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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 10 by First Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and
I'm the director of SEO and co founder of First Dentist. All right,
let's jump right into some general SEO news. This,
this particular podcast is going to have so much actionable, actionable information you're not going
to know what to do with it. But let's start off with something really soft
and easy. Most of us these days have secure websites.
That's when you go to a website and you see a little padlock next to
it and it's. If you actually looked at the address, it's
https://.
Well that was something that Google forced really on most of us and it was
a good idea. It really forced all of us to
ensure that information being shared from site to site, all
that was secure. It's a base level security, but it is important.
Well, Google is as of October 2026
going to begin warning users if anyone goes to a site that is
not secure. Saw this coming at some
point, but it has taken longer than expected to be rolling out. Anyways,
it is coming and, and I honestly barely
ever see a site that's not secure anymore. So it's not really a big deal.
But if you do know anyone or perhaps you have a secondary site or something
that isn't secure, keep in mind that that's going to be a.
Well, Google's going to actively deter people from going to them. If it
even shows up in search results. Oftentimes they're. Well, they're
definitely going to favor a secure site over a non secure site. All
right, well let's jump into an article I created on
seogrock.com that's SEO
grok.com it's a little SEO
newsletter, if you want to call it that, on Substack that I've created
and it's free. You can just go check it out and it says newsletter
but it's also a blog so you can go to it and see all this
information. It's a place I'm going to share
my experiences, my learning, all of the stuff
that I'm doing on a regular basis. It felt like I really was missing out
by not sharing what I've been up to. Grok means to
be very learned, very, you know, understand something thoroughly. I'm sure
Elon Musk would Like to think that Grok is something he made up, but it
isn't. It's. It's older and I've actually owned the domain longer
than his business has been around. But. And
so it's got nothing to do with the AI. Grok.com this is
SEO Grok. At any rate, I did an article on SEO
grok.com called how to add AI generated multimedia to your
content in 10 minutes. I include real prompts that
work. Now. The reason I'm bringing it up is a big
part of what makes content really appealing to search
engines and always has, is multimodal content.
So multimedia, true spirit of
multimedia. You've got images, videos,
perhaps streaming podcasts someone can just click on to press play,
charts and tables, infographics. All of
these different things you can embed into your content to add more value and
structure and, well, different ways to learn what you're teaching
them. Teaching a viewer versus just text, which
can be quite difficult to absorb.
So you practice. You could be putting in
images, sanitary images of
surgeries or what teeth look before and after. That's the
sort of stuff you've been using to date. But you could also put in tables.
Of course, it does depend on what you're writing about. I get that. But videos,
infographics would be great. All the different things perhaps that
an adult, what kind of surgeries or
dental services a senior perhaps could get.
You can make that into an infographic and it might be a lot of things
they didn't even realize. Add that to a page that's also about the same
topic and you add a lot more value. It becomes very, very
powerful. Well, AI loves that as well. So
I've on there, I've created this little article that gives you some tips and some
really, really easy shortcuts to create content using AI that will
help your rankings in AI. Gotta like it. All
right, next up, this
has been bothering me. There is nothing but
hype online right now about how staggering
the changes in AI are in our
world with AI and all the things it can be doing for us. And I
100% agree, there's a lot of really, really cool things about AI. For the
one thing that I don't believe is that it's fundamentally
changed SEO. Not yet. Search engine
optimization is the optimization of pages to ensure that
your content is friendly for search engines and hopefully
drives a better ranking. That's my off the cuff answer. I know
Wikipedia does better and, but anyway, how is
that any different in this case? You know, a lot of people are Pitching
geo, that's generative engine optimization or they're
pitching AEO answer engine
optimization and how SEO is dead. And
it's, it's stupefying, honestly.
But I get that they're probably selling things and,
or maybe they are generally worried and they believe that this is true.
Well, I don't, I don't believe it's true. It's always going to be
SEO. It's that simple. Search engine optimization is an
umbrella for all the things we do to optimize content for search engines.
And AI is a search engine agents, whatever they
are, whatever medium that's being provided to engines, whatever
they're going to look at has to be optim for
best effect. And we're going to continue to do that.
However, there are some things that you will want
to keep in mind. None of this is
new, but it does have an impact on
how well you perform in both Google and
Google's AI overviews and in ChatGPT and in
perplexity and so on and so on and so on. So
let's start off with authority building. This has been a mainstay of
SEO for decades. To many this has just been link building.
But really link building is the ugly stepchild of true authority
building. You're better served to build authority
through earned media. That's stuff that you,
you're not buying, but you've truly earned
sure links, but from reputable sources legitimately
talking about you, you know, news websites,
interviews done of you, places where you've done,
sponsoring, whatever it could be, you know. Some examples here are bylines from content that
you've written on trusted sites, links from various local events you put on,
sponsor put on, put you, that you put on. Or
sponsored, uh, podcasts you've
appeared on top dentists lists, sites
that share the top dental practices in a specific area and if you happen
to be there, great awards you've won. All of this stuff
is it takes effort, granted, but it has the
best effect. Google AI, doesn't matter what it is, wants to
see this and it will pay
to do it to put that effort out. Part of the reason too is because
it takes effort. Your competitors won't do it. They're going to try using all the
AI shortcuts to get those benefits and they will fall short,
at least in the long run. They'll fall short. They might find an
exploit or something that AI hasn't plugged yet and
gets somewhere at the beginning, but then that will bite them in the butt or
will simply just fizzle and overnight you just never know
what's going to happen. I like to go for what works for the long
run. Next up is content formatting. Now this is a mixed
bag. Let me just get into what it is. First of all, AI
adores unique, well sourced,
experience driven content. It should start with,
you know, the too long didn't. Too long didn't read sort of a synopsis
at the beginnings that it can just grab and understand about the page, understand
a whole thing about the page. The body of the page though should be
heading based with a hierarchical layout
and include mixed media like we talked about. The problem is
everyone's going to do this. Everyone and their dog is building all their content this
way. Hey, we're doing it on our own site and we are seeing results like
within two days we're seeing results in AI.
That just shows to me how simple it is to do. It's really nothing
rocket science y about it or anything, but I
believe it's more important you write in your
own voice. Create content that is
in a style that you want to stick with, that you know is
relating to your patients. You know, it's something that
is you. And the reason I say this is because again,
everyone and their dog is rebuilding content and
creating new content in this new format that looks very
formulaic. And if it's very formulaic, at some
point or another, it's going to get annoying for people to read and
it will only be useful for AI. So people will begin writing in a
different way. But what if you could do both? Make it really useful for
AI, but also keep some
character, keep some personality in it. How I would do that,
I'm still learning how to do it my own way and find my own style.
But I definitely would start with a bit of a synopsis, a
tldr. As much as I don't love it, people like that these days.
Everyone's out there for the quick fix, get their answer and get out. Maybe that's
what they'll need. They're always going to get more value out of reading it. And
that's the purpose. You want to make sure that it's got some real value. You
put your expertise in. It's very important that you put your
expertise in. Otherwise if you get content that's just being
created by AI without any of any input from you, it's
grabbing content that everyone else can get as well. As a result,
everything's going to be very vanilla. You need to differentiate with some
great content. The next part is expertise.
Now there's the Acronym eeat,
and that's experience, expertise, authoritativeness and
trustworthiness. These are all elements that Google looks at when it's trying to
determine the quality of content and whether or not it has earned the right to
rank and whether or not the person who has been writing the content
has these qualities. You, as a
dentist, are an expert in your field, but does
AI or Google really know it? Is there a page, a
canonical page, a page that everything links to, that talks about you,
talks about your education, shares your wins
and links to your different social profiles and they link back
to you? And it's. It's like this, essentially, your,
your Internet cv,
you're having this one place and ensuring
that it really does a great way, a great job of documenting
your expertise is very, very important.
I did this recently with RossDunn.com and it was a fair bit of
work and I'm still working on it. There's still lots to do, but you got
to start somewhere and I would say
in the high 90 percentiles of people
have not done this. And as a dentist, you
probably never even thought of it, why bother? You probably have a bio page about
you. Great. That can be your canonical page, that can be the place
everything links to and perhaps should be on
that page. Just make sure you've got your,
your education listed, all the different certificates, degrees and
all those different things, all that should be there linked to the different
places where you obtained those certificates and degrees. If
you have that, you're going to have one place that Google and
AI can look at and confirm that you are who you say you are, that
you do have these qualities and that you should be listened
to. There's a little more nuance to it when it gets down to the technical
details and we can help you with that if you'd like some assistance. But
ideally, any place that you linked to
from your profile links back to your profile.
It's not easy to do all the time. Sometimes it's near
impossible because you don't have control. Like, say, a podcast. I can't
put a link back from a podcast platform to me because I can't control
what they put. But just the same, if you do it, as in many
and as many places as you can, the better off you'll be. If you've got
a Twitter profile or X profile, whatever they want to call it. Now,
make sure that the website that you're linking to is your website
with your about page. It goes right to the page, it doesn't go to your
website homepage. It goes to that page. If it's Facebook and you
have ability to put some link in there or a link in there, put that
to your site. If you've got a LinkedIn profile, which I do
recommend, ensure that your LinkedIn profile
links to you as well, again to that
canonical URL that, that one Persona, that
About Me page, if that's what you choose to make it. The correlation
is something that cannot be ignored. It's going
to pay off to do that kind of
work. So that's, that's where I am with that. One of the things that
I was actually chatting with AI about this, it's funny, sometimes I just get on
a bit of a chat and we were talking about how really I
find myself working harder than I ever have before.
Now that AI is here. And really what
it's done is it's given everyone superpowers and
if everyone's got superpowers, there really is no superhero. Like
we're all the same, we've all got the same tools
now. So yes, I can do more,
but so can the next person. So now I have to make sure I do
more and I take myself to
the next level and do even more. It's
really not a win. If I had AI before everyone else, that'd be different, but
I didn't. That said, a lot of dental practices
probably aren't taking the time to take advantage of
all the levers that we currently have
with AI being in our front pocket. So
this is the time. Have a discussion with your marketer, ask them what they're doing
with AI, what you can do with AI and it's very new. So they may
be already planning something like we are. We've got other plans and such. We're bringing
to our clients slowly but surely because we want
to make sure they're proven and we've worked out the kinks. But you
need to have that discussion because if you act now, you will
get a certain amount of first mover benefit, I believe.
Sure, it'll be level playing field when everyone gets
into this later, but the fact is a lot of people won't and a lot
of people take shortcuts. The key is to mix in hard
work and that's the non shortcut version
with some of the shortcuts and a good plan. I'll
get off the my pulpit there. Very important to me.
I just see too many people getting swayed by all this hype.
It is not a fundamental change in anything. It's just
we're doing more work. It's enhanced a lot of
the signals that we use to get rankings. And many
sites that have good rankings and have been properly
optimized are performing perfectly well in this new AI paradigm.
So just keep that in mind as a nice kind of connection to this.
I thought this was interesting. There's lots of naysayers about this, but
geo startup, Generative engine optimization startup,
Lower Light shut down and it was. I'd never heard of it before. Many
people didn't. This is why they're kind of hacking on it going well. I didn't
hear about it. No wonder it shut down. But it shut down and
the owner said that the reason he did this, he says, I'm just not going
to keep it open. I'm just going to. It didn't fail. I just,
I'm going to shut it down because I could not show
a difference in how AI like there wasn't enough of a
difference. He found that the brands showing up all had familiar
traits. High quality, helpful content. We've already discussed that.
Mentions in authoritative publications. We've discussed that
and strong reputations and subject matter expertise, which you
have as well, being a dentist. And you can apply that within your content. And
we talked about ensuring you've got that canonical page and all that relevance
and all that authority in one place. So again, this
is a perfect example of how a startup, someone
who's put, I can't even imagine how many thousands of dollars into creating a platform
has just gone, what's the point? I can't prove to people that
there's enough to show here that this platform is
worthwhile. Worthwhile having because it's just telling everyone that what you've been
doing is working. I hope that gets across. I have been
looking at this a little bit long today, but it is very, I
think, awesome to know that everything we've been doing is
right. And yeah, sure, we have to take it up a notch
slightly, but it's really nothing fundamentally different. My colleague
Scott, my other company Step Forth, did an article on how to
maintain rankings after a redesign. Now, this
article was originally written, I think about 15 years ago
and I mentioned to him that it was way out of date. We really needed
to rewrite it. Well, it was almost. It was a very short article to begin
with and actually did pretty well. A lot of people liked it, but he says
this is so pathetically outdated and it's ended up becoming
6,000 words or some ungodly amount with great
detail and fantastic. Everything about it's fantastic and
it's immediately done well, that was the one I actually was
mentioning. You know, two days later it has AI rankings, but
I'll just go through some of these points. So how to maintain
rankings after a redesign? If you are
undergoing a site redesign or if you're considering it, you need to listen to this.
There are many things you need to consider in no particular order.
First, ensure you have a backup and a recovery plan. Sometimes new
sites launches. Well. Can't speak. Sometimes
new site launches don't go well. Ensure you are prepared
for the worst. Oh my gosh.
Always be prepared for the worst. Next, conduct
a content audit. Next, conduct a content audit of the
current site. Map out what content on your site is ranking
and performing well. These are traffics,
rankings, conversions, et cetera. Preserve
existing content. Now again, remember, the goal here is not to
lose rankings during a redesign. You want to say consistent or
better, right? Any content that performs well should be
ranking, preserved. Maintain the URL structure. This is
really important. It doesn't have to be done all of
these. There's always, and it depends, but this is kind of the ideal world. Okay?
So when you create the new look, just make sure the URLs are the same
if you want to be in the best position. If you
do have to switch it up, you need to take some other
considerations in mind and we'll get to that. So keep the URLs the same
as if possible. This includes, and this is very important, the
usage of the triple W and the trailing slash. So if it's. If
you've got a site, www.thisdentist.com
well, make sure that you continue using www.
It's very important that WWW is a part of
your URL. And if you remove that, it's a broken URL. And
if Google tries to go to it from a link or re
indexes again and expects to find it and finds a broken page, there's just
so many different ways it can go badly and you can lose rankings. Create a
301 redirect map and implement it. This is a bit gobbledygooky, sorry,
but essentially this is a redirect
map so that if you do change your URLs, like I mentioned again, you don't
want to, but if you do, make sure you. You create
a redirect map that says to Google and any other spider that's visiting your
website or bot, this is where the address was and this
is where it is now. Where it was and where it is now. Very, very,
very, very important. And if you had one existing on the old site and you
don't want to, you know, perhaps some of them are still very important. And there
was links pointing to different pages. Make sure you move that over with it as
well. Consolidate them. Because
you might lose some great authority from a
link that you got from CNN.com or something that was going to a page that
doesn't exist on the old site. And you want to make sure it's being redirected
to the proper site and proper page. Now I should say update
internal links. If things are changing, URLs are
changing, content's changing, you may want to ensure that.
You will want to ensure that any links within the site are pointing to the
correct pages and any links within content where you
might not be just instantly finding is being linked
to their appropriate page. It's not going to a broken page. A lot
of this can be fixed simply by ensuring that you do not
change the URLs. Just restate that. That makes life a lot
easier. Choose an SEO friendly CMS. That's your
content management system. WordPress is a very, very,
very friendly system. You do need to ensure you're on a good host with
proper security, all these different things to use it, but I do recommend
it. We provide hosting and security for
our clients to ensure maximum uptime
quality and frankly, peace of mind for all of us. Because
whenever a site goes down for any length of time, there's always
a chance it could have a negative impact on rankings. And that's the last thing
we want to consider. So we make sure everything is dialed in and
rock solid. You need to
ensure that use of existing titles and meta description. So
for pages that perform well, make sure to reuse the same titles and
descriptions. For those that don't, now is the time to improve what you
have. Go for it. You can do some changes.
And again, that's something you should keep in mind throughout all of this. You
know, earlier on here I said that you should create
a list of the content that you have. You know
what's performing well, what isn't. The stuff that's performing well, you want
to touch as little as possible. The look of the
page can change with this new redesign, but try to change not a single
word.
Structured data. This gets a little more complicated,
but there are, there is structured data that's generally
in a website. It may have been in your
older website and you want to maintain that into the new website.
Structured data is behind the scenes. You, it's in the code
and it, yeah, it does have some impact and we wouldn't. We
like to maintain every single thing we possibly
can when a redesign is happening. And we need to maintain rankings,
the more that changes, the more uncertainty there is that rankings will
be maintained. So move over the structured
markup. That can be schema. Markup is another one they use, or schema,
I should say is the other term for it. But,
you know, make sure that it is there and if it's not there,
now's the time to add it. It's a great time to add it, and there
are some great tools out there that'll help you do it. It is generally more
something that you would want an SEO to help you with or, you know, spend
the time to do a bunch of reading. I mean, none of this is rocket
science. It's just, it does take time and, and expertise
to implement and know you're doing it right. Improve your page speed.
This is the one thing you can do when you're doing a redesign.
On even the pages that were performing well, if you improve their page
speed, there's no downside, it's just going to be better. Will
it improve your ranking? Maybe not. But in the very
least, that is one thing you can change and not be fearful that it's going
to have a negative impact when you launch your new website.
Unblock it, please. What do I mean?
Well, WordPress is a great example. When you launch a new website,
sometimes it's got sort of a switch
in place that says, block this to search engines while we're doing the redesign, while
we're doing our work on it. And it's not uncommon for
development sites to have that switch turned on because they don't want
Google. If it happens to somehow find this, the development
site, to index it and add it to the, to the content
that's online, it'll. It'll be bad. But we've seen countless
times people launch these sites and they forget to disable that.
And it doesn't matter what you've done. All of this
work could have been meticulous. But if you find that your
whole website is being blocked to Google, well, that's,
that's it. That's the kiss of death. Unless you catch it
within a day or two, there are some pretty
fundamental damages you're going to see on your rankings. So
make sure you do unblock it. After that, monitor your performance.
Make sure you have a Google search console in place, like access to that
Google Analytics or whatever analytics platform you choose to use. I'm not
too fond of Google Analytics these days. So I do recommend checking other ones out,
but whatever you have, make sure you monitor it and
look for changes. Look for anything that's happening and flags that
you need to jump on. Google Search Console will be particularly
useful because it does give you warnings. It is more designed as a
diagnostic platform. So that's it. There's a lot I shared today. I
hope you found it really, really helpful. So on behalf of myself, Ross
Dunn, Director of SEO and co Founder of First Dentist, thank you
for joining me today. Have a great week and remember to tune into the next
episode where we'll be sharing more 101 SEO tips and news
on dental SEO.