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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 todayâs 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 SEO101, a
podcast dedicated to helping dentists retire well, hello
and welcome to the Dental SEO101 podcast, episode number
11 by First Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and I'm the director
of SEO and co founder of First Dentist. All right, well, it's
been a bit of a hiatus. It's been, well, February
and the last one was November, so apologize for the delay but,
well, we've got lots to catch up on. That's always good.
So non SEO. I'd say this is non SEO
to a degree, but it's about AI. So everything seems to be around
AI these days. In this case, it's about ads.
OpenAI AI has shared that it
is going to be doing ads and this is how it's going to
work. Who will see ads? Ads will appear
for free and go tier users
plus pro and enterprise subscribers will not see ads.
Enterprise workspaces will remain ad free.
Additionally, ads will be visually separate from model answers.
We'll see how long that lasts. Conversations will not
be shared with advertisers. Ads will
not appear for topics such as health, politics and other
sensitive chats. Users can adjust or turn off
personalization again, something I don't think will
last because inevitably the greed hits and they
just want all of this data and they can sell it for great
money. And if there's one thing that AI needs these days,
AI startups, they need money. At some point they're going to
be called to task for all the money they're spending and they're going to need
to make it. So I think all this is going to go out the window
and they'll be taking everything they can from us.
Perplexity, on the flip side, has stopped
testing advertising and I think this is fantastic.
They began testing sponsored placements back in 2024.
According to the Financial Times. They've now phased out the they're paid ad
testing with no plans to bring them back again.
I don't know how long that will last. They believe that sponsored
placements, even labeled ones, risk undermining trust.
Perplexity executive said, quote, a user needs to believe this is the
best possible answer and that once ads
appear, users may 2 guess response
integrity, unquote. Very true.
Makes good sense. Why did I include this in the
podcast? I think because, well, we're
marketers and your practice is going to be
doing advertising on AI at some point and it's always Good
to know where they stand, what kind of opportunities are
coming and perhaps
what opportunities aren't coming. In this case, perplexity being one of
them. Now, one of the things I did in
January on My other podcast, SEO 101, is I provided some
SEO predictions. I like doing this every year
and I've taken those same predictions and I've skewed them a bit and made them
a little more focused on practices. So
without further ado, prediction number one,
more companies will be posting AI ethics
statements. By late in the year, more customers will
become aware they exist and will begin looking for them.
That might be a bit optimistic, but at least ethics
statements will be posted. I believe this is really
important. We're going to be doing it ourselves for our own website
and it's a way to be transparent about
how we're using AI, where it's not used,
where we consider going to. It's going too far using
AI and really well, in my
case, I want to make, make it very clear that we're human first.
Yes, we're not fools. We're going to be using AI.
We have to. It's the only way we're going to survive. Just like any other
business these days in, in a knowledge space and a technical
space, AI is going to be everything.
So we need to work on that. And I do believe AI ethics
statements will be one of the ways that can be done. Prediction number
two, AI slop will become so
prevalent, people will making extra efforts to show
their content as written by a human hand.
Now, will that mean that there's a written by a human seal
on content? Who knows? I, I could imagine
it happening, but in the meantime, people
will get tired of AI at least. The slop.
As things get better, as people get smarter about
using AI, it's going to be harder and harder to tell good content
from AI. And that's okay. I'm okay with that.
In fact, I use AI a lot, even my own writing now. I was a
little hesitant, but I do. And it is important that when
we do that that we're ensuring the quality is still high.
Prediction number three, by the end of 2026, Google
Search Console will still not have any way to
separately analyze AI mode or AI overview
data. It's a bit technical gobbledygookie
here, but the fact is Google's been really
mum about this. They provide a lot of great information in Google Search
Console, which is your window into what Google sees about your website.
But the fact that they haven't added any AI
Any method of tracking AI is very suspicious to me.
They've had a lot of pressure from people that they really care,
I think, but it's fishy to me. I
really don't see why they can't share it unless there's something they're hiding
or they feel they would give away too much to do.
As it turns out, I made this
prediction in January. Bing
Webmaster Tools has just come out with one, and we'll talk about that in a
little bit. So it's nice to see someone has done it. Prediction number four.
2026 will be the year when authentic brand storytelling
becomes the mainstay of successful practices, practices
and businesses. This is going to allow you to show that your
practice stands out from the rest.
Make people want to come to your practice
for the experience and for the people. It's.
I don't know about you, but when. When I. We obviously see a lot of
dental practices when we're doing sales, when we're doing research
on competitors, and a lot of it's very dry,
boring and just another dentist. The
ones that stand out, that really shine, have a
culture, have personality, and
it makes you want to go and see them.
AI is making it, unfortunately, it's kind of making
the drier ones a little drier.
They're kind of putting lipstick on a pig by adding more content and stuff
because they can do that quicker. But the
practices that are really going to succeed are going to put that extra
effort in to show that they are more than just their website,
more than just really boring, plain material. And
it's. I think they're going to stand out even more from the rest.
So do keep it in mind. Prediction number five. Many
practices will erroneously lean too heavily
into chasing AI search results while letting their SEO
lapse. I'm already seeing this happen
and it's very frustrating because a lot of them are
just. A lot of people are just falling to
all of the misinformation that's out there. This is going to cause significant
losses in online exposure. AI is
far too unstable. Still, don't try to catch
it. Just improve your authority and your content quality
signals and it will get you there. If
you try and chase it, you're going to be wasting money, probably going
to fly by night. Companies that say they can do it all and they can't,
it's just too much. Right now we do AI. Sure,
everyone who is in the SEO realm probably does at a level of
AI, but I mean AI
search and AI SEO. The problem is
if you focus too much on it. You're
it's like trying to catch a greased pig. It's just moving around too
much. It's changing every day. Work at it. From the slow
and fast, slow and certain
path of creating authority and creating great content. And that's what we're working
on with our clients. Prediction 6 the quality of
Google's local SEO results will be further
eroded by AI trying to add value
Air quotes AI will present incorrect facts about
local businesses and Google probably won't do anything about it
unless it makes headlines, which I guess is more likely to do. So they probably
will do something about it, but only if it makes noise and makes them look
bad. Google has shown time and time and time and
time again that they don't care about local
SEO unless there's ads involved. There's just no
words for the dumpster fire that
is local SEO. It's local results. I mean they're
just a mess of spam and way too easy ways
to manipulate them that are against guidelines that should get you
nailed if you use them. But people are getting away with it and
have been for years. It's
embarrassing to me. I don't understand how Google
can stomach it. The team there prediction 7
AI agents will become common knowledge among the general public as
they become ubiquitous. This might be
pushing it, but I do mean AI agents are all over the
news. Many people won't know what that means or what they do
or their impact. However, I do believe by the end of the year we're going
to have enough news out there that it's going to become ubiquitous and people are
going to start to realize that AI agents could
actually make their life a little easier. Implementation won't happen yet though. I don't, I
don't believe unless there's something really
revolutionary that comes out that makes it really easy to do. I think it's going
to take some time for the average person to use it. And this is
pretty easy to predict considering the fact that I think it's still a very
low adoption rate of like 40% of people even use
AI. That's going to increase a lot this year. But
getting into AI agents is yet another level of complexity. So who
knows? Prediction 8 SEOs will be re engineering
the infrastructure of websites and associated content to provide
AI and AI AI driven search engines with clear
authority signals. Now, I've mentioned before that that's something
that practices should be doing as well. We've already
begun doing this for our clients. It's not something done lightly.
And yes, I'VE tried to use AI to do it and it totally
messes it up. Do not. It just sucks at this stuff. It's
too technical, it has too many moving parts and I'm sure
we'll be able to get there, but at this point it can't. So it is
something that needs to be done. Websites, as they stand,
have been optimized a different way than how they need to be
optimized for the future. They'll still work, they'll still
get rankings and visibility. But the ones that will lead
the pack have a different infrastructure that we're currently working on
and implementing. And I'm going to end it on number nine
this is a Bit of a Dream the growing alarm that AI growth
is surpassing safeguards, which it is, will spark
a global initiative to slow it down over the next few years to allow
safeguards to catch up. I know I'm dreaming.
More pessimistically, I believe we will see more AI
and Safety Governance employees quitting
in disgust or protest from the leading AI
companies as their concerns and guidelines are thoroughly thrown out the
window in favor of profits
and just another step towards our doom.
How's that for pessimistic? It's just.
It's just if you watch this stuff, if you're monitoring it, it's
terrifying. They're really going way too quickly and safeguards that
will prevent AI from potentially being
catastrophic are being thrown out the window. Anyways,
time for General SEO News AI
overviews reduce clicks as much as 58%
this is from a bit of research done by
Ryan Law at ahrefs back
in April 2025. Ahrefs found that AI
overviews reduced clicks to top ranking site by top ranking
sites and or content, I should say by
34.5%. Despite Google's statements to
the contrary as of December 2025,
they have found that the presence of an AI overview now correlates with
a 58% lower average click through rate for
the top ranking page. Ouch. This is
why everyone wants to be found in AI. The
problem is it doesn't mean you're going to get the click, but it is still
better than not being anywhere for sure. And thankfully
local is still a bit of a different game
and we'll get into that in a little bit. And I mean what I'm talking
about are local search results. And as I alluded to earlier, Bing
Webmaster Tools officially adds AI Performance
Report. And this is such a great thing because even though it is
very weak, it's not a very powerful report. It's still a good step in the
in the direction of giving us something. And what
is this essentially in Google Search Console in
Bing Web Bing Webmaster Tools these
are kind of our peek at what Google
sees about our websites. It allows us to track what kind of traffic we're getting
basically, or however whatever information they actually want to
share. Now, AI has been around for a
while in search results, but we've never seen exactly what
that's translated to. We don't know who's clicking on those
to get to our website, what could be the keywords they were clicking or what
kind of prompt was being clicked. And not all this information is going to
be available right away and certainly isn't with Bing Webmaster
Tools, but it is in beta and it does
share how your content is cited within Microsoft Copilot as
well as Select Partner integrations. After selecting a
predetermined or custom date range, you can now see total
citations over that time period along with the average
number of cited pages per day. So this will give you some kind of a
benchmark of how you're improving over time. You can
also see which queries you were cited for as well as
which URLs have appeared. However,
you cannot see which queries served which
URLs, only the number of appearances, and that does suck. It
would be nice to have that information about the queries again. It's important
to note that this report only shows citation frequency. There is
no indication of ranking, position or prominence.
This data is available going back as far as November 1,
2025. Yay. Thank you
Microsoft. I don't say that very often. All right, Google says links will
be more visible in AI overviews. This is a bit of a
relief. Google's Robbie Stein posted to Google that updates
to how citations will be displayed in AI Overviews are coming
to quote him In AI Overviews and AI mode, groups of
links will automatically appear in a pop up as you hover over them
on desktop. So you can jump right into a website to learn
more and will show more descriptive and
prominent link icons within the response across
both desktop and mobile. Our testing
shows this new UI is more engaging, making it easier
to get to great content across the web.
Now as much as we hope this increases, you know, the click through
rate for those that are sighted, I do question how
those link icons will appear. Practices
get most of their traffic through mobile, so this pop
up they're talking about only appears on desktop and if you
are sighted in AI and hopefully you are
the only way you're going to get any kind of click through is
if those link icons are truly as prominent as they say they are and
look good. So we'll see what happens. 75% of
ChatGPT users rely on keywords for local services.
This is pretty cool. It's a bit of a harkens back to the old days
it feels like. But there's a lot of push to move away from keyword based
SEO. And while focus on topics and
other techniques grow, new data shows
that people still use traditional keyword type searches.
Now the assumption is that people are using more
long tail conversational prompts when they're doing their search.
Like what's the nearest
dentist that does dental implant. Does dental
implants and has offers
sedation. That's a long. Sorry, that's a long
one. That's a very long one. That's the kind of thing that they're talking about
that people were being taught that we're
expecting people to be using. However,
Frank Olivio from Sega Pixel spearheaded a test where they observed
participants using ChatGPT to find local service providers,
primarily in the healthcare and aesthetics fields. They found that
69% of users still searched using keyword based
queries, 25% use natural language
and 6% used a hybrid of the two.
Now the hybrid of the two is probably a bit of the canary in the
coal mine is what's coming. More and more people will be using natural
language, especially when more people start using voice search.
Voice search is where it will really change to
a natural language longer tail conversational
prompt. Because when we ask a question we don't just say
dentist nearby because we can actually speak. So we
are a little more detailed. When we're using a keyboard,
we use as little text as possible in many cases.
So this shows that keyword based searches are alive in your favorite LLM
and should not be ignored. Yet for the time being, working towards
ranking for a combination of both keyword based and conversational
prompts is your best bet. All right, to tie things up here, this is
really, really important. Even the best for last call it the
best I guess. There's been a massive change in
how local search results appear
in Google. So these are the results that you see
next to the map. Now for the
longest time you'd be able to go there on your phone and go hey cool,
I want to talk to this dentist. Click to call, make a click and it
would call. Done well Google and
it's great greed and this is there's no way around it. This
is just greed has removed the call
button unless you're paying. So unless you're doing
Google Ads and it's connected to your Google
search Google business profile, this is a way to do that
and it shows it's sponsored, you're not going to have
a call button. If you are sponsored, the call button appears within your
ad. I'm very disappointed. I wish I could say
I'm surprised. Actually it's not going to say I am a bit
surprised. It just seems so low handed, underhanded. But
again, Google just keeps wanting to improve
its bottom line and as the capitalist way
and with public being a public company,
it has this crazy
unrealistic goal of always improving its,
its profits. And I can't consider that can't keep happening
without dropping their ethics. And they're
starting to do that. I don't believe this is ethical at all.
So if you're doing any kind of marketing, doing
Google Ads is now necessary. You're going to lose
calls to your business. If you need help with this, let us know. We
are extremely affordable doing Google Ads.
We consider it just a supplement to all the SEO we do for our clients.
And you don't have to use the SEO and we're here just to help you
out no matter what you need. All right, well, on behalf of
myself, Ross Dunn, co founder of First Dentist and Scott. Oh,
not Scott. Wrong, wrong one here.
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'd like to like
answered either on the podcast for free or on a
more private consulting basis, please email info@first
dentist dentist.com. thank you for listening and remember
to tune into our next episode where we'll be sharing more 101
SEO tips and news on dental SEO.
Thanks for joining me.