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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 SEO101, a podcast dedicated
to helping dentists retire well, hello and welcome to the Dental
SEO101 podcast, episode number six by First
Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and I'm the Director of SEO and
co founder of First Dentist. Well, let's jump right in here.
We're going to start off with some non SEO news. Just because
it seemed interesting enough and pertinent enough, a
LinkedIn study has shown how to increase engagement
now this is just in case you spent some time on LinkedIn. You know, keeping
up in the latest dental trends from thought leaders or being a thought leader yourself.
A LinkedIn study by Metropol analyzed 48,000
company pages over three years, analyzing more
than 577,000 LinkedIn posts. Not
bad. The results found that posts that include links get
13.57% more interactions and
5% more views than posts that do not include links. This
contradicts what other studies have said in the past and other experts
have claimed. Historically, it was suspected that LinkedIn displayed posts
with links less often. Now this study shows that about
31% of the analyzed posts contain links and those
posts consistently outperformed ones without links. The study
also revealed that posts using carousels had the highest
engagement rate at 45%. That is
seriously impressive. Posts using polls also had
about twice the engagement rate of regular posts. Text only
posts showed the worst performance of any other post
type all right into general SEO news. This is going to
be annoying. If you haven't already noticed it, Google business profiles
had a bug resurface that is now showing old
fake removed reviews removed air
quote this is so annoying. The dumpster fire that is Google
business profiles anyway they consumed Google has
confirmed this. This is a bug. We're fake and old
removed reviews were resurfacing for some business
profiles. As if it isn't hard enough to get rid of bad
reviews that are garbage. I personally have issues
with a number of clients where there is no way
at all that Google, if they had anyone manually reviewing
them, would believe these are real. They're just
unbelievable. But somehow they don't get removed. And to have
them finally removed and then see them come back again, that would be infuriating.
So if you've seen this, hopefully by the time you listen
to this anyway, it isn't an issue anymore. These bugs do
take a while because Google puts local on the very, very low tier of
importance. But yeah, let's let's hope. All right,
what can you do to improve your site's visibility in AI search? This
is something that First Dentist we're focusing on
a lot for obvious reasons. I mean,
AI is consuming the world
and search engines more. So in many ways,
the search results we've seen since five years ago have
dramatically changed. We've seen AI overviews everywhere and
that is dramatically cutting into people's organic traffic.
Now, how much of that traffic is actually traffic that would have led
to getting a new patient? There's debate around
that because we have seen particular clients not
see a drop in business, but a drop in traffic.
So was that traffic really worthwhile getting? It's hard to say, but I don't
like the idea that is being dropped and that there's no control
over that. Once again, Google has the final say. Well,
here are some tips for you. Now this is, I know this
is a 101 show, but it's pretty difficult to stay completely
101 when we're talking about AI overviews and trying to influence
them or just simple AI search. It does
require putting your thinking cap on and going the extra
step maybe into 102 or perhaps 200.
Anyways, first of all, add extra information with
structured data. That sounds like, oh no, what the heck are you talking
about? Well, imagine giving search engines a roadmap to
your content. By adding, you help search engines understand the
specifics of your content. For instance, if you have a recipe page,
structured data can highlight ingredients, cooking
time, calories, and this makes it easy for search engines to display your
content and rich results, potentially attracting more visitors.
Yes, I read that. But it's a good, quick and easy way to describe
what's being done. Now how to do it is using what's called
schema markup and that's structured content or structured
data. It's added to the background of the page. You do need someone with a
little bit of knowledge to do it. We can certainly help you with that. And
it's something we do implement across our clients sites.
It is not rocket science. Just like most things, SEO is
simply how you attack it.
The order of importance and being on
top of what changes are happening in the given
SEO sphere, I guess you could call it. Next, you need to target
specific detailed search terms. These days people
have longer search terms. They're typing in more specific
phrases into search engines, especially when they're using voice
search, which is happening more and more often, especially for the younger generation,
by focusing on these long tail keywords that mirror natural
speech you're increasing the chances your content matching these detailed queries
will show up. This approach can improve your your visibility in
both AI overviews search and actual
AI search engines like Search, GPT, Perplexity,
Gemini. Well, I guess Gemini is its own. But anyway you're getting that. You
get the point. Search engines that are focused on being your new
place to do search. And by the way, Perplexity is gaining a lot of market
share. Nothing like Google never, but it's actually
noticeably picking up. I'm seeing more and more people talking
about it. I'm seeing more thought leaders suggest you switch to Perplexity
to get a feel for what the new search engines in the world will look
like soon. That's pretty awesome. I mean,
kudos to Perplexity. That's a fantastic honor
to be, to be put in that light in my opinion
and I do love it. I think it's, it's great. Have I abandoned using
Google? No, because that's my livelihood. I have to go between the two,
but I'm definitely using it. So when you do this kind of
targeted specific search term optimization, it doesn't mean you're
not going to be showing up in other rankings. That's really important to note. The
way that search engines work now, they're more about.
Well, they understand, they simply understand what you're looking for. In
most cases, if you have a detailed search term, you're usually adding more
information, especially if it's voice search that they have to
draw from to provide a better result. So creating great
content with great
explanations, using terms you have
investigated and you know that you're your target market are
using is going to help you. Next you want to incorporate
images and videos. This has never really changed. We've always
suggested this, but it's becoming more and more important and it's
an uphill battle for many of our dental clients and
prospects because, well, your life is already busy
and it's getting more and more necessary
though to create video that you can show off. And it has
to be really should be authentic.
You're taking video in your office,
maybe you invite some people over there are friends that don't mind being on video
and you have them in the chair and you
chat and it doesn't matter if the audio, sure, it's recording audio.
You're not going to use the audio in your video. Probably it's going to have
a nice voiceover or simple music or
whatever, but it just shows someone smiling and in
the chair and having a great experience. Another one might be
at the desk, talking to the receptionist and doing these
on a regular basis. And then switch it up, bring up another friend and have
it there. And change the lighting slightly so it looks like it's a different day.
Make people change slightly so they're not wearing the same clothing.
You can get a lot of this video done in a single day.
Not a great fun day, but you can mix it up to have some fun
with it. You pretty much need to, in other words, to. To
ensure that next time you need to do this, these people will help again, take
them for dinner, whatever. You know, make it a fun day. But
the amount of video and collateral you'll get out of that is
immense. And it's going to make your life a lot easier for the
coming days where video is taking a front seat.
And from those, you can easily get captures for images as well, for whatever you
need that for, from ads to examples of particular
procedures, whatever there may be very important.
On that note, YouTube has become
more, even more important. So having
this information and perhaps hiring a team
to do video for YouTube,
even taking the video you've already created in and wrapping it up and making it
as something for YouTube, we do that as well. That's a good idea. That's going
to help. Will it help immediately? It depends. Depends on what the
subject is, whether or not it's something truly innovative or
really catches people's eyes. That's a different thing entirely. But
it is something you need to build on and it's going to be
harder. There's so many practices out
there that are doing decent optimization. So you
need to go above that and do greater. You need to be
a better competitor. And that's what
we're upping our game for our clients to do. Very important.
Encourage visitor interaction. That's the next bit here.
Search engines. Notice how users interact with
your website. If visitors spend more time on your pages, it
signals that your content is valuable. To boost
engagement. Create content that includes and invites
comments, shares and discussions.
Tricky. Without question, tricky. Like, how do you do
that without this getting out of control? I mean, some comment
areas will just be a nightmare to manage. This has to
be done very carefully. It's something that's recommended, but I would definitely
speak with your SEO, speak with your team, figure out what
is doable and whether or not this is just something you put on the back
burner or something you want to go full steam ahead on. You need to
go with your eyes wide open. There's a bit of management
involved for comment and
discussions. Finally, keep your content fresh.
It's been the norm for dental practices to
have content that is written once, perhaps very well,
hopefully very well, but then it just sits
and some parts of your site will be like that no matter what.
But if it is content that is cornerstone, content that really
talks about how great your practice is,
your differentiators and perhaps shows video or all the different things
that we've talked about that are really good, well, you need to keep that
lively. Doesn't mean you have to do this every week, but
keep it fresh. If there's something new, perhaps you've added new
equipment. We'll update the page. If
there's been a change in location, definitely update your
imagery and your video. If there's any changes
in how you do what you do update the page.
It is stuff that Google can see, search engines can
see overall, and it shows life to not only them, but also
to prospects who are considering your practice. All right, I hope
those have helped. I know it is a lot,
trust me, I don't think I've ever had to learn so much
all at once on a regular basis in my
28 year career of doing SEO. It's very
intense right now and it's going to get worse. Worse or better.
Depends how you look at it. I do enjoy the
yeah, I do enjoy the challenge. I just
hope that it will at some point get to a
place where this is what works and this is what doesn't work
versus always a moving target. That might be a dream
in vain though we'll see. Either way, there's lots
of work to do in with this
thanks to AI content being put out there all the time,
usually in a very poor fashion. Google has updated its
Google Quality Rater guidelines. So these are guidelines that are used by
humans to rate Google results. Google
then takes information from this these Google quality raters and
helps informs inform its algorithm as training information
so that it becomes better at noticing issues. So it's
not them directly writing to the algorithm or making changes
to what they've provided information on. Like they
say they don't like this page or is poor quality.
It may end up that that page gets dropped or
has a lower ranking yet later. But it's not because directly because of them.
It's going to be because Google has gotten smarter about what has been
provided in terms of input on its own rankings.
So that said, Google has updated it. They did it up back in January
and here are some core changes Scaled Content Abuse
Creating a lot of content with little effort or
originality, with no Editing or manual curation.
This is their answer to generative AI. This is essentially what they
meant anyway. It's, it's one example of an automated tool used
that would create this kind of content. So if you use AI
to help with content, which you should, we do hardly believe in that. Always
be sure to vet what's created and expand on
it to make it amazing. I say amazing because that's how it stands
out. That's how you will not be just yet another practice.
Main content created with little to no effort. This is a new
catch all section in the in the Raiders guidelines for low
quality paraphrased content often seen with
generative AI and other forms of automated generation.
So again, any content you create, ensure it
adds value and
it, you know, adds value is really just really where it
cuts off. But just, you know, give credit where it's due.
If it's something you need to source, rewrite
it if you feel it wasn't perfectly written, if it's not going to be a
quote, but it needs to add value and make it excellent.
Misleading claims and they're getting. Well, this is a good argument whether or
not they're truly getting good at this. But Google is getting stricter on
exaggerated or misleading claims. They claim keeping
everything honest anyway, we can dream. But the key here
is that using AI is not bad, but you have to be very careful because
it does often hallucinate, ensure what you're getting from
AI is true, high quality and vetted.
That's it. These are things that just make good sense and were
inevitable with Google's. It was an
inevitable update to the Google rater guidelines. AI in
search well, we kind of talked about AI AI, but this is sort of the
AI section. Google AI overviews are linking over
and over again to itself, which is really annoying
and I hope is fixed soon because it's. Well,
to me, obviously to me it seems as though Google is just favoring
itself, which I know they're already
in the target reticle of the Justice Department,
but this is the kind of thing that should not be happening. Anyway, there
are reports where AI overviews are adding links that point back to itself.
In an example by Matthew Kerr, he found that if you search for
narcissist, the AI overview links the search results for the term
narcissist with the same AI overview. Oops. If
you see any other oddities like that, please share them wherever you hang out because
everyone should see this stuff. It's garbage. I've seen
other things like this. I just, I Just got, I'm too busy. I just get
past it and go, whatever. Yeah, more garbage. Google is using AI to improve
paid ads. Let's consider this a win for now. I'm hoping it's win.
If you do paid ads, which many of our practices do,
it's a very good idea. Then this is good news.
Apparently. In its annual ads safety
report, Google has highlighted how AI has helped shaped paid
ads. They used AI to remove
5.1 billion bad ads, restrict
9.1 billion ad ads, suspended
39.2 million advertiser accounts. What?
Anyway enforced against 1.3 billion publisher
pages, blocked or removed 415
million scam related ads. Wow,
that's just. Those are some big numbers. It's
hard to fathom how much crap was in
ads already. Never mind how much they probably
missed. Wow. Anyway, talking about buyer
beware, it's the Internet's just such a
nutty place to be, but that's just blows my mind.
Now to finish things off here, I wanted to introduce you to something that we're
hoping comes about. It's a little
technical, but it is important. I think you'll see that pretty quickly.
LLMs text. What the
heck's that? Well, it's a file and a
proposed and it's a proposed standard for AI website content
crawling. So there's always been a thing called robots
txt. Well, not always, but for a long time in search. It's a way
for owners of a website to tell Google tell search engines
how to index its website and where not to go.
It's very, very important and very helpful. And you can
even block certain search spiders from visiting your website,
which again is a very good idea because it is.
Well, you don't necessarily want them everywhere and there's
certain content that may be sensitive or certain content that would just mess up
your search results because it's totally irrelevant.
But there's nothing for AI like there's just really nothing that's done a
good job. So Australian technologist Jeremy Howard has
proposed the use of an LLMs txt.
Of course he's alluding to large language model txt.
It's a file that aims to provide a standard way for AI large
language models to efficiently crawl and access website content
while giving content creators more control over their data use. The file would
work in a manner similar to the robots txt file, using simple markdown
language, allowing website owners to provide context on how their
content should be accessed by AI models. It would allow
website owners the ability to specify which website areas should
be Accessible Potentially benefiting SEO by guiding
AI models to relevant content. The
benefits I think we've covered a bit of them. But it protects proprietary
content by directing AI models that comply with usage directives. Again,
that comply because there are directives out there that
search engines just don't comply with. Enhances interaction with
AI, thus improving the quality of AI generated responses.
Let's hope may improve the content visibility in AI
powered search results. Offers a competitive advantage
through effective AI readiness. Debatable, but again,
hopeful. Now the challenges and limitations. We'll kind of already mention this,
but adoption. There's no guarantee that every
one of these developers and LLM creators are going
to comply with us. They're like whatever.
I want access to everything. Potential conflicts with existing robots
Txt and XML site directives. These are technical, but
if there's a conflict saying yes, no, yes, no and maybe they're looking at both
and trying to figure out which way they should go. That could be an issue.
And it exposes content to competitors for analysis.
This is an old technique that we used to use when we were doing competitor
analysis in the back in the day. Well, we still do it, but when it
was a little easier and we would look at robust TXT and
see where a competitor was blocking people from going, we go, ooh, well I
want to see what this is. So it was technically
a pretty simple way to see what the person was
hiding and that would I guess in this case do the same thing. It was
never super revealing whatever we found. But sometimes we
get a hint about what they were up to or what they were maybe their
dev site or something that would give an
indicator what's going on. Okay, taking my competitor analysis hat off,
let's get back to this. When will this attack? When will this
take effect? Well, currently it's just being discussed and
apparently implemented by some, but it's not yet universally adopted.
Until it is adopted by major industry players,
its effect will be limited. We'll certainly be
implementing it for all of our clients as soon as we possibly can.
When it's when there's a point to do. So how do you create this
file if you want to do it yourself? Well, there's certain tools online website.
LLMs is a WordPress
plugin that you can use. Never tried it.
None of these have actually have I ever tried. So do
keep that in mind. Markdowner. That's one word.
It's a GitHub tool Amplify. This is
an LML LLMs try and say that Fast
Text generator and fire crawl that's
firecrawl.dev Places to look into. If you're really
interested in finding out more, it is all very fascinating for us
SEO nerds. May not be to you, but
I think and hope it will be a part of our lives soon. Because it
is important that AIs have some restrictions and I hope it's
enforced. Who will do it? No idea.
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'd like answered either on the podcast for free, love to
answer some questions for you, 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
sharing more SEO101 tips and news on dental
SEO.