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WEO Media is a thoughtful and technical marketing company with 15 years of experience. Ian McNickle Is a Co-Founder of WEO Media and he let's us know the importance of tracking and converting leads. How to quickly and strategically start marketing after you purchase the practice and got the keys in hand using the Google Business Page. We discuss how rebranding can impact the practice and how to strategically transfer into a new brand with the help of experts like WEO.
Contact Ian to discuss your transition needs when it comes to marketing a new practice. Let him know you saw the show!!
Email: ian@weomedia.com
Mobile: (503) 708-6327
Web: www.WEOmedia.com
0:00 Into Music
0:40 Episode Intro
2:30 Introducing WEO Media
4:49 Biggest Challenges When Transitioning Marketing
8:33 How Do You Transition the Brand or Name?
14:39 What Advantages to Acquisitions Have
17:30 Best Ways To Boost Your Searchability Online
19:30 The Main Goals of a Marketing Company
23:03 How Do You Track Marketing Effectiveness
31:02 Questions You Should Be Asking a Marketing Firm
33:43 Writing Unique Content For Your Site
40:25 Understanding a Holistic Approach to Marketing
SHOW HOST:
As a dental buyer representative, Michael Dinsio helps dentists buy dental practices step-by-step. With over a decade of experience and more than 500 dental transactions, Michael is a key opinion leader in the dental industry. This program helps walk dentists through the process of becoming a dental practice owner via dental practice acquisitions. If you would like a free consult with Michael or would like to work with Michael in the future visit his webpage. https://www.nxlevelconsultants.com/buyer-representation.html
DENTAL UNSCRIPTED HAS A WEBSITE ! ! !
Find all the content from SEASON 1: "Start Up Unscripted"... as well as SEASON 2: "Dental Acquisition Unscripted", it's all here in one spot here π https://www.dentalunscripted.com
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#marketingadentalpractice #buyingadentalpractice #marketing #dentalpodcast
Intro Music by D Fine Us on https://artlist.io/song/15785/howling-at-the-moon
This podcast covers from START to FINISH How to Acquire a Dental Practice. Michael Dinsio, founder of Next Level Consultants has literally seen hundreds of deals as a banker in the industry & he has personally consulted hundreds of dentists as a Buyers Representative. Michael talks with GUEST SPEAKERS about Due Diligence, Legal, Demographics, and more... He invites experts to the show to help you avoid those headaches and heartbreaks. So start at the TOP w/ Episode 01 and work your way through the transition process. We break it down step by step in a true #UNSCRIPTED and genuine way.
00:00
Oh yeah, here we go practice acquisition. There are pitfalls throughout the entire process.
00:25
Acquisition Unscripted, the truth when buying and selling at dental practice.
00:36
And now your host, Michael Dinsio. All right, guys, welcome. Is my voice shot because holy cow, my voice is gone. It is Shark Week. The last episode I've made it through. Hopefully you guys got a ton of great marketing advice this week. I will be introducing my next guest, but we got into kind of got into ROI on a whole nother level, like pretty deep.
01:06
We definitely touched on some Google algorithm stuff, which was really fascinating. Like how do you talk to a marketing person as smart as the guy that I'm about to introduce you to who knows SEO on another level, but how do you interview someone so that they make it tangible and easy to understand? I thought he did a great job. Big, big picture. I thought we covered a lot of ground ROI, Google algorithms, converting the
01:35
the digital footprint from old website to new. We got into conversion rates, which is very important. So marketing companies need to get you calls. How do you convert them? What's important and how do you track? So a lot of great stuff. As I conclude this week, I want to remind all of you, what I do is buy your representation. So if you're looking to buy a practice, you need help, need us to hold your hand through the process.
02:03
We've got a couple of programs that could help you do that. Buying a practice can be super scary. We've got years and years and hundreds of deals of experience in it. So if you're looking for someone to hold your hand through the process, let's set up a consult over at Next Level Consultants. Without further ado, let's get it going. Last episode of Shark Week, and thank you all for being a part of it.
02:29
All right, all right, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Dental Acquisition Unscripted. This is Mike D'Incio with Next Level Consultants. You guys know me, but today I'm interviewing a friend that I've known for, gosh, 20 years. We've done business together and he's taught me a lot about the dental marketing game. I think they've been in the game for longer than 20 years now. So is that right? Over 20 years?
02:55
Good 15 something like that. Yeah, it's been a while though. Feels like it. It feels like it. Well, with that with that with that being said, this is Ian McNichol. He's the founder and co-owner, co-owner, co-founder. you tell the audience who WIO Media is and what you guys are all about. Yeah, thanks for having us today, Mike. Appreciate it. Yeah, I'm one of the three co-founders of WIO Media. We're a dedicated dental marketing agency. We're based in Portland, Oregon area, but
03:24
There's a lot of companies these days where we're pretty virtual. staff is all over the country. And so we have clients as a result all over the country. Um, but yeah, we've been around, you know, for about 15 years, we've, we've done very well. We exclusively do dental work with probably a couple thousand proxies over the years now, you know, general dentists and specialists alike. Um, we know the space inside and out and love to share some information with everybody today, just from the lessons learned over the years. Dude, thank you so much. Like, uh, just having you on the program as an asset to us and look.
03:52
Today, this week is marketing shark week. We've gotten into a lot of great stuff, some tips and tricks. Honestly, each episode has kind of taken a different form, not really where I thought it would go. And so really our format today is just, it's wide open. Let's see where it goes. But as you know, we're working through the acquisition process and we've hit marketing. And marketing is key because you're trying to grow a practice the minute you buy it.
04:22
really important that you have a growth strategy, that you don't just buy something and stay stagnant. And oftentimes you are inheriting or purchasing somebody else's situation that may not be as great as it could be. so a lot of different directions that we could go in, but why don't we just start it by an open-ended question is what do you see as the biggest pitfalls?
04:49
for an acquisition like a buyer walking into buying a practice. Like what do you see as a challenge kind of like in your world of doing this for as long as I've been in the business? Yeah. Yeah. When it comes to acquisitions, know, marketing specifically, probably not planning ahead enough in advance is the thing that I see more often than not, bites doctors.
05:12
Yeah. And using a shark, we can now do their bites. I'm right. So that's good. didn't get that. Dang. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of times there may be a rebranding involved, maybe a new logo, name switch, that type of thing. So you want to allot some time for, the logo design. And if you're going to be building or launching a rebranding, a website, obviously the logo generally needs to be done before that can be done. So it's just kind of making sure you've got, you know, a good three to four months.
05:41
Uh, before, know, you need to kind of take ownership or before you're starting to see patients, um, start that process, right? So you can get, the logo going. If there's a rebranding, you know, they can do the redesign on the website. And sometimes there's even like a, a changing of the website URL, you know, depending on if it wasn't the old doctor's name. And so a lot of times what we'll do in that case is maybe run parallel URLs or do a redirect, right? Where the old one redirects to the new one, that kind of thing. There's different ways to approach it, but.
06:11
All these things take a little time to implement. So that's probably the biggest pitfall is if you know any doctors listening to this. I mean, three to four months out, you ought to be engaging with a marketing company about that far out at least further out and even better if you can do six months. Cool. But three to four is probably a good rule of thumb. Now on the startup side, like all day, every day, I mean, you can, you can waterfall back into the timeline of that all day long. The challenge is with an acquisition is this
06:40
folks don't usually know that they're going to the finish line at an acquisition probably 30 days, maybe 45 if they're lucky out before they maybe have an accepted LOI or let's say the LOI is accepted, but then there's some negotiation during the due diligence of something that they saw that they didn't like. so
07:06
Okay, so you're through due diligence and then now you know you're doing the deal. So you're probably about 30 days out. So that can be challenging not having your your ducks in a row. So in those situations, Ian, like you do you suggest kind of using the sellers digital assets and then in the short term and the interim of getting up to speed? Yeah, certainly, you know, certainly in it.
07:35
It really depends on the strategy of what the buyer is looking to do. Are they looking to kind of maintain, is the selling doctor going to be sticking with them for a period of time so that it's easy to leverage and keep those things in place? And then you slowly migrate to different branding eventually. That's one path. Obviously, the other path is a doctor selling, walking away tomorrow, smooth, transition. So in that case, you can still do that.
08:02
But if the buyer has a pretty, cause sometimes I talk with buyers and like, yeah, I definitely want to rebrand. I want to have, I've got my name and my idea for how I want to brand myself. And that's cool. In that case, you know, you can still kind of get the logo and the branding going and maybe buy the URL and even kind of get a website queued up without an address. So you can still do parts of the process. Even if you don't know specifically where you're going to land, if you want to rebrand it yourself. So I think it depends on which path you're going, but, also it depends on what the selling doctor is looking to do.
08:32
Let's talk about like what you just said. I don't think we spent enough time on Shark Week about a strategy here. guys, you guys definitely have a foothold in the digital, you know, website space. You've been doing it for so long. How do you, how do you go from like Robert Smith, DDS is the website domain.
08:59
to change it to, you know, Apple, dental or whatever, whatever it is. Like how, how do you capture, let's just say that robertsmithdds.com is doing decent. It's got maybe, you know, it shows up on the first page, whatever he's been around for years and they, they do get, you know, new clients, patient calls from that. How do you transfer that over in a smart way? Like, can you,
09:29
Can you give us a little bit of that? Like we'll never be able to do this ourselves, but at least like comprehend what the marketing companies are trying to do. And, buddy, keep it at a first grade level here. I know that dude, Google and heck even, you know, Apple maps and there's all kinds of things. we could probably get crazy here. Let's try to keep it to Google though. Let's just, let's just try to keep it to Google for now. How do you, how do you jockey that, that
09:58
asset over high. Is there best practices? Yeah, yeah. So so Google is probably, you know, the most important thing you need to worry about, obviously, except about two thirds of the search volume in North America. So that's going to be the top one we focus on initially. But yeah, so when you when you're changing the branding, you know, in the URL, I mean, that's really, guess, the first thing to think about is, the URL going to stay the same or change? If it's going to stay the same, it's that's fairly easy. You don't need to do much.
10:27
Eventually, you're going to want to update the website, of course, but where it gets real tricky is if you're updating the URL, which a lot of times happens. A lot of times the buyer wants to rebrand and it's old brand was in the doctor's specific name and the new doctor wants it maybe in their name or something else. it's a, sometimes you get a practice that's already got a couple of locations and they're buying a third location and they want to kind of tuck it into their existing branding. So it depends a little bit on that, but to get specific about Google.
10:54
So everybody knows there's kind of like the Google business page, right? And so that's, I encourage people to think of that as like their second website because it gets a lot of traffic. And a lot of times people will do the search and they'll click on that and they'll look at the Google business page. And a lot of times they'll convert right there. They can schedule an appointment. Sometimes they can call directly before they even visit the website. they see, oh, you know, 134 reviews, 4.9 star average, got some nice photos on the Google business page.
11:22
looks like it's relatively nearby. I'm just going to go ahead and call them. A lot of times they don't even visit the website. you know, oftentimes they will, but you know, there's a decent chunk of the time they don't. So the first thing you want to do is get that Google page really converted to the proper information. This can get tricky because you have to prove ownership. So if the existing doctor has ownership and actually remembers their login,
11:48
You know, good luck with that. We've spent a little time on that this week. That's it. It's getting all the passwords, isn't it? Not just that one, but Dentrix and all the things. But yeah, you're right. OK, so so having the the access to it is key. Step one. Yeah, if we can get access, it's relatively easy for us to make the updates. If it's if it's a situation more commonly where they don't remember, then you got to go through kind of a verification of owner process with Google.
12:18
And it's helpful, like if you're hiring an agency, a marketing agency to do this stuff, it's beneficial if they're like a Google certified partner, does give them more connections within Google to help move things along quickly. That would be kind of a piece of advice to you. It's like a common misdemeanor with like a Google certified partner agency is people think, oh, that means they're gonna do a good job. All it really means is that people have passed a test which technically show they kind of technically know what to do. It doesn't mean they've got good customer service.
12:48
doesn't mean they build good websites, doesn't mean they're honest and ethical. All it means is they technically passed a test, right? So now they do have higher tiers, like you've been with them for longer and you spend more money and stuff like that. So we over the years, we've gotten to be a pretty high tier within Google, but regardless, if you're looking to partner with somebody from a doctor's perspective, it's kind of a, it's a nice, it's not a have to have, but it's a nice to have because it will help you get some things moved quickly, more quickly along with Google. If you're trying to recover passwords and just get things resolved.
13:18
Um, that that's kind of step one with Google. And then of course you got everything else, Facebook and Instagram, you know, all the degrees and so forth. So, so what you're saying is, is really tap into kind of the, the, the, uh, listings. think the official word is listings, the third party listings to tie, to tie the old site to the new site or the old name to the new name that it really starts there is really tying everything back to.
13:47
Yeah, you want to do Google kind of first and foremost, but absolutely. There's literally like over a hundred different directories and listings out there and there's more at it all the time. And so what most marketing companies use is we'll use an aggregator service to do a lot of them where you can just kind of input the correct information and it blasts it out over the next 30 to 45 days, they'll get sync. And the bigger, more important ones like Google, Yelp and some of those, you want to go in and manually do those because there's just so much that is.
14:14
There's so much more you can do with the manual process that gets you a much bigger bang for the buck than just kind of simply updating information. So the big director is you want to really physically do those with having like an SEO, you know, manager do that kind of work. So, but it's really helpful if you do it right. That makes, that makes total sense. Um, very, very cool. Um, so we, we talked a little bit about like how to, how to
14:42
how to transfer that over. The idea of startup versus acquisition is kind of lingering in my head. And I know I'm not supposed to cross over. I'm breaking my own role with you, Ian. like, what are like, I'll give you the opportunity that I didn't get the rest of the sharks of really defining from a marketing perspective, what's the biggest advantage of buying a practice from a marketing perspective? Well,
15:11
Would it be disadvantage or advantage? It's probably advantage. Let's say advantage. What's the advantage of buying a practice versus doing a scratch star in your world? of course, that's a hot topic in everybody's respective fields. But in your field, marketing, are there advantages then? Yeah, certainly there can be. Likewise, there's a flip side of that coin if the existing practice you're buying has a bunch of bad reviews or
15:40
has done some nefarious stuff on Google and has been penalized, it can actually be a negative. But I would say generally it's a positive. Google looks at how long the website has been active and live. So if you can keep that URL in place, or redirect it perhaps, you get some benefit there. There's name recognition from Google searches and things like that. Domain authority can be built up, trying to keep it at the first grade level, but domain authority is like an important thing that Google looks at to determine
16:08
How high to rank you in a Google search is one of their, their, know, tons and tons of different, you know, there's a couple hundred different ranking factors, but that's one of the important things that they look at. So all those things are better. Uh, if you've, if you've been around for awhile, right? So an existing practice. So generally it's, beneficial, um, from that perspective. Yeah. I, I, um, I heard someone say once, and I'm not sure if it was this week or in years past.
16:35
that your domain is like an address, your house, your house. And if you're changing it, you're changing the address, then people might not be able to find you. So essentially you've got to build the new house and tell the post office to redirect your mail and all of that good stuff. But the longer that your house has been listed, the more authority so to speak.
17:02
Uh, that that particular site has, mean, get into a little bit of the authority stuff. I, this is interesting to me. Like, uh, it just, it just feels like this, like kissing the ring type situation with Google. Like you can never really figure it out. Um, like, like a credit score, there's certain things that you need to do to make sure you get a score. What are the, what are the big ones? I mean, you'll, we'll never be able to get into all a hundred that you just.
17:31
said that hundreds, but what are like the big, big things? Yeah. when it comes to just ranking on Google in general, I mean, obviously getting the Google business page properly set up with the correct information is, is important. Getting all the listings to be again, consistent is very helpful, especially the major directories, know, Yelp and Facebook and health grades and some of the big guys. Um, but when you're, you're looking at just pure Google rankings, uh, that's
17:56
Really, I teach entire courses on this. So the way I think about it, the way we teach this is you've got a set of what we call on-page ranking factors, then off-page. So on-page would be on the website itself. So optimizing the code, know, HTML, know, meta tags and keywords and all that stuff. The content is probably the most important piece. Having unique content that's written specifically and only for your practice. That's a really big factor. you know, videos,
18:25
photos, anything that's not stock. So stock content, Google gives you very little to no credit for it. So whether it's written content, photos or videos, if they're not unique and not optimized, then you'd get very little benefit. And simply like having unique stuff in and of itself, that doesn't necessarily help a lot unless you do it properly. So unique content, you want to have, you know, keywords that you're trying to rank for. If you have videos and you're posting them on YouTube and then embedding them on your website, if you don't
18:54
you know, fill out a title for the YouTube video. And you probably know this from your podcast, right? You want to have a title, you want to have a description so people can, it can be indexed and found by Google. If you don't do those things, then it doesn't have as much impact on your SEO ranking. So lots of little stuff like that on page, the code and the content are by far the big ones. Off page, it's your directories. Another thing we didn't talk about yet is really reviews. online reviews is, is everybody knows this is not a newsflash. Everybody knows they're important, but I think a lot of people probably don't realize how important they are.
19:24
because they do actually, they're a pretty decent factor for Google rankings. And of course, when we teach marketing at a higher level, we're talking really, there's kind of three steps. You got to generate a lead, number one. Number two, you convert that lead to an appointment request. Number three, you convert that patient into sole dentistry, right? So the marketing company, we're really trying to generate the lead and it's really on the office to convert the lead and then have case acceptance happen in the chair. So we can really kind of just do that first step.
19:52
So there's a lot of things that go into doing that on our side. What we found that gets the best results for folks is if we can work with practices who are willing, this is just advice I'd give your listeners here. If you hire a marketing company, try to find one that you can partner with and not just be a vendor. There's a big difference between a vendorship mentality and a partnership mentality. And you wanna hire some group, some company that's going to collaborate with you. They're gonna share information every month.
20:20
Hey, we got you ranking for these keywords. What are you seeing? What kind of phone calls are you getting? Right? Because we're trying to track, the phone calls going up? Are the appointment requests going up? Is the Google traffic and rankings, of course, corresponding to that? So, but if we see traffic and phone calls going up and the practice is like, oh, we're not really getting any new patients from it. Something is wrong. Right? One of those three steps is a miss. And so we can record calls and work with them on that stuff. And a lot of times,
20:48
You know, when we get, if we do get complaints like that from practices, we'll go through their recorded calls. you look 45 % of your calls are going to voicemail, you know, and then the ones that you're answering, they're like, hello, you know, so, uh, you know, welcome to someone Bob Smith dentistry. That kind of thing, right? There's just like the training is really lacking in the attention. Yeah. So that gets you in trouble all the time. I do talk about like a lot as, a consultant, like
21:17
you can hold your marketing company accountable to getting you some phone calls. Absolutely. mean, you you're spending some money. You need to know what, what the trickle down is, but, uh, well, and, and not, but, but, and the, the, the, the onus is also in you in that, like, you got to track your conversion rates and you got to look at how many calls you, you, you, you missed and
21:44
We're always putting software on our clients system where we're listening to calls because I mean, it's great to say that you got, you know, 30, 40 new patients this month, but I want to know how many calls you got because what if you had 60 calls and you only got 20 new patients, you know, um, there's, there's a miss there, just like diagnosing dentistry and converting the treatment and tracking like treatment acceptance.
22:14
Like it's the same on calls to converting to the appointment, but also it swings all the way through to treatment actually. It's not just how'd you take the call and did you convert the call, but also did you then convert the treatment that you diagnosed? you might spend a couple thousand dollars with WeO Media on a pay-per-click camp that panned this month.
22:40
And if you've got five calls, which might be a little lower, but two of them, you got to Invisalign cases. Well, that paid for itself easily. So, you know, I like to take it to ROI as well. I'm glad you said that. And that triggered something. how Ian back to to tracking. Can I ask you this? So kind of in a different direction, how
23:08
What's the best way to track where the source of the new patient came from? Right? Because if you're doing, if you're doing Google or a pay-per-click campaigns or postcards or Facebook or whatever, just having, like you said, the Google My Business page complete. Like all of these things, patients come in and they say, where'd you hire of us? And they say, Google.
23:36
mean, that could be anybody. So what's your advice on real tracking? How do you track this stuff? Yeah, that's always... Is this a tough question? No, it's a long answer, but I'll keep it to a shorter version. right, first grade. Remember, first grade. Yeah. So the short answer is it's impossible to accurately track every single lead. What you want to try to do is approximate as best you can.
24:04
In the olden days, we would use a separate tracking number for every single different thing. Different phone number on Facebook, different on Instagram, different on website, different on Google, different on Yelp. so the problem was that tended in the days past, you'd get severely penalized by Google and your rankings because they would say, well, we don't know which of these numbers is correct. so it loses confidence in the information it's displaying. And so it tends to hurt your rankings. Google has gotten more forgiving at that over time.
24:33
But generally, it's kind of a, when you're talking digital, it's a little trickier to do that. Now, if you're doing radio, TV, print, direct mail, definitely use different tracking numbers for those. But even, even on those, you know, if somebody hears your radio campaign, call 800 Bob Smith, you know, whatever. A lot of times they still go online and Google search Bob Smith and go to his website and end up calling him through the website. So you just have to recognize that a lot of
25:01
consumer behavior, they're typically going to look at between three to seven pieces of information before they pick up the phone and call you. And you're oftentimes only able to track the last thing that they looked at. what we say, that's so true. Yeah. Yeah. What we teach in our courses in the marketing classes that I that I'll do with these, you know, workshops and dental conferences and study clubs and all that kind of thing. You know, one of the things I'll teach is you definitely want to track the aggregate. Like so total calls, you know, increasing
25:30
new patient versus existing, if you can use like a patient prism or some sort of software like that that helps you discern these things. And then you want to start it with like, what's the top level ROI? So I'm spending 2000 a month, I got 20 new patients, $100 on the acquisition cost. So start there, is that number acceptable? If it is, okay, cool, you're in a good space. Now, can we dig deeper and see specifically, well, how about more, where should I, if I'm like, if I want to spend more money, where should I increase my budget or?
25:59
I want to dial back what's the least bang for the buck. And so then it's like, okay, is SEO versus PPC versus social. And so in those conversations, you can track things. So like on the pay-per-click ads, there's little tracking mechanisms you can use in there with cookies and where you can follow them through to see kind of the different pages they've clicked on. So you can, to a degree, get a feel for what are your more popular pages, your landing pages, what your more popular search results. And so
26:28
You can get a sense of what's working the best, but to narrow it down to like, I got 20 new patients that I want to know specifically where each one of those 20 came from. That is admittedly difficult to do. You can get a feel for generally by certain things, it's, you know, it's a little harder to know. So your suggestion would be to look at your marketing mix. I was a marketing major, marketing mix. You have a mix of things, tools, things you're investing in. And then
26:57
those that mix is yielding X amount of calls. And then you would take the calls and divide it by how much you're spending. And then that's your kind of like your base is what you're saying. And then at that point, you can kind of play with the mix. that what you want? can you can always dig deeper. But I just I don't want people to kind of lose, you know, side of the forest through the trees or the the idea is return on investment, right? So it's like you want to spend X amount of dollars and get
27:25
five, 10 times return on your money when you're getting patient flow. So that's kind of the high level. But how do you, especially with dental groups, they're always going to want to squeeze every last dollar out. and frankly, any practice should want the same thing. If I'm spending X amount of dollars, I want to get the best return I can get. so there are a lot of things you can do with campaigns where you can use unique form fills on different landing pages. You can use your kind of coupon codes to identify
27:55
you know, you know, use a coupon code springtime, you know, and you only use that on Yelp and then use something else only on Google or, know, on Facebook. So there's ways to kind of track it with, with things like that. Um, and there's of course cookies, can do cookies and things like that. And then you can use tracking numbers and some, some things you can use tracking numbers a little differently. So there are ways to get at it. Um, and you can get fairly accurate, but I just, a hundred percent accuracy. just don't think it's possible. Yeah.
28:24
No, that's the right answer. Sorry for the hard question. just didn't really dig into that too much this week. And I feel like the ROI conversation needed to be dug into a little bit deeper. One other quick thing I would add, sorry to interrupt you Mike. Another way to do this is layering things over time. you start with one service, like we're just doing SEO and you're kind of get it up in your ranking wall and you see kind of your
28:52
Once you're kind of your phone calls and your traffic kind of plateau, like, okay, we know this is our baseline, what we're getting from SEO, spending this much, getting this many patients ROI. So you could do that. Now we're going to layer on PPC ads on Google, right? Optimize that for three to six months, see what the difference is. So if you really want it to know, you could sequence these things one at a time over time and kind of establish new baselines as you go. And that is a way to get more accurate, but it's a slower process to get there. Yeah.
29:21
And to do anything, you should do it at least three months. Is that kind of the rule of thumb? It largely depends on what it is. So like for pay-per-click ads, mean, you turn on an ad, you're getting calls and clicks the same day you turn on the campaign, but it does take time to dial it in to get the cost per click down, to get the conversion rates better on the landing pages, to see what terms are more efficient. So usually within three to four months, a good TPC manager should have a pretty well...
29:50
not totally optimized, but pretty dang good. And you should be getting a pretty good ROI within a few months. SEOs is like, if PPC ads are a sprint SEOs, the marathon, right? It takes time. So if you are in downtown Seattle, that's much, much more difficult than if you were in Eastern Montana, right? I mean, it's based on population density, right? So the more densely populated the area that your practice is in, the longer it's going to take you to get SEO results. Getting back to that kind of domain authority piece where it's like, if you've
30:18
If you buy a practice in downtown Seattle that's been there for 20 years, you you want that digital agency to do a little research. Well, how is this domain ranking? Like if you've got a super powerful domain, you probably want to do what you can to try to keep it at least as a parallel domain to maybe your additional website. You know, maybe you can have two websites, one purely for marketing, one more for patients. Like there's different strategies there, but you want to pay attention to that. it's largely the competition will determine like how quickly can you really start judging the results for SEO.
30:47
Yeah, that's good. That's really good. Ian, thank you for for doing that. It's a it's a complex world there. It's why you guys have experts probably that just specialize on on on that. Oh, we have we have a team of a dozen people and that's all they do is SEO, like literally. What what on that vein? What are the right questions to ask marketing firm that like, like, like you kind of touched on and I that you did on the whole.
31:16
Google preferred provider thing. I always wondered about that. But with a transition, a startup really just partnering back to that conversation, like you said, like partnering with a firm and someone that educates you about your stuff. What are some really good questions as you're interviewing marketing companies and seeing what they all have to offer? yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
31:44
Yeah, there's a number of a number of maybe a topical categories, you know, you might want to ask him like, when it comes to results, you know, it's like, Hey, how much experience do you have with your pediatric or ortho or perioral surgery, you know, whatever your, what your type of practice, do you have a lot of experience with my type? You have experience in my, in my kind of geography and you know, whether you're in like Pennsylvania, Maryland, Idaho, like Nevada, there are definitely different differences regionally in terms of like what you would do.
32:14
from messaging and some things, like the technical parts identical. You know, it's like, oh, you need to understand the market for most of it. You really don't. It's more on the technical side. So the questions you're going to want to ask would be more along the lines of, you you have experience with the type of practice, you know, how long have you guys been in business? How many clients have you worked with? Just trying to ask or attain like how much dental experience these guys really have.
32:37
And is dental one of 20 verticals that they operate in, is it just like one of one or one of two or something like that? When we started WIO years ago, back in 2009, I think we started it. Initially we had a half a dozen verticals and by 2011 we decided to focus exclusively on dentistry just because we could see where the industry was going. it's like, if we're going to be really, really good at this digital marketing.
33:01
We need to pick an industry and just get super knowledgeable and go deep dive on it. Cause so much of digital marketing has to do with content. So another question you're going to want to ask in addition to like, long have you been around is, you know, what do you do for content? Are you writing unique content specifically for my practice or is it cookie cutter stock content? And, and like, if people ask us that the answer would be, it depends on what package, if they just want a basic website and that's it, they just get the stock content like everybody else. Cause they're not really trying to, they don't care about rankings. They don't care about new patient flow.
33:31
If you are doing SEO and you care about new patient-fluent rankings, then we always are going to want to write that unique content for them. So, you know, ask people about How hard is that, Ian, to do something so, like, unique enough? How do you write? I always wondered that. I mean, with the chat GPs and the AIs and stuff, that's a hot topic right now. like, you can't just write a website with chat GP and think that's going to fly with Google, right? Like, I guess this whole concept of
34:01
of custom stuff. Google really hurts you if you're going to copy and paste, right? It does. Yeah. Yeah. Google does not really give any ranking benefit if the content is duplicate, meaning it exists on other websites. then there's software tools. We have software tools. Most like any serious SEO agency with a lot of experience is going to be using a third party software to really analyze the website and look at the...
34:31
The software that's out there, like we can literally look at a page by page by page in the website and it'll tell us what percent uniqueness is this page, you 20%, 80 % and literally on a page by page basis, we can see how unique each page is, the content and the code. And so we want to target 70 % or above on uniqueness for score. We find if we can get a website with enough content at that 70 % threshold or above, we can generally get it ranking very well, even in very competitive markets.
35:01
So those are some of the things that we're trying to look at. the AI stuff, that's kind of to be determined. mean, Google initially said you can't use it and then they just changed their mind as well. Maybe you can use it. And so it's very much evolving in real time. Like, I don't know what the future of content generation is going to look like with, with chat, GPT and all the AI stuff. It's super interesting right now. We have never used it in terms of like content generation for our clients. We always use people.
35:28
Right. Website copy and social media posts and like we, you know. Yeah. But you know, I could envision a situation where maybe the chat GBT does the first draft and then an actual writer polishes it from there, perhaps. I don't know. Yeah. See where it goes. Yeah. Folks to put a timestamp, this is July to 2023. Yeah. mean, it's it's it's really interesting with the whole AI stuff. So I.
35:57
I always wondered how a writer that works for a wheel could write a general practitioners website 1700 times, you know, or I mean, that's gotta be a skillset in, in, its own right. Um, yeah, we have a big team of people we contract with for sure too. One person doing it over and over would go insane. Yeah, exactly.
36:21
Uh, it got me thinking, and maybe this is the last topic for the interview, unless you want to really drop something different, but, um, I was thinking like you were, you were talking today about the SEO and, and, and, and, and really honing in on the services that you want to attract. And when people are searching, um, you want to make sure your website.
36:49
represents you well so that folks looking for that come back to you. That's in essence marketing and this whole SEO thing. So I'm thinking like as you walk into an acquisition, maybe the doctor was big into ortho, big into implants, big into endo. Maybe they were just bread and butter and you can do some of those bigger procedures.
37:16
It really is important to partner with a marketing company and really deep dive into what kind of patients you're looking for, because the seller may be a totally different profile. A B, maybe their website doesn't even embody them or you. And so, you know, yes, you're inheriting an old site, but I feel like your vision has to be
37:43
crystal clear so that you're attracting the right people. Cause otherwise what are we doing here? Your team's writing articles about stuff that maybe the buyer isn't even interested in, but you're trying to create custom content. like there should be an intentionality here with what they're looking for, right? Yeah, certainly. So we have a client intake process where
38:08
the sales consultant, they'll kind of scope out the services based on their goals and needs and budget and competition and all that. they give them a custom proposal. Here's what we can do for you. that can range from, we have clients paying us a hundred, 200 bucks a month for basic stuff and clients paying us five, $10,000 month for aggressive growth and everything in between. So it's very kind of a custom approach how we take. And then once the client on boards, then the operations team, do an onboarding intake process where what they'll do is they'll ask a series of questions around,
38:36
What services do you provide? What are the top three things that you want to focus on on the website? Are there certain types of patients you want to drive in particular? want all in for dental implants. want Invisalign or Ortho, or I want, you know, sleep apnea, whatever it is. And so we'll ask those things specifically during, before we even start the build and design process, we know what services should we focus on, what content, and also we'll ask them like, do you have content that you've bought? Cause sometimes we have doctors who are like, I've already written some great stuff on blogs and
39:06
articles and stuff in the past, like, could I leverage that on my website? So we want to collect that stuff up front and build that, integrate that into the process as well. So yeah, the first thing is like, one of the first things you do is you need to understand what type of practices and what services they want to focus and highlight. And then that's how that gets rolled into the SEO and the content plan for sure. Yeah. See folks that that's key because if you just go at this kind of blindly and without any thought or intention, then the marketing companies over here,
39:35
trying to do the best they can without all the information that it'd be like you doing a crown without, I don't know, all of your fancy equipment, you know? So each piece of it matters and back to that partnership, the more that company can partner with you to get you the best results possible. So that's cool, buddy. Anything that you'd like to add to the show or don't feel the need to do this, like,
40:05
a give or we always put your contact information below. So they're always, they're already going to have your, the access to you. But yeah, any last minute comments or concerns or questions or things that you want to talk about? Yeah, I think one of the questions I get asked a lot of times when I'm doing lectures or interviews and stuff is, know, where do you see things going in the future? You know, with, with digital marketing, dental marketing, these kinds of things. And
40:32
In my opinion, what I've seen some companies doing and what we are doing as well is really trying to take more control over that three step process, generate the lead, convert the lead and schedule the case acceptance. so we are not a consulting company. We don't do that. But what we try to do is find people like you, Mike, frankly, who are in there and they can help affect, you know, are you answering the phone and are you doing the right things clinically? how's when a patient comes in?
40:59
You know, are you, are you doing the whole process and intake process, the case acceptance, you know, the treatment planning? We can't do that. That's not at all our core competence and skillsets. So for us, like we try to find like with our clients, if they're spending a couple of two, $3,000 a month on marketing or more, we're like, are you working with a consultant by any chance? Or are you, you know, are you, uh, how are you handling the phones? And we try to like, without being pushy or, or, you know, kind of condescending or anything, just kind of ask like politely. Yeah.
41:28
It'd be really great if you had somebody who could help pay attention because we're going to pay us thousands of dollars to get that phone to ring. And if what happens from there forward isn't optimized, you're wasting money on us. Right. So my advice would just be, you know, look at it as a process, not as a function like my marketing people, they get me new patients. No, the marketing people get you part of that process, right? They start the journey, but it's your team and your consultants that are going to finish that part of the process. So to me,
41:56
I think about it as a team approach. This is a team sport, 100%. This is not like a marketing company is some amazing rock star and we're going to, we're going to blow your door off with new patients. Like, yeah, that's possible, but the internal part of the practice has to be running just as smooth. Couldn't agree more. And the thing, the thing about that process and you, touched on, I think you said, said three to five or three to seven touches before someone makes a decision.
42:21
That's so obvious, especially with the generational, the younger, the generation, the more research they're doing, the more savvy. Gone are the days of having a pretty sign, you know, and that's it. Today, not only do you have to have a decent looking, engaging website with the bounce rate that's appropriate, gone are those days.
42:51
Now it's what did they post on Instagram? How many Google reviews? How did they respond to those Google reviews? I mean, how did they pick up the phone? Did they have availability? Do I have to wait too long? Like the game has changed. Yes. And we have to be better. I know Ian works a little bit in the DSO space and it's interesting that the DSOs
43:21
They are good at this stuff and that's why they're winning. It's not winning quote unquote. They're doing well. Let's just put it that way. think private practice definitely is holding. they're making sure calls are picked up. They are tracking those conversion rates. They're good at business. And you have to become really good at business too. And Ian and Next Level and all your partners are
43:51
should help you understand what's going on so that we can fix it. So I echo that as loud as Ian said that 100%. Thanks Ian so much for being part of Shark Week, brother. It's always a fun week. I'm exhausted. I think this is my last interview. But we got through another year and I think the listeners are going to respond really well because marketing is such an important thing.
44:19
There's a lot of choices. Give WEO a shot. Call Ian and see if you guys could partner with them. So thanks again, Ian. All right. Yeah, happy to help. Thanks for having us, Mike. Yeah, absolutely. Talk to you soon. Bye.