A Reply from Great Dental Websites
Date: December 21, 2010Category: Author: David Hall
Last month, I wrote a post titled Dental SEO Scams, in which I mentioned a competitor, Great Dental Websites. Just to be clear here, I was not accusing them of conducting a scam. I just like to use provocative titles. There are plenty of SEO scams in the marketplace, but it sounds like Great Dental Websites is just trying to trim costs to compete at the low end of the market.
Anyway, I got an e-mail from Jeff Gladnick of Great Dental Websites, and, to be fair to their company, I decided to post it here:
First I’d like to thank Dr. Hall for giving me the floor to respond, he didn’t have to do so (it’s his blog), and I do appreciate it.
The first critique of our SEO services focused on Dr. Stirneman’s website, https://BellaireFamilyDentistry.com. Dr. Hall’s point was that “Bellaire Family Dentistry” was not as competitive as some other terms. That is true, but please keep in mind this was only after 9 days. Several months later, Dr. Stirneman’s site was performing well for a variety of more competitive search terms.
Here is one example: https://www.google.com/search?q=bellaire+dentist
Also, SEO ranking reports are not the only things delivered to customers. We also provide a web analytics suite and call tracking, allowing customers to see how many visitors they get to their website, what cities they come from, and who called them from where and at what time. The call tracking is particularly effective, as it shows how many visitors were converted into phone calls to the practice. I do not have permission from Dr. Stirneman to release his actual stats, but I will say they are well above the highest estimate provided by Alexa. Alexa, in my opinion, is not a very accurate measure of dental websites.
I must admit that that particular case study is not presented in the best light, and this rather harsh criticism has convinced me to update that section to include the latest seo ranking reports, and perhaps I will address some of the concerns Dr. Hall had as well.
For the 2nd point, which was alluded to being a “snow job”, the charge is that “North East, Md” is not a large area so the search engine optimization was not aggressive enough and we should have pushed for Elkton, MD or suburbs of Baltimore. Our goal is to provide dentists with the best value for their money in terms of search engine optimization and dental web services in general. Some dentists have limited budgets, and want to focus on their own city. Dr. Gwiazdowksi was one such customer, and we focused primarily on the town of north east, which while small, is being dominated by Dr. G for every conceivable search term. We’re creeping into the first page for county related search terms as well as other cities. While Elkton is, as Dr. Hall mentioned, the closest nearby city, it was specifically left out as it is a lower income area and Dr. G wanted to focus on other places that he felt more lucrative patients would come from.
As for the actual ROI for Dr. G’s site, it paid for itself several times over last Thursday, when he emailed me to mention he just got a no-referral patient who found his website, walked in, and scheduled $10,000 worth of treatment. All from his website, and nothing else. And this was just one of many customer’s he’s received from the website up to this point.
Overall, our target customer base is Dentists in smaller population areas, who we can serve well with our finely tuned Dental website software. We currently refuse customers who want to be prominent in giant markets like New York City, Chicago, or Los Angeles (although we can target for suburbs or neighborhoods in those cities effectively, but dentists targeting the entire city we refer else where). But, for the rest of the Dentists in the country, I still believe we have an unbeatable value proposition, and I encourage you to give us a second look if this blog post originally turned you off.
Again, I’d like to thank Dr. Hall for the opportunity to post a response, and am grateful for the opportunity to do so.
– Jeff Gladnick of Great Dental Websites
Jeff, thanks for that clarification. And just to set the record straight, while I did throw out the word “snow job,” I did not apply that to Great Dental Websites. In fact, I said that term was too strong to describe what was going on here.
Also, to be clear, I have no problem with a company providing low-powered SEO, as long as it is presented as such. I did like seeing Jeff come forward and explaining everything here. It is a sign that they are comfortable with their approach and that they are being honest in their presentation of their services and the promises they make to their clients.
– David Hall
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