A question to all treatment center owners, operators and executives: Is your SEO firm lying to you?

Short answer: Probably. Maybe not, but most likely they are. A fractional CTO who understands both SEO and the SUD industry can help you determine this.

Longer answer:

As a treatment administrator, and not a technologist, you need to really scrutinize an SEO firm's work to answer this question with certainty. Would you even know how to tell if they were lying to you?

Keep in mind that the SEO industry was originally built on a desire to cheat the system and gain in rankings. This doesn't lend itself to the most honest community of people.

There was a time, not too long ago, when a layperson without programming or web development skills could invest time in learning SEO principles and quickly support their own business rankings. They could then sell these consulting services to others.

However, things have changed. Most of the simpler tricks and strategies that anyone could employ are no longer options for increased rankings. Today, such trickery is often unsuccessful and can be detrimental to rankings and long-term harmful to a company.

Does this mean that those who do SEO today must be the most sophisticated technologists with the most advanced skills? Unfortunately, it does not.

The SEO industry has learned - quite well over the past two decades - how to sell SEO services to a largely non-technical public using a lot of jargon and false promises, all while charging steep monthly fees. This chicanery thrives on a steep gulf of information asymmetry. The SEO industry doesn't need to produce strong results to profit; it just needs to sell to people who don't have time to do anything but trust them.

There are exceptions. This is quite a condemnation of an entire industry, and for certain, there are good people who do good work in SEO. But they are the exception, not the rule.

Here are some prominent red flags to look for when it comes to SEO firms:

• They put you on WordPress. We'll write a whole article about this soon, but the short version is that WordPress is loved by the SEO industry because it means they don't have to learn web development. They can focus on pretending they're hard at work for you while doing nothing.
• You have no idea what other treatment centers they are working with. Shouldn't you ensure they aren't promising top rankings for your main competitor in the same area? All of our SUD clients know who our other SUD clients are. We won't work with anyone if a current client thinks a prospective one may be a close competitor.
• You don't know what they're talking about. Sure, you can pick out key phrases like "link building" and "title tags," but do you really know what they're doing? Can you explain it to someone else meaningfully? If your SEO firm is performing well, they should want you to understand their work and educate you about the underlying discipline.
• You have seen no real increase in rankings or anything else, but they're always very available and very nice, so you keep paying them. This is common and, unfortunately, this is not being nice. This is called client theater and/or grin f---ing. Don't fall for it.
• You did see an increase in rankings that was rapid, but then those rankings were lost and could not be recovered. Your website may even be overall behind where it started now. This usually happens with overly aggressive link-building tactics. Google search initially rewards a high influx of links with increased rankings, but a quality control metric ensures these are naturally occurring, not artificially procured. Low-value links can give a short-term boost but usually end up hurting your rankings more than helping.
• You never hear anything from your SEO firm beyond a complicated monthly report you don't read, and you've been paying them steep monthly fees for years. This is not good. You're almost certainly getting very little to nothing.
• You have verified that you are ranking for the phrases they targeted, but this has led to very little to no increase in prospective client outreaches and admissions. An old SEO trick is to get you ranking for something obscure and easy to obtain where there is virtually no competition because no one is googling what you rank for.
• Google Analytics indicates that your traffic disproportionately favors your treatment center name. If your marketers are doing a good job, people should be googling your name... a lot. But if it's your only source of purchase-ready traffic, you could have gotten that traffic without the SEO firm.
• Google Analytics indicates that your traffic disproportionately favors content that is not purchase-ready. Your website should have a variety of behavioral health-related content, but if broadly focused topics are the only source of your traffic, then that traffic is not valuable. Purchase-ready traffic would be for phrases like "residential treatment in Colorado" or "drug detox in New York City," whereas an information blog on "the history of THC in America" is broadly relevant but not directly assisting purchase-ready traffic. Many SEO firms only get this sort of traffic which is not much different than no traffic.
• Your SEO firm only cares about rankings. Rankings are important to any SUD facility, but SEO firms often have you dilute your brand value with awful UI/UX and poor content overly stuffed with repetitive keywords. This is arguably as bad as having no rankings at all because the more people you show an awful website to, the more people who undervalue your service based upon a gut visual appraisal. SEO firms don't understand the variety of disciplines that go into good web development, so they only speak to rankings. Ranking is just one piece of the puzzle of doing well online.
• You have a bad feeling about them. Speaking of the gut... you should trust your gut. It's an industry fraught with shadiness that preys on the SUD industry. Do you pretty much already know that they're lying to you?

This is a very negative appraisal of an entire industry, but it has earned this disrespect.

Do you want to determine if your SEO firm is a problem? We can help you find out. Our clients do not live in information asymmetry because we handle this oversight for them. In some cases, we oversee SEO; in others, we manage your current firm to get the most out of them.

Please feel encouraged to reach out to discuss further.