make sure you use headings and subheadings (H1, H2, H3) as appropriate on all pages.

Make sure each page has good content and keywords on each page. The search spiders will pull keywords from the page. But make sure that you use the keywords in an organic manner in the context of the page. Spiders are set to ignore the old "keyword stuffing" of days gone by where you would create a paragraph of nothing but keywords and then set the text color to the page background color so visitors wouldn't see it, but spiders would. (That was also a horrible thing to do from an accessibility standpoint as a screen reader would find that and read it out).

Speaking of accessibility, make sure that your site is coded for accessibility. That includes alt text for all images, correct headings/subheadings, etc.

Don't overload your pages. You want a fast load time. It is better to have several smaller pages than one huge page, especially if you have big images or a video file on the site.

Create an XML sitemap for your site.

Use Google Search Console as a tool to evaluate your site. Use it to see what keywords your visitors are using to find you and fine tune your pages to include that information.

Get links to your site on respected sites. If your town has a chamber of commerce, make sure your site is listed/linked on there. The more links that come to your site from trusted sites (domain authority), the better.

Two really good tools (both cost money) are Moz Open Site Explorer and Screaming Frog. They let you evaluate your meta data tags, inbound links, outbound links, etc.

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Get links to your site on respected sites.

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This is extremely important but hard to accomplish. Getting marquis websites to link back to your website (inbound links) is easier said than done. For example, if you had someone that worked for the ADA and somehow managed to get them to link back to you, that would be awesome. Ditto for someone in the financial world getting the Wall Street Journal to link back to their site. If you ever get mentioned in a well respected publication, make sure they use “anchored text” in the article.

Google, to a large extent, judges you by the company you keep.

backlinks are a huge racket and i imagine it's the next frontier in fake media (as a way to generate revenue in addition to ads)

i think it's very possible that it is already a "behind the curtain" revenue stream. if not the media is stupid

i've actually thought, if my local news station hasn't thought of it, of proposing an advertising arrangement where they write stories and link me.

Been happening for years.


Here's a fun example: LINK -- notice that the only link within the article is keyword-rich anchor text on a completely unrelated topic.

How about this one: LINK -- "riding the bus" is a great link for LINK /, makes total sense in context.

Here's a good one! LINK linking to this, clearly the best resource on the web for stamp collecting and not spammy at all: LINK

Or here we have "Contact A Lawyer" anchor text that takes a user to, you guessed it, some law firm that paid either Erin or AL.com: LINK

Good one here...never thought there would be a link for "rhodium plating" in an article on JerkTech (whatever the hell that is), but clearly LINK is a site JerkTech readers NEED to know about: LINK