Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Marketing Chairside Podcast by Pro Impressions Marketing, where the team covers a variety of dental marketing ideas to help you attract more new patients in the quantity and quality you need to grow your practice.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Chairside Podcast. This episode is in a brand new format. We’re really excited to bring that to you. Ultimately, we’re here to help you improve your practice in whatever way we can. My producer recommended that I record this episode with no pants on. I’m not willing to go that far. I don’t think you want me to, but we’ll figure something else out. He did tell me that I can mention anything and he’ll bring it on screen, so an elephant, bowl of pears, and Mr. President.

Donald Trump Illustration:

I’m really rich.

President Biden Illustration:

Come on, man.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

We got, I don’t know, the president one might give him some copyright issues on images. But no, today we are here to help you improve your local SEO, and we’re going to give you some tips. Joining me on the podcast today is our director of account management, Jared Lowry. Jared, how are you doing, sir?

Jared Lowry:

Doing well, thanks Jonathan. Thanks for having me on the show. I’m not president, but hopefully the next best thing.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

There you go. Not yet anyway, huh?

Jared Lowry:

Yeah.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Pants. I got to ask now, do you have pants on?

Jared Lowry:

I do, as a matter of fact, yeah.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Okay, great.

Jared Lowry:

Even in the post-Covid world, I am wearing pants.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Fantastic. As I mentioned, we are here to talk local SEO. Jared, you work with a lot of our dentists and oversee our people who work with dentists themselves. SEO is definitely a need that clients have when they come to us.

Jared Lowry:

Yeah. I find that it’s one of those things that it’s a little bit mystifying for people who aren’t kind of in the dental, in the marketing realm to really understand how it works. Hopefully some of the tips that we can share today can just be practical ways that people can take control of their own SEO efforts.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Yep, yep. The reality is that one of the reasons why I enjoy working in the SEO industry is that it is just this giant ever evolving puzzle. You could think of it as a jigsaw puzzle where the picture’s always changing. You start putting together pieces and then all of a sudden the puffin penguin thing you were putting together becomes a hot air balloon and you’ve got weird pieces in the wrong spots and you got to change it around. We’re recording this today with some key tips on some foundational and super potent criteria, but we may have to rerecord this next month. Google and the whole world is now embracing the role of AI, and so that’s going to change.

Robot:

Good morning, sir. Yet another on time delivery from-

Will Smith:

Get the hell out of my face, canner.

Robot:

Have a nice day.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

At the top of our list is just, like I said, a foundational thing that still is an ever-evolving piece of criteria, and that’s the dentist has his or her and offices Google business profile claimed. Jared, can you tell me what a Google business profile is?

Jared Lowry:

Yeah, so Google Business Profile, it used to be called Google My Business, but in the spirit of what you were just talking about, Google likes to change things on a regular basis. A Google business profile is the little profile of a business that will show up when you do Google search for a business or a category. Sometimes you’ll see a little kind of business highlight there. That’s called the Google Business Profile, and you have the ability to claim that, you have the ability to change the information on that if it’s incorrect.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Yep. Changing the information, not to skip past this key point here, because the first tip is claim your Google business profile for the doctor and for the practice, because Google says you should have a profile for the practice, and then a profile for the doctor. I believe one of the reasons they do that is because things change in the real world, too. Sometimes the doctor moves on to work at a different practice, but Google feels that reviews for that doctor should go on with the doctor, because the doctor is still the same person. The practice might change. You want to claim both of those. Then, this is the second point, complete that profile and keep it updated with new information. That is something that dentists struggle with a lot, because claiming the profile is critical because your name might even be incorrect, but your information will likely change over the years. There’s all sorts of pieces of information that go in those profiles. Jared, can you give us some examples of some of the profile information that we’ve added to our profiles for our dentists?

Jared Lowry:

You can highlight services on there, which I think is really helpful for people who may not know where your business is and what some of your kind of highlighted procedures are. You can add links to scheduling widgets and things like that. There’s kind of various pieces of information that you can kind of use to fill in the gaps where people might be looking for more information about your business.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Then they keep adding things. When Covid hit, they added some information for cleaning protocols observed and that kind of thing. They’ve added information about ADA compliance in terms of whether or not the place is accessible, the closure times. But that’s a great example right there. Closure times due to holidays, if you know that you’re going to be closed for a certain period of time, you can update that in your Google business profile. But we also help our clients keep things up to date with social media, and that really extends into Google business profiles. We don’t think of Google business profiles as being a social media site in the same way, but you are able to put posts live in those profiles. That’s based on whatever you want to share that’s going on at your office. What we actually do is we help our clients with social media ideas, we post for them, and included in that is posting to the Google business profile.

But incidentally, if you are a dental office in need of social media ideas, we do actually have a calendar of 365 days worth of social media ideas for dentists and it’s available on our website real easily. That is right there. Graphic two, for those of you watching the podcast, rather than just listening to it, it’s $40 and you can equip your team with ideas.

That takes that piece away, that problem of the blank canvas, “What am I going to post?” You can just click into that and there’s an idea for you and just do it. Don’t let the kind of, “Well, what if we did something different?” “I don’t know. I don’t have time for that.” Google wants to see things fresh and see things keep coming. I guess, you know what? That’s a good segue and to the next step. What we want to do is, in those Google business profiles, there’s one piece of information that’s very sensitive, and that is the practices online rating, their reviews. That’s a key component there is online reputation. Jared, can you tell us a little bit about online reputation and how dentists can keep that star rating up?

Jared Lowry:

Yeah, so online reputation is just kind of the industry speak for your reviews all across the web. Typically, we kind of prioritize reviews that are going to be on some of the biggest platforms like Google and Facebook, but there’s other platforms like Yelp, Healthgrades, Zocdoc, where reviews can be left, as well. Those are important, too. The idea there is it’s just as important for Google to see that you are getting reviews on a regular basis as it is that you have good reviews. So obviously you want to make sure that you’re providing excellent service to people, that you’re providing a welcoming atmosphere, a great experience from beginning to end, because that’s what ultimately encourages people to leave those positive reviews for you. But if you’re not getting positive reviews on a regular basis, Google sees that as a sign of a stagnant company that they’re less likely to be excited about showing the results for.

If you can do things to encourage reviews in your practice, that’s what we always recommend. One way that we do that for our clients is we have a software called ProView Analytics that has some tools in it, one of which is a tool that you can shoot out review links via text message or email, just to make it as simple as possible. Because leaving reviews is one of those things that people will do out of a matter of convenience a lot of times, but as soon as you put hurdles in front of them and make it more difficult than it has to be, they’re a lot less likely to do that.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Right. I will say one hurdle that’s worth jumping over, for our offices who are listening to this, is to ask for reviews personally. It’s a little awkward, but I promise you almost… Just embrace the awkward, you can tell that I do that. Hippopotamus, by the way, Aaron. Yes, thank you for that. You want to embrace the awkwardness of asking for that review because it sticks in the patient’s mind. If you say… Just listen for an opening and your team should have training, have them watch this. If they hear the patient say something like, “Oh, you guys are so nice,” or, “Oh, I’ve never been to a dental office like this,” or “I’m never leaving again because you guys are amazing.” Then you want to say, “Well, thank you, Shirley, thank you for saying that. Would you please help us get the word out about the practice? Would you give us some feedback in the form of an online review? Because that really helps us tell people about how different we are,” and just wait for them to respond. Just asking for those will help you get those reviews.

Jared Lowry:

Absolutely.

The other thing I want to mention on reviews too is it’s not the end of the world if you get a negative review. We do see that from time to time where even the best dental offices in the world get negative reviews. Believe it or not, that actually lends a little bit of credibility to your business. Because if you see a business, if I’m searching for some sort of product and I see a business that’s offering it, only [inaudible 00:11:40] reviews, no hint of criticism, something tells me those aren’t all legitimate reviews. When you get a negative review, obviously you want to handle that, you want to respond to those professionally. In some cases you can even get those removed if the situation is right. But it’s not the end of the world. Just make sure that you’re providing stellar service so that you’re outweighing your negative reviews with positive reviews.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

My goodness, yes, the stellar service and unique experiences is huge. This is a two-way street. In producing a podcast, a producer says, “Hey, how about mentioning a testimonial?” Ask for testimonials, ask for a short video, because that’s then content you can post to your social media platforms, and that’s a great idea. Thank you. Aaron, you should put Aaron [inaudible 00:12:34] face on there. Yes. Thank you, Aaron. Now, the next tip I guess I want to just recommend is that you find someone on the street and grab their cell phone and say, “Just a minute,” and grab… No, just find someone who hasn’t likely been to your website in a long time, wherever, and ask them if you can pull up your website on their phone. See how quickly that website launches and how easy it is to navigate. Because if you’ve been to your website before, your phone will have memorized the page, and so it’ll come up very quickly.

But if you’ve never been there before, you’ll actually see what your average patient is experiencing when they go to your website. The next criteria is to have a fast, modern, functional website that Google can be proud to show its users. We used to say a mobile friendly website, but that’s basically the same as saying, have a business card made a paper. All websites should be made to work well on a phone these days, or at least that’s what Google wants.

Google is actually measuring your website’s performance on the lowest common denominator of website usage, which is going to be a phone on a 3G connection. If you’re on a fiber optic internet connection or a 5G internet with LTE, and I don’t know what else they have out there in the big city, but that’s going to be a little bit misleading when it comes to your website’s performance. At Pro Impressions, we have our websites tuned to be the fastest in the dental industry, and that has a lot to do with how the website’s coded and how the website’s designed, and then how it’s hosted on the server.

You, the dental office, the best thing you can do is to ask for a third party opinion. We can actually help you with that by doing a website analysis and marketing report. You can get that on our website. Producer Aaron will show you down here where you can get that. Jared, I don’t know. Do you have anything to add about having a fast, awesome website?

Jared Lowry:

No, not necessarily. Just that it can really help set you apart from your competition, as well. We find that a lot of dentists have websites that were built in a different era and may not load as well. Even user experience might not be as quality when people actually land on the website. Having a quality website that’s really streamlined can really help set you apart that way.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Google’s been pulling people kicking and screaming into a faster internet from the time when we founded this company back in 2010, so well over a decade. They’ve been like, “Come on guys, let’s pick up the pace a little on the mobile experience.” It’s definitely important that you do that, and they’re factoring that into their algorithm. If you got a slow website, you’re going to be less likely to rank. It also kind of creates this perpetual cycle of terribleness because if people are having a bad user experience on your phone, then they’re less likely to contact you. Google can tell when people click into your website from their search engine results and they’re like, “Oh, that took forever,” and they click the back button, then that’s a negative indicator to Google, and so your rankings start to suffer.

Then you’re like, “Why should I invest in this? Because this doesn’t even work for me.” Well, you’ve got to start pumping in things.
You’ve got to design the user experience. That brings us to our final tip for the day on how you can improve your local SEO, and that’s to make sure that every page of your website functions as a landing page for an actual human being with a need. Jared, can you talk a little bit about how we design a page to function as a landing page rather than another type of page on the internet?

Jared Lowry:

Yeah. Well, first of all, I think it’s really important to keep in mind that a lot of people who are searching for things aren’t necessarily up to know with the kind of industry jargon of dentistry. They might be using some very just common knowledge phrases. A lot of times we like to use content on the website and optimize pages for phrases that are things that people would actually search for. Then if they do land on that page, they’re going to understand the content because if it does use jargon, it at least explains what that means. It’s important to use information that people can understand and digest, but also provide unique information that people are actually searching for. Because there are tons of great resources out there where people can learn all types of things about dentistry. [inaudible 00:17:52] the resources, but what Google’s really looking for is that you can provide something that users in your market are uniquely searching for.

If you can tap into some of the search volume that people are looking for in your area, that will really help Google to connect the dots and know that you are the right person to connect them with. But in terms of having imagery that people connect with, that represents people in your area, having before and after photos so that people can see the great results that you provide and can have that emotional punch that you want to, those are all things that we can do within those landing pages and on those landing pages so that when people get there, they’re going to be more likely to [inaudible 00:18:46] and actually convert into a new patient for you.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

That’s a balancing act, because, yeah, Google knows about WebMD and Wikipedia and all these other information resources that are already there for patients. However, they do want to see that you’ve got something to offer the patient, and especially our dentists that want to offer a high end or luxury dental brand. The tendency is to want to have this glitzy website with very few elements, and whatever works is great, but what we’ve found really works well is to mesh telling the patient about you, but also addressing their needs.

Then the piece that you can’t miss is asking for conversions, asking them to call, asking them to email, to schedule an appointment, and not just once, but throughout the page so that as soon as that user’s curiosity is piqued, and they see that they can trust you, that they take action because Google can tell how many pages of the website that people visit and whether or not they’re actually doing something once they get to the website. There are over, we used to say over a hundred criteria or maybe 200 criteria. Now, we know it’s hundreds and hundreds of criteria that Google and other search engines use to evaluate not just the website, but the practice in general. I truly believe that maybe they’re not telling us about it, but there could be satellite imagery where they’re analyzing parking lot usage in your area to see if you actually have people showing up and that they care.

Jared Lowry:

Big brother is always watching.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

It is. Google is Big Brother, and now the robots are thinking. Truly, there’s just… Like you said, Jared, just be awesome and help patients tell the world about how awesome you are, because that’s impossible to fake, and that’s what Google wants to promote. You’re just doing it naturally at that point, and it makes our job as a marketer a whole lot easier if people like who they see when they come in the door. Let’s see here, a 1976 Volkswagen Beetle. That’s how you improve your local SEO, or at least some tips for you. Jared, hey, thanks for helping us out on the episode today.

Jared Lowry:

Yeah, thanks again for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Jonathan Fashbaugh:

Great. We’ll have you on again soon. For all of you who are watching, thank you very much for joining us on Marketing Chairside. We know that dentists struggle to add new patients in the quality and quantity that they need to grow their practice, and that’s why Pro Impressions specializes in dental marketing that attracts more ideal patients, and that’s why we’re here. I hope you’ll join us next time on Marketing Chairside. You got to get back to work.