Whether you are a dentist or a physician, you've probably considered paying for monthly SEO services to boost your visibility in search engine rankings. In this video from Dr. Wank's recent "SEO Q&A Office Hours" webinar he addresses the question.
For quick reading, here's a copy of the transcript:
Let's get started. So the first question that we get all the time is... Let me move this, okay... is, "When would I need or do I need monthly SEO?" And the answer is I don't know. The truth is, that's based on the data. So if you haven't checked it out yet, I have an entire SEO live blog that I'm doing with Dr. Chip Payet from Dentaltown, and Chip has allowed me to broadcast the entire thing, and it is watching behind the scenes what I do and how I do it and the decisions that I make.
And so monthly SEO... So let's talk about what we're looking at, the diagram right here. The diagram that I have up is from SEMrush, and what that's showing you is when we do keyword research, we are not going to say, "Oh, Dr. Smith, you do endo so you need 'Endodontist, Iowa City.'" No, we have to look at the keywords. And we look at the keywords, we make sure they're good keywords, meaning they have high search volume. They are keywords that have high search volume and that are relevant to what you're doing in the practice.
So let's take a look here. In this office, I got rid of the keywords. You normally see the keywords on the left side. I got rid of those just for privacy here, but what you're seeing is the rankings on October 31st and you're seeing the rankings on November 6th, right over here where my arrow is. That that is less of my concern. More of my concern is the volume and the ranking.
So when we're looking here, we want to get you ranked for the keywords with the most volume. Now certainly, you can come down here to the one that says, 13, 6 and 4, these keywords, these rankings. But combined, that's only 30 visits per month. These are relative. They're not actually numbers, but this is relative to each other. But over here our most important keywords... They're most important to me because they have the highest search volume... We're doing pretty well. So being right here if the client said to me, "We're doing well and everything is good and the office is great," we probably don't need monthly SEO, because the truth is...
Now could we try and tweak to get us from you know, third to second or fourth to second or first? Sure. We absolutely could. Here we dropped two. I would check that out. I would wait another week and see, because search does fluctuate, but right in this situation you can see we are already ranking in the top five, really top three, for the keywords with the most volume. So is it worth spending money every single month to try and get us from two to one or three to two? Will the ROI be there? And I'm not sure. And I don't necessarily think it will. And especially if we fully optimized already, if we've done everything that we're supposed to do. Sometimes you just can't rank higher.
But over here, here's an opportunity, because I know that this is an endo related keyword because I looked. And yeah, I tell you we're ranked 13th, and that says to me there is search volume and I think it's important for us to try and get this ranking up there. So I might say to this client, "Let's do focused SEO." And what does that mean? Let us try and add more endo content. Let's try and add some more internal links for endo. Let's see what's going on with endo to try and just get us higher up on the endo page there, because that does have 70 searches.
But for this one, for these down here, yeah sure. I could charge him for monthly SEO. We're ranked first here, we're ranked 13th here. We can certainly do monthly SEO and then try and improve these, but are we going to get a bang for the buck for moving from 13th to 1st let's say, or whatever it is, for a keyword that has only 10 searches per month? So the answer is, if you are ranking well for the current keywords that you have, and those are the keywords that are researched, that have a high search volume, that are very relevant to your practice, then you don't need monthly SEO.
I mean for this client who we're not doing monthly SEO, he does get these reports every month so we can check, and certainly we might do some temporary monthly SEO to adjust this endo issue, but other than that there's no need for him to spend more money. Now, if we saw that even with all of our efforts, even after we've done everything that we're supposed to do with SEO, and let's say everything looked like this, you know, 13 15, 31 with high search volumes, then we might need some more monthly SEO to try and keep tweaking, keep checking and keep working. But as of right now, since the rankings are stable and he's got the keywords that I want him to get and the office is going well, I don't necessarily want to really... We don't need to do more work there.
