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We had one of our chiropractic website clients call us today, asking for help. It seems that his site had been ranking well for the major search terms in his community, but suddenly had dropped off the rankings and ended up in page six of the search results. (If your site is on page six, it's practically invisible to your patients, so this isn't good.)
A sudden drop in search rankings tells us that something odd has happened, because those kinds of drops aren't normal. We asked the client if anyone had been working on his site.
"Yes," he said. "I hired someone to help me with our SEO."
Uh, oh.
We ran some of our SEO tools that we use for our clients to do a quick check and immediately found the problem. The doctor had 1,089 brand new links to his site. Links with the names of:
www.shoemoney.com (about 800 links)
www.razzball.com
www.dinosaurbarbeque.com
These are clearly not legitimate sites and all of the "links" are poor quality blog comments that are obviously spam. This doctor had been paying an "SEO expert" $300 a month to work on his SEO, and what he managed to do was destroy his online search ranking. And the "expert" managed to do this in just a few weeks. Very impressive. (But not for the doctor.)
Now the doctor has turned to us to fix his site reputation, and we have our work cut out for us. But there are some valuable lessons to be learned here for all chiropractors when dealing with SEO:
- Never, ever, ever, ever, ever pay for backlinks. Google knows what you're doing and Google will not be happy. And an unhappy Google will make you unhappy.
- If you need some help with your SEO, hire people who do real work on your site, like creating content. That's what we do with our clients and it works.
- Ask your SEO person about content marketing. It's the only real effective way to build your site's reputation. The problem? It takes time and expertise to write, edit, and promote content on your site. (Again, this is what we do with our VIP Marketing Service, and it's a lot of work.)
- If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Don't ruin your site's search ranking with bad SEO techniques. If you need some help with your search ranking, we'd love to help. Best of all, we'll tell you exactly what we're doing and actually build your site with good quality, shareable content that will get you good search placement for years.
For more information, give us a call at (800) 295-3346 or (360) 866-3731.
