Is Ceatus not keeping up with recent SEO changes?
Date: December 17, 2012Category: Author: David Hall
Ceatus Media Group is one of the competitors for whom we have high respect. They are one of the very few dental website companies who, like us, custom write all the content for their clients’ websites. And they have relatively strong SEO performance.
However, I just read on their blog a post made last Thursday that is off the mark in its understanding of recent Google updates. See the Ceatus Media blog, and scroll down to the subhead, Find Your Niche!, where they recommend procedure-specific websites.
It has been a couple of years since Google revised its algorithm to give more preference to higher authority websites. It was 2010 when it became more profitable to concentrate all your website marketing into one website, as opposed to having more than one website for a dental practice. So it has been quite a while since a procedure-specific website was a good idea.
But even worse, Google is now penalizing the multiple website strategy.
Let me illustrate why by telling you a story. I was at a dental meeting speaking with a dentist who was well known as an Internet marketing guru. When I told him how we sized up our competition in each market with the determination to knock off the website with the number one ranking, he said that he liked how I think. But then he explained his thinking about dealing with the competition, which was a step beyond mine. He said that for a key search term, he wanted to rank #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. That way he would block out the competition.
Well, Google is figuring out ways to block that strategy. Their interest is to provide a variety of results to searchers, and delivering a search results page with only variations of one dental practice doesn’t suit them. They are succeeding. With business listings, they are getting better and better at tying a website to a specific practice in their database, and when they are able to uncover this multiple website strategy, they are penalizing it, sometimes severely.
And the worst thing you can do, when you have multiple websites promoting the same dental practice, is to cross-link them as Ceatus is suggesting.
How is it that we know this and Ceatus doesn’t? I have puzzled over that because I have a lot of respect for Ceatus. I think it’s because we watch our clients more closely and take responsibility for their success and their conversion. When traffic to our clients’ sites is down or their rankings are down, we’re on top of it. We have several clients who hired us to do additional websites. They maybe have one website from Ceatus or from Internet Dental Alliance, and another from us. In every instance, the rankings of both those sites have suffered as a result of this Google algorithm change.
I was surprised to see this from Ceatus. They are generally fairly SEO-savvy. I know that Internet Dental Alliance strongly advocates for these procedure-specific websites. I expect something like this from IDA, but not from Ceatus. IDA’s whole marketing program is built around ranking for each individual procedure by having a domain specific to that procedure. Then, if you want to be aggressive in your market, you buy a bunch of these websites, so you are nashville-sedation-dentist.com, nashville-cosmetic-dentist.com, nashville-tmj-dentist.com, etc. In some cases, dentists are still getting away with this type of strategy. But beware, Google is coming after you.
For more information on other aspects of this topic, please see our page on dental search engine optimization.
You may also be interested in seeing how Infinity Dental Web compares to our competition, in traffic graphs.
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