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The Dental SEO 101 podcast is your ultimate resource for optimizing your dental practice's online presence! The host, Ross Dunn, simplifies the complex world of digital marketing, offering strategies explicitly tailored for dentists.
Each episode covers essential topics such as the fundamentals of SEO, local SEO strategies, and tips for enhancing your website's visibility. Learn actionable techniques to attract more patients and boost your revenue while maintaining exceptional customer service.
Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or just starting out, Dental SEO 101 equips you with the tools to thrive in today’s digital landscape. Subscribe now to ensure your practice is set for long-term success, and take the first step toward a profitable future!
Dentists that own their own practice, provide customer service, excellence
and work with a professional SEO make the most money.
Welcome to Dental SEO 101, a podcast dedicated
to helping dentists retire. Well, hello and welcome to the Dental
SEO101 podcast, episode number seven by First
Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and I'm the director of SEO and
co founder of First Dentist. All right, well let's jump right into
it here. This is our seventh episode and we're going to start with a little
non SEO. It's more of a bulletin of interest,
buyer beware kind of notice. And it's about ads
in AI and then what starts with ads and AI and then kind of gets
into just using Google Ads to start with.
According to Google search results with AI overviews,
that's where we see the initial AI in a search result are
monetizing at the same rate as search results without
AI overviews, which was actually a bit of a surprise to me. But
that's good to know for them because of course they want to make more money.
That's the whole purpose here. It's not so good in some respects
because you'd almost hope those wouldn't do as well so that they wouldn't continue doing
it because it does have an impact in all of our livelihoods for organic
traffic, the non paid traffic. But at least we do know that we can
still get some attention there and benefits out of doing
our paid ads, which is a good component of all marketing. Even when
we get great organic results, we typically continue doing paid ads
because it's just another medium and it's another way to get a click and that
final sale, as long as it's got a good return on ad spend, who cares,
right? Anyway, so in case you're not aware,
advertisers have three placement options for AI
overview ads. One is above the AI answer, number
two is integrated within the AI answer. Try and say that
fast. And the next is below the AI answer.
Now I'm noting this just in case you wondered if you could take advantage of
this. And then yes, of course Google always allows you to pay money and spend
with them. Now on a side note, if you're ever
using Google Ads and it asks you to do automatic bidding or
their AI powered ads, seriously reconsider doing
them, I personally say don't do them. I'm not saying that there's
no situation where they may work well, but to begin
with, they're a black box. You're going to get some information.
Mostly just conversions. You know this money went
to this many conversions but they're not going to tell you any detail.
There's a. And I'm not the person doing this, otherwise I have far better
answer for you or more description here. But I have
an ad specialist, thank goodness because it's quite a different market than what I do
in our different area niche. But I was speaking with him
the other day and his, our
clients have questions about well what, what
ad did, what was doing this, what, what made the big
sale here. And, and he's like, well they tell us this but I can't tell
you any more than that because it's, it's just not showing because it's an AI
powered ad and we did AI powered ads just to test
them and a couple clients insisted on them. So
fine, of course we're providing a service, we will do that.
But we've been kind of disgusted by just how little information
there is on what is driving the business and
what isn't. Whereas if it's being created by an
ad specialist like Nathan, our in house man,
well it's night and day. He can ensure
that we know exactly what copy did it,
what ad group, where the money's
going, what kind of ad was it, a
display ad, all these different things. That's just, there's
data there that is very valuable that is not available in the
AI powered solutions. Plus I
guarantee that they are going to maximize every dollar you
spend. I shouldn't say maximize, they're going to spend every dollar you
have at Google. Whereas in our case we would, as
ad specialists we would ensure that and I
can speak for any ad specialist, that's good. We'll
ensure that yes, your dollars go the full mile. But also
if we don't need to spend all of it, we don't.
There's often money left over. Not, I shouldn't say often,
I'd say most, about half the time, let's say half the time just to be
really, really conservative. So that's
a different experience. Granted you pay for it, it's
not free quote unquote like Google does. But you remember you're giving
keys to the fox for the hen house. I mean you're really
just giving them open to like here's your money. Oh yeah, and you can run
it too. It's not really a great recipe for positivity
and results. And I also note that they're
pushing partners. In order to get the partner status with Google you pretty
much have to toe their line and say yes, the best solution for this
is using AI powered ads. Even if you don't believe it, it's the only way
you'll get a passing test, a passing mark and get their partner status.
A little fishy and kind of disgusting in my opinion. But anyway, that's what happens
when you start dealing with monoliths and they get a bit growthy and out of
control. All right, let's jump into general SEO news. Some of
this may or may not be things you've seen or be of great interest, but
I think they're worth adding to the show today. First is
Google is testing a recently viewed label. It appears next to
search results snippets that you've clicked in your recent search history.
Google has tested similar labels back in the fast or back in the past
in the past, including a you visit option label
back in 2023. Now we're unsure if this label could
increase click through rates or reduce it when when searchers see it, but
I think it's kind of handy. I I like having insights into what
I'd I've already looked at right now,
the main insights being the same thing they've had for decades, which is
if you've got history or you haven't flushed your cache or anything like
that, you'll see usually a discolored a slightly
different color of link on that page for the any links you've already
visited. But a little more clarity can't hurt
I think. But we'll see. We'll need to see what kind of
click through rates those produce on May 29th. Actually, as
I write, as I do this, it's June 13th, so I know a lot of
this stuff is probably a little farther down the line, but there was
some search volatility around May 29 that has
continued for a while. A lot of it has calmed down,
but it is the next one after the last
confirmed date, which was March 2025. There are other
potential Google updates reported by Barry Schwartz throughout May, but none of them appear to
have had much impact. So not much else to say at this
point. As far as I've seen so far, this one hasn't done a lot but
like to keep you on top of things, Google Updates when
Local questions and answers display this is another Search Engine
Roundtable article. A lot of our great content is from
at least initiated
sparked by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable.
That's scroundtable.com can't recommend them enough. Great. He's a
great guy and he's got great info. All right.
Signs have indicated that Google's been slowly phasing out the questions and
answers section of Google Business Profiles, which had a lot of us really quite worried
because I think it's a very valuable component to
your profile. Even if you probably haven't used it, you should be using it, but
many people don't. However, it doesn't seem to be quite
that bad. Joy Hawkins, one of our colleagues in the industry
who's focused on local, noted that the new criteria for
Google Maps questions and answers showing up
are 1. Google the Q and A is visible
in Google Search when a user clicks on a result from a map pack.
So when they actually click on the result in that little map pack that shows
up within a search result, however, it will not be shown if the search leads
directly to a single result or a knowledge panel without a map
pack. In Google Maps, the Q and A feature is available across all search
types. So if you're doing any searches within the Google Maps
application, you'll see always see it. Additionally, business
owners can access all Q and A via their Google Business
Profile and their API. So you can still access it and add to it,
which I strongly recommend doing. It's a great way to
ensure that you've answered some of the more basic questions
that you get all the time and perhaps some of the
questions that I would say this is probably more of a focus
the questions that may turn people off that they
they're looking at you trying to decide if they want to go to your practice
and you say yes or no.
Do we handle insurance or do we accept insurance
based service and and so on. Anything that might limit them
from coming to you and you can reassure them otherwise or
if you want to just allay the potential of them
contacting you. And this can happen a lot when you're getting too
many calls asking about a particular service you don't provide and you just
want to nip that in the bud. Well, you can add that to the Google
answers and questions, a Q and A. So that's a good place to do it.
And sometimes they ask questions, which is gold.
That doesn't happen as often as I'd like to see, but it does happen and
you want to make sure you have a great answer to provide. Now
one of the things that I was thinking about sort of occurred to
me when I was putting all this together is that traffic
analysis these days is frankly a nightmare.
What do I mean by that? Well, Google Analytics 3
was phased out a couple was it a couple years ago. Now
my time's flying. I know Google Analytics 4 has been around. We've got
easily a year of data for our clients. So maybe it has been a couple
years, at least a year since it was officially phased out. And
usually our clients have a couple years of data if they listened and we got
things started quickly. At any rate, all that
data From Google Analytics 3 wasn't passed along, which is very
curious of Google, wasn't it? Like our case, we had literally
decades of information in our Google Analytics profile. That
poof. It's just ridiculous that they can do that. But
we don't own it. I guess so anyways.
So now we've started off with a Google a whole flat
empty platform of data. We began accruing
it as soon as we could, but it's based on the current
status where a lot of information isn't provided anymore due to
privacy restrictions in browsers, ad blockers,
simply incognito blockers,
anything like that, anything that could cut the data out that we get.
Well, they couldn't have really created a better storm because not only did
Google do this to us, but
they've also launched AI overviews, which has dramatically
changed how a search result looks. And you know,
we've been looking at data for clients and going, okay,
clients are coming to us. Why does this change? Why do we see this big
dip? Well, you're, yeah, you're looking at
the results now and you're looking at the results last year. What's
the big change? Well, search results don't even look close to what they used to
in many cases, not all the time, but many cases. There's
a big AI overview that's answering the questions that people
want to see. Probably not very well. I've seen a lot of terrible
answers, but they're out there. So that has reduced the
amount of informational clicks to people's websites
that's showing quite clearly
in results. So it may look like you're seeing less traffic and you may
just be doing that, but that traffic may not have been the traffic that
was converting into business. So year over year data
is mired in
inaccuracies. Do keep that in mind when you're looking at your
reporting. It's exceedingly difficult to drag
any really useful information out of that right now.
And I know clients have
very little time. So when they do jump in there, they make
sometimes hasty decisions and they're like, they get very concerned and hey,
I get it if you're busy. And this is all new to you. Oh my
gosh, I've seen this big drop. But I want to explain that this is going
to be happening and you're going to see even worse changes in analytics.
Positive too probably, but you're going to see all over the place. It's going to
be chaotic. And that's if you have year
over year data and you haven't just switch to Google
Analytics. 4. Okay, so you're also in
another position too, and that is because you're not getting this proper data.
There is only one thing you can really focus on. Are you getting more conversions?
But if you haven't set up conversion tracking properly on your Google Analytics
platform, you're even, even more trouble here. Because what are
you going to get out of it? You've been cut out
of the knees, really. And it's partly your
fault, but partly whoever's working with you or not working with you.
If you haven't had anyone working with you who's an expert in
SEO or analytics, well, that's probably why.
How could you possibly know? But it is important
that conversion optimization is set up. It doesn't matter what the conversions are. It
could be something as simple as stating
that a person has been on more than three pages
for or has visited more than three pages on
your page on your site. That's a conversion of one kind. It's not a
conversion that's leading to a sale, but it is something
of some benefit. So do keep in mind
that you have these different types of conversions. The other one could be,
of course, that they're calling you, that they've sent in an inquiry on
your site. All of these need to be properly set up within Google Analytics and
the proper tracking codes, pixels, whatever it might
be that we're going to use on your site, that has to be done. So
if you're in a position where that's not being done, get on it immediately
because the sooner you do, the sooner you have data that you can actually look
at with some certainty of year over year benefits.
Because conversions is, that's fine. You want to look at that year
over year. That's what really matters, not how much traffic you're
getting. Okay, I hope that made sense. I felt like I rambled
a bit there and then I saw a notice and I thought, oh no. So
anyways, don't mind.
It goes off and strays off. Squirrel. All right, AI in
search, let's jump into this section here. Google's Gary Ish has warned
that AI agents will soon create web congestion.
This is an article from Search Engine Journal. And, and
I don't want to get in too much of this. But it is important
to note that we're coming up to a place where if you had a
larger site, this is probably not going to impact many practices. I
should know. But you just never know. Things changing. And if you're on cheap hosting,
that can make an impact. Anyways, AI agents are
essentially unmanned drones of sorts that are
sent out by someone to to do a certain amount of
work. And often that requires crawling and then
indexing particular pages on sites. As agents become
more and more common, our websites are going to be bombarded
by these agents. And since we already have a fair amount of
processing power on our websites, our servers
going to just search engines coming to our site, nothing staggering.
This is just going to make things a bit worse and potentially a lot worse
for bigger clients who have massive sites.
So he provides some suggestions. Again, some of these are going to
be more applicable to giant websites,
but the heck it might be something that at least you should know about. So
first, infrastructure evaluate your current hosting arrangements to ensure that it
can handle the projected traffic loads which are going to be high as more and
more agents are out there. If you have a giant website, consider a content
delivery network and that includes if you have videos. Videos
are a huge suck on terms of
processing power and site speeds can
slow things down a lot. So if you can have those on a content delivery
network, not a bad idea.
Access control Review your robots txt file to ensure you've
effectively managed which AI crawlers have access to your
website. It's essentially it's important to block unwanted bots.
How can you do that? Right now it's easier said than done, but it can
be done. And if you have any questions about that, we're happy to
help. I don't have a full tutorial on doing anything like that yet, but
I can see it coming. Database performance
when you're working on optimizing your database, you
do want to make sure that it can manage resource consumption better. Again,
larger sites. When you're talking about WordPress, I would
say that an aspect of that is if you have a WordPress site and
you've got 20 plugins, I'd be concerned.
Plugins require a fair amount of resources on
a hosting platform, and the less you have in
there, the less intensity,
well, less burden on the platform. Oftentimes
we see plugins on websites that are
simply unnecessary or could easily be coded
into the website to remove that
potential burden. So do consider that
monitoring. You want to ensure that you are monitoring the website.
This again, there's Levels of importance here. I mean
definitely monitor websites, but
monitor your websites for different web crawlers and AI agents.
But I would say this is more applicable to larger
sites that have an admin person who's doing that on a regular
basis for smaller practices. This
isn't going to be a problem yet. All this is
changing so fast. I don't even know what will happen next week when it comes
to this kind of detail. Anyway, I've got some hot hunches
for the other stuff, but not sure about that one now. As you probably already
noted, if you're in the US Google has launched AI mode.
It's a tab on your search result page. They
did launch it on May 20th. However, as of today
or no, yesterday, that's June 12th, they had.
They were rolling it out completely to all US users
in AI mode. There's some updates. Well first of all,
AI mode leads to search results that are two, three or even five times the
traditional length of an AI overview. It's quite in
depth. Don't take
it as faith like as
ash as writ. Make sure
you do. If this is something really important, make sure you do your homework.
I've seen absolutely terrible results that are completely
wrong, full of hallucinations and are just
a waste of space and data power. So do keep that in
mind. There is one aspect of AI mode that's really
cool. It's called deep search. It uses this and I'll quote this is
from Liz Reed at Google. She says deep search uses the same query fan out
technique as their general AI
mode but they take it to the next level. It can issue
hundreds of searches, reason across disparate pieces of information
and create expert level fully cited report in just
minutes saving you hours of of research
unquote. Includes search live personal
context in AI mode Shopping in AI mode it's pretty cool where you can
actually try on. You can take a scan of yourself of sorts and
then try different articles of clothing on a virtual
you good it is. I have no idea. That's called
that's shopping and then try it on is actually what I meant there agentic checkout
no thank you where you can have them do the buying for you.
And Gemini 2.5 on a geeky end of things AI
mode in the Google search console for the longest time
we haven't had any data to look at. You know
which AIs search engines have been to our sites?
How do we track that? What's going on? There was no referral data.
The good news is as of May 26 that AI mode data
is coming to performance reports in Google Search Console.
There is no set date yet and it's not live yet, but they do say
it's coming. So yay. The more info we have about
AI traffic to your site, the better and the more we
can act on it. So it's pretty exciting to us. Well, I hope that wasn't
too nerdy for you. You got some benefits. I do love
passing along this information and just making everyone a
little wiser about managing their websites and creating successful
practice. We are here for you. We want to do that not only through the
podcast, but directly with you if you have any need for service
or even some consultation. So please let let us know at First Dentist.
Well, on behalf of myself, Ross Dunn, Director of SEO and co Founder of
First Dentist, thank you for joining me today. If you have any
questions you would like answered either on the podcast for free. Hey,
there you go. Free consulting or on a more private consulting
basis, please email
infoirstdentist.com thank you for
listening and remember to tune into our next episode where we'll be where we will
be sharing words today. More 101 SEO tips
and news on dental SEO 101.
Thank you.