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This Dental Specific Podcast is dedicated to the Dental "Entrepreneur" Michael Dinsio, Founder of Next Level Consultants, delivers #TRUTH when starting up a dental practice. From the very first step to getting the keys of a dental practice, Michael shares his raw & unscripted playbook with you. Not only does this podcast provide you with "What To Do" but more importantly "What Not To Do". With over over 15 years of experience & over 150 past clients, Michael delivers an educational and informative program in a real and genuine way. Start w/ Episode 01 - as we go through a STEP by STEP process.
00:03
question is so low to John, I don't even know where to start with that. I guess the problem is, and by the way, I love that question. Interesting, interesting. This is an interesting topic. What's the solution here? Show up, understand your part, and just crush it. Paper, click, social media, we can talk about all this stuff, but what really matters is patient experience, that wow factor.
00:34
Start off uncensored, the questions you have with the truths you need to hear. Now your hosts, Michael Dinsio and John Bertagni.
00:52
All right, all right. Welcome, welcome. Startup Unscripted. This is our marketing part two, Affordable Image part two. And we have a very special guest today. But today, specifically about marketing, we kind of stayed pretty high level on part one. And part two, we're going to deep dive into some stuff that I quite frankly think
01:19
is a game changer and X factor to these startups. Hopefully we get into some of that. know, John, you've got some big plans for this too, right? This episode? Yeah. mean, in my mind, there's no better person who definitely makes us look great and who really was kind of the lifeblood even in early conversations on what we were doing than Mike Shoun of, you know, of
01:46
affordable image and what he and his team has done. Desra killed it, Mike. So I hope you have just even the little, little bit of gumption to get up to her level, but welcome, welcome my friend. She's definitely left me a a big or tall bar, tall bar to try to even touch, let alone reach it and go over it. But yeah, she did awesome. So proud of her and her knowledge. She's been
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with Affordable Image for 15 years and she knows her stuff and she works directly with doctors on a regular basis and so she's in it and yeah, she did a great job. Thanks for- You got big shoes to fill but she looks a little better on camera than you do, Mike, but I'm not gonna lie, but that's okay. Now I know what your definition of a little is. Right, right.
02:43
Well, let's get into this boys. We know that we can't hold our audience attention too long. So let's just jump right into it. Our topic today, like we talked about, is going to be search engine optimization. And I guess the first question that I have, Mike, is this is one of those things that oftentimes gets pushed to the back burner when they're picking that startup package.
03:12
They've got all the expenses of equipment and construction and, you know, it costs a lot of money to build a practice. We all know that. And then it trickles down to us minions of the consultants and the marketing people. But if you trickle to even more, SEO gets cut first out of marketing plans. So first of all, what is SEO in its most Dinsio layman term?
03:42
I would say to try to make it as easy as possible is to be found online. You're going to Google. When we talk SEO today, Search Engine Optimization, we're pretty much talking Google. Google holds 80 plus percent of the searches. However, 98 percent of what we talk about will apply to Bing and Yahoo and the other ones as well.
04:10
But mostly obviously we're going be talking about is Google today. When people are in the marketplace for anything, where do they go? They go to Google. The word Google now is synonymous with search and finding, not even search anymore, it's finding. That's where they're going to go look for information. So that would be what search engine up. So let me ask you this. How many people go to that second page, that third page of
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You know, and we'll get into sponsored links and versus non sponsored, but like how many people actually dive down a little bit? Um, that's going to, depending on what they're searching for and who it is that's doing the searching, but overall the roughly zero virtually zero. So they usually stay on that first page. It's to be mostly on the first page unless they're really searching and that's the really looking for information and wanting to do, uh,
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or in-depth search, then you will see people, they'll dig pages and pages deep. However, mostly in relating to what we're doing today, it's gonna be the first page for sure. And that's where those keywords and meta tags and all that stuff becomes very important, correct? Correct, and that's actually, let's just get right into it right now. I love it, yeah.
05:32
I love that when our guests actually say, get right into it. It's perfect. Let's do this. They're trained. They must have watched a few episodes. of my favorite things is hearing people talk about getting on the first page. Well, what does that mean? Yeah. Right. First page of what? First page for what? I mean,
05:54
We hear other companies, not just in dental, but marketing companies in general talking about getting customers on the first page. And my always question is first page of what? I can get you on the first page for Michael Denzio, John Bertagni, Michael Schound, startup uncensored, you 85 other words. I get you on the first page tomorrow because no one else is searching for that. Nobody's looking for that. So we get that. We do a little bit of work. I'll get you up tomorrow. The key there is competition.
06:23
And when we can delve into that a little bit more, competition means quite a bit. The trick is there's more than one page that you could be found on for anything in dental. There's unlimited amount of pages you could be found on. that's- Okay, so let's narrow that. Let's get into that. That's really good way of putting it, Mike, because you can be on the first page of something that nobody cares about. Pagement-
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That's usually where I'm found. I'm found there on that page. Yeah, you're on the first page of who cares. Exactly. So then that means that there's some science behind what people are searching and you guys are professionals at understanding not only what people are searching, but also getting
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your clients obviously on that particular page and fighting for that spot. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, I'd say science and psychology also. mean, having a psychological understanding. when we look at marketing, let's kind of define what marketing is and how we look at it as a company is it's communicating. It's communicating what it is that you're doing to your target audience. And so in dental, we want to be able to communicate
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what we do as dentists and what our clients do as dentists, that's what we're trying to communicate. And so when it comes to SEO and searching, have somebody who's doing a search. So you're dealing with the uneducated people doing search, not knowing what they're searching for. So that's where the psychology comes in, trying to understand what they may be searching for and that kind of stuff. So, kind of to try to, cause we could spend hours on this.
08:15
Kind of what I want to make sure that everybody understands here is let's talk about competition real quick. So on that first page, you've got those 10 spots that are called organic search. And what that means is you can't technically pay for that. You can pay and you can compete and we can have another conversation later about competing for pay-per-click word, for the pay-per-click word. The organic spots you cannot pay for. However, it does cost money.
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in some way, shape or form to get into those spots. And we'll talk a little more about that as well. But it depends on the competition, not just who your competitor is. So let's talk about teeth whitening. It's probably one of the best easiest example to understand what competition means for a space on Google, on one of those top 10 first pages. Your competitor is probably not going to be the dentist across the street for teeth whitening. It's probably going to be Colgate.
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or one of the teeth whitening businesses that have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on those spaces. There's other words and terms and things that you're also gonna compete with that are not necessarily going to be your competitor that you call the other dentist across the street. Could be other things that are gonna be similar search terms that you're gonna compete with. Even on a local basis now, Google is very,
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It's putting more emphasis on local. So if you're in your local area and you're searching teeth whitening and you're a dentist who's spending money on doing advertising and writing articles and things like that for tooth whitening, there's a very good possibility you could get picked up by Google over Colgate who's spending millions of dollars for that because Google is now putting more more emphasis on the local authority and local
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expertise and things like that for those spaces. So there's the tricky part with Google and talking about it. There's so absolutely so many variables. that's what I was going to actually ask. I think you're going to get there, but I'm going to carry you over your shoulder to that point. The question is, Google makes these changes constantly, right?
10:40
They're looking at unique blogs. They're looking at making sure you're not using vernacular or, you know, paraphrasing things from other sites or copying. Or copying. They're looking for reviews, you know, tell us out of these things. And I know it changes by the nanosecond, right? But where's Google looking now? What is Google looking for right now?
11:08
for these guys that are not spending X amount of dollars a month for keywords. Yeah, so Google's more and more into, I'm gonna call it conversational language. So in the old days, we could just put keywords and then you could even trick them by stuffing with a bunch of different words and writing almost as a robot.
11:31
But now Google is getting smarter. Their search engines, algorithms, and robots that are doing the searching are getting smarter and they can actually understand conversational language versus someone who's trying to trick the system. they're looking for, those robots are looking for good quality information. They're also checking like how often are you putting this information out? So the doctor that's putting out information, say on a weekly basis versus a monthly basis versus yearly basis, you're going to get
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moved up the rankings if you're doing it more frequently. Now, if you're doing it more frequently, but the quality isn't as good as the person is doing less frequently, the quality could rank higher over that. there's a lot of different parts and pieces and factors involved. The problem is there is no one size fits all. And that's what I think that our clients get confused on, is they think it's super simple, it's super easy, it's super
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cookie cutter and it's not. each place, so each, I'm going to go back to that competition thing. Okay, wait, wait, wait, before you do, before you do it, if I want to, if I'm oversimplifying what you're saying, because this can get really, really complex as I'm hearing it, right? Like, like I'm totally tracking it, but I've been on a hundred calls now about this stuff. Right.
13:01
So for our audience, I've actually paid for it as a consumer. I'm very sensitive to this. Okay. so let's, let's back up for one minute. Okay. And say, okay, this shit is really complicated. Okay. That's number one. Your brother cannot do this. In fact, I was just talking to a mutual client, Mike, and she wanted to have her brother build the website and
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And I don't know how to convey without being a jerk, how bad of an idea that is, right? You just become a jerk. Just be yourself. Just be myself and be a jerk. So, okay. So it's really complicated. Let's stay out of the weeds on that. But there's two things. There's Google.
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and what they want to see. And then there's what you guys are doing, Mike. And from what I understand, it's very, you have to stay consistent, right? You have to do a lot of things over time. We just talked about that in the last episode, doing lots of little things that add up to a big thing. And startups oftentimes cut this budget, but it might be a really bad idea to do that because it takes time. Can you talk about
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the little things you gotta do, staying too much into the weeds, the little things you gotta do so that Google can find you. Does that make sense? Sure. So it does take time. So in a perfect world, in a perfect world with a startup, I would love to be able to have the website up and running 30, 60 days prior to even opening because literally love that. The clock starts ticking the minute that that website's up. Now, when we first start with a client, even if it's six months in advance, we'll put what we call a temporary
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landing page, where it's just the basic information coming soon, that kind of stuff. Now that's not something that's set for Google to find. Once the website's built, it's built to correctly, we launch it. That's when the clock, I say the clock starts ticking for Google to able to start looking for it. Then we're able to go in there and actually communicate to Google and say, hey, Google, come check us out. We got this new website here. Look at all the stuff.
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and the technical team on the back end will go inside and literally make little pointers to different sections on that website that we want them to come find on a regular basis. So in the beginning, we want them to find the name and the address and the phone number, all the basic things. As it goes on, then we want to refine the different things that we want them to see on a regular basis. So it's literally a nonstop constant chain. You're only as good as the last piece of information that you put out, the last
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technical changes that you made. So we're battling a lot of things here when we're doing SEO. We're battling Google's constant changes. You talked about the algorithms are changing on regular basis. I kind of liken that to think about your iPhones that are constantly changing and we have to update them on a regular basis. And at some point when you don't update them, they just stop working. Right. Necessarily know it or they're not working as efficiently. Well, that same thing's happening with your website. The day that we put it up, it's it's
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perfect, but the next day, technically, it's already, I'm going to call it eroding. It's already eroding because Google's already making all these changes. And so that's also part of SEO is doing the backend technical things to make those adjustments and changes for the programming, update security features and things like that. Security is a huge part of SEO, which is something that really doesn't get talked about enough. I'm just going to throw that out there. Make sure your website's secure.
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SSL certificates and other things you can do, make sure your hosting is secure, things like that. There's so many, there's literally hundreds and hundreds of parts and pieces in SEO and each thing works differently and each thing has an effect on another one in different levels and forms and that's where the tricky part comes out and that's I always get concerned about that our doctors, you know, hearing information out there that's just, it sells people that are selling versus the way, you know, when I try
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about, I want to educate, I get passionate about it. I get angry about it because I want the person to know the truth. I want them know the truth. want them not to, know, because the worst thing is, is when a customer comes to us a year or later, two years later, whatever, and their website's so messed up or they weren't, they didn't have the information. was not, you know, it's a horrible feeling for us to see that and hear it. So we're out there trying to give the good information so that our clients can know the importance of it.
17:46
Well, and I, this goes back to, to, to Mike that, know, this should not, everything goes back to Pernicus. mean, everything just revolves around you. here's, here's where my mind goes here. Like don't have my buddy, you know, the my buddy thing or my buddy dentist use this guy. Do not have your brother-in-law do your website.
18:16
He's not going to do all of these nuances that Mike just so eloquently went through. Like these are a lot of steps that he has another full-time job that he doesn't really care about your website to the passion level that you do. I mean, that's ultimately what's coming out of that conversation right there. There's so much happening and we don't want, you you're spending money somewhere.
18:44
You need to spend money on an ongoing basis. that's just with, it goes down to, know, print marketing. goes down to SEO, SEM. You just have to have a repeatable process ongoing for it to have results. And unfortunately with SEO, SEM, just like print, like direct to consumer mailbox pieces, you're not going to see those results in month one, but you will start to see them over time.
19:14
So that ROI, which I talked to Dezra about, that people are like, hey, what's my ROI? What's my ROI this month? You can't necessarily tangibly put that together right out of the gate, but it's a cumulative over time that what you'll see out of the patient flow. It's almost like an annuity, right? You pay it, and then it pays you out bigger over time. But what do I do? It's freaking.
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painful, right? It is checks for SEO, SEO. I'm not kidding around. It's crushing. is. I personally, I personally pay you. You've paid everybody that does this is paid, but it eventually does pay off. I here's, here's my question for you, Mike is for a startup, since we're talking about startups for a startup on a scratch, beautiful website, SEO written.
20:09
Beautifully, you know like your brother may be able to build a website But to me it's it's probably more about the the the inside of that website the mechanics Like anybody could put up a website, but it's how it's structured so that Google sees it But let's just say that everything's structured beautifully written perfectly. Nothing's copied It's just Keywords are exactly what we want it to be for that particular client. Everything's great What's the timing here that?
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that a startup should expect to be competing for some of those more dentist near me terms. Are we talking about a year? Are we talking about six months? Yeah, tell us a little bit about that. Six months to a year. Again, it goes back to the competition. An area with less competition could be three months. An area with heavy, heavy competition could be 18 months. It really depends.
21:07
Also, because what we talked about in the very beginning, being found on what page? So there's unlimited amount of pages really that you can be found on. So the way we look at it, if we're in a highly competitive area, there's always going to be something somewhere that somebody's not hitting, right? So we're gonna try, it's like fishing. You go watch a bunch of fishermen and they're all over here and there's this little spot over here that's not been touched.
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because they're all focusing on it here. So we're to go over here and we're going to work this little area. And once they see us, then they're going to come over here and they're going to free that area up. It's kind of like that in a way where we're going to try to do the research and find out what's, you know, what the competition is for the various search terms and keywords. So if we have a small budget to work with, which we do most of the times in startups, we're going to find out where that opportunity is to be able to go fishing and grab that, grab those fish for them and then build from there.
22:04
Yeah, I love that. Like you guys stay away from where all the fish are. You couldn't have said that perfectly. You're gonna have have Dan work up a graphic there to splash that on the face. That's perfect. So what you're saying is, is you guys will identify a part of the pond that isn't being looked at to go fish somewhere. I love that. That's a great idea. So the timing though was 18 to 12 months ish. I'm gonna say six to 12 months. So we told our clients six to 12 months.
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is realistic and we can get them sooner, but it's one of those things where you can't promise it. There's no problem. The Google themselves says, no one can promise getting you anywhere on here. See that advertised. We promise to guarantee, we guarantee to get you on the homepage. Google themselves says that nobody can promise you on here because think about this for a minute. Why don't we trust Google? We trust Google because we trust Google.
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And the day that we stop trusting Google, Google doesn't have a business anymore. Right? So that's why they do that algorithm change multiple times a day to keep people like my team off of figuring it out. Because unless they figure it out, they change it. They go somewhere else. Google has a monster vested interest in making sure that the best information shows on those top 10 areas for those terms.
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has something where right now they're looking at more expertise, authority, and trust. Those are the big three things that Google is looking at. And there's a ton of ways to show that. One of the ways, so as new doctor, as a new dentist startup, you're not going to have the longevity part, because that's a pretty big part of trust that you've been around for a long time. what can you do instead? Well, number one, you give some great content, great quality.
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information out there to your patients, not just generic information. So we want to make sure that we're writing and that we're putting together good quality information. The other big thing now is video. And I'm trying to preach as much as I can about how important video is. Most of our dentists don't want to do video. And I understand it's not a comfortable thing, but we're trying to get our clients to understand how important video is.
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video is big and it's only going to get bigger, Google is going to make it more more important. Google owns YouTube. So guess what that is. They want that. want that. So Mike, I got a question for you. For all of the folks that are on a limited budget or they've built out a project and there was like an OSHIT moment where, oh my God, I don't have the SEO budget that I need to have.
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Give us some tips on what our doctors can do at home that help companies like you guys to give them more SEO activity. Like I'm thinking of a few things, but it doesn't always have to be at affordable or at the marketing company's level. They can do things, right? That's certainly correct. One of the things is going to be asking for reviews.
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asking their patients for reviews, putting a system together for the practice itself, for the different parts and pieces of the practice to ask for reviews. So that's going to be one main thing we always ask our clients to help with. Another thing is if there are some of our dentists and our doctors like to write, and so we ask them to write articles and write blogs.
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and articles that are placed. Another piece to extend on that is talking about articles. I mean, we can place articles for them, but some of the best places are going to be in their local communities. So making connections to different places in their local communities where they can actually write articles and be like a a guest columnist, I'm going to call it. It doesn't have to be a published paper. can't. There's a lot of digital local things that are going on in their communities that they can be part of, that they can be writing and then
26:17
You know, we could take that information and put it where it needs to be on their website. So those are some of the main things. then video. If they're not ready to do video, practice. Start staying at practice, ranking some videos out and get used to it. Find your outfit, find your look, find your voice. Because video is here and it's now. But in the next year, two years, three years, it's going to be even that much more critical.
26:45
But at some point Google is going to move that I believe and I don't have any proof just from what I'm seeing and what I've seen. I believe Google is going to make video number one ranking factor at some point when it comes to when it comes to SEO and being found. Not that they bought YouTube has anything to do with that, but it has everything to do with that. In addition to the to just
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at the numbers if we were to do our own research and find out the amount of people that are looking at video on a daily basis, on a regular basis. It's crazy. video. So those are probably the main things that we want them to do. then the other thing is going to be is even just asking their friends and their family to go to their website, check out their website. Google does like to see that people are putting that website address in.
27:42
and then getting feedback, you know, even from them, things that we can make changes to or things like that. That's another great thing that they can do. I there's literally, literally unlimited things. That's perfect. That's perfect. I find that, you know, if they don't have the bigger budget, that anything that they can take on themselves, it can help. It can help the cause. So thank you for going through that. So bottom line is, if I'm, you know, trying to like, it's hard to
28:10
encapsulate what we're talking about here, but you you have to have relevancy. You have to have consistency. You have to have a website that actually provides proper information. You need to have a website that actually has throughput of information, whether it be in reviews or TikTok videos or what have you that are flowing there. You also need to have, mean, John needs to know what TikTok is. I have, I have a daughter and son in Amelia and Francesco. yes.
28:40
Why don't you say so? Didn't even know. No punches left to roll with. Thankfully, otherwise I would not. But the other piece is the pay-per-click. I mean, all of these pieces of the puzzle, yes, there's monetary units that go into this. However, you know what? I actually think working with a company that allows for there to be a path, a pathway.
29:08
Of not only six months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months, you need to look forward and you need that CEO, right? The guy in the CEO seat and that CEO is your or your marketing director to have that vision forward. Then you actually have to have someone that could actually say, Hey, let's implement this system. Right. And that's what a strong marketing company does. It's taking this down piece by piece and saying, here's this.
29:37
And here's how we're going to attack it. Here's this, here's how we're going to attack it. And that's what you guys do really, really well. You've done a great job with our, with our team. And, and I know you've done a great job with a bunch of, you know, your own clients and mics. Yeah. Well, thank you. We try to look at it like building a business is like building a building. Um, a strong building starts with what a strong foundation. Yeah. We want to make sure the foundation of the marketing is, is strong and that's going to be, uh, the brand, the logo, the branding.
30:04
And then obviously the website would be the next part of that foundation. Really everything else is built off of that. Everything else we do kind of comes off of that. It's directed to whatever you want look at it, but that's really the foundation. If we can get that part right and that part working in the vision, I love that you guys are talking about vision all the time because it goes back to this marketing company. What I said earlier, it's communicating a message and how do we make dentist A different from dentist B is the vision.
30:31
And if we can take the vision that you guys are helping the clients with, and if we can take that vision and find a piece of it that will connect to the marketplace different than the other competitors, that's part of that messaging that we're going to connect with that's going to help be the driving force to bring new patients to the practice. so it's all the parts, it's all the pieces. One part and one piece aren't equal all the time.
30:57
One piece, they could be equal to this and tomorrow this one could be bigger than this. There's so many variables. It's an on literally an ongoing constant change. Um, but the biggest thing is it goes back to if you have a strong foundation, you can withstand the other things that are going to change along the way. Well, if that doesn't really summarize this whole episode, it got a little crazy there in the beginning and how, uh, detailed and how
31:24
Crazy it is. I'll leave you guys and everybody else with this. If you've ever been to Silicon Valley and you've seen the headquarters of Google or even here in Seattle or what the buildings they're building, they have a lot of people working to try to trick you or marketing companies. So that is literally a full-time job, literally, to try to stay on top of all this.
31:53
And I'll say it again and again, the number one pitfall is really getting cheap in marketing on a startup. That's just the bottom line. John, take us home. mean, Mike, first of all, thanks for what you do for our program, but also what you do with my clients and helping them achieve their quick starts. I've seen it and I believe it. And thank you for what you've built over at Affordable Image. Bertagni?
32:23
Thoughts This is the cornerstone of your practice. it's Desra and Mike just did a great job trying to dissect exactly what needs to be done. Most importantly, their information is below and obviously they could be found throughout any of our outlets or media outlets. you know, they're here to help.
32:51
as we are. is not an easy, know, tangible item, but they actually make it almost tangible in terms of how the roadmap looks and what it's going to look like moving forward. So it's that peak around the corner and affordable image. They just do a hell of a job giving you that peak. So thanks for what you guys do.
33:14
Appreciate it. Our passion comes from working with people like you guys that truly care and are giving your time and your, I call it love, giving your love to the dental community. That's what affordable image is about. You can see how I get passionate. I get a little bit angry. I care so much about these doctors and watching them take advantage of upsets me. I do everything I can to...
33:42
Give them the information to make good decisions. So thank you guys for bringing this to the communities. We're here to help. We feel their passion for what they do and we feel their pain. And we're here to help them, right? Well, on that note, thank you gentlemen for taking their time out of the day and giving back to our great community. Take care guys. Thanks guys. Thanks for listening.
34:09
Tune in next week for another Truth Build episode of Startup Unscripted.
34:19
Check out Startup Unscripted on Facebook and YouTube. Click like, subscribe, and interact with Michael and John.