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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 SEO 101 podcast episode
number eight by First Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and I'm the director
of SEO and co founder of First Dentist.
Let's jump right in. We got lots to share today in local
SEO news. Google review scams are on the
rise. Well, actually, I should say they're
resurfacing and probably expanding.
One of my colleagues, Bill Hartzer, noted that scammers are now texting businesses
about how they're posting negative reviews on their business.
The scammers post a single negative review and then blackmail the business
demanding payment in gift cards to prevent being bombarded
with more negative reviews. So how do you respond to this?
No matter how concerned you are, never
send payment to the scammers. Google suggests ignoring them,
flagging the negative reviews and submitting a report via their help center.
And will you get a response from Google? Will
they do anything about it? Unfortunately, that is unknown. But if you do
flag the reviews, there better a
better chance that something's going to happen. And if you do submit your help
request, that will reinforce it. So make sure you do that first,
okay? And don't add any that
look like they're authentic. That
might muddy the waters. Just be careful, okay?
If you need help with this, please do reach out. I don't envy anyone
in that situation and we really want you to to pull through this
because blackmail is terrifying online,
especially when they're dealing with your Google business profile, which can
mean a lot of business. All right,
next up, Google disallows adding countries or states to service
area business businesses. So does this have any
application to you?
I couldn't directly think of a reason why a dentist
would do this. However, there are practices perhaps
that are statewide and maybe they want to be more of an area.
I don't know. I just wanted to be sure I covered this because it is
rather important. They are no longer supporting this. They used to.
You used to be able to say, I covered this entire state.
Essentially, they want you to specify your service area by city,
postal code or another type of area. You can have up to 20
service areas. The boundaries of your area should
not be more than two hours driving time from your physical location. So
if you happen to be one of the rarest of businesses where you're, you're
coming to people to provide dental work, keep These in
mind, do not add countries or states
as a service area. That's the takeaway.
In June there was a major update
that to to Google's. Google's algorithm that
has caused a lot of headaches for many people.
From a dentist point of view, one of the most obvious issues
may be in your Google business profile report.
A significant and uniform drop has occurred
for many people. This is of search
impressions and search impressions count. Whenever someone
visits a search result, let's say that they conduct a search
and your business appears in the three pack of
local maps just appearing there
is cited as a impression.
Now since this update occurred
and where there's no direct correlation, Google's not saying there's a connection.
However, it looks rather interesting about the timing. A
little coincidental. People are seeing between
40% and 90% drops
in search impressions. That's pretty significant.
Up till now we have not seen any improvements in this
for the odd person who has been affected. Again it's been uniform
but across a different margin of people. We don't know if it's affecting all
dentists. So far we've seen it very in a fragmented
basis across hours.
So I would take it with a grain of salt, don't be too concerned about
this drop. A lot of stuff is happening right now in
AI being applied all of these different
tests. The overall update to Google in June
has turned out to be quite significant. More information is coming but
do keep in mind that when things are
boiling like this, it's too easy
to overreact. Just chill and see if things
stabilize, which likely it will in most cases
unless you've done something you know you've done very wrong, that you're, you're pretty much
in a good space here. And we'll update you
as we learn more. Suspicious review warnings on
Google User Ben Fisher, this is from Local
Search Forum reported that one of steady demands clients received a
consumer alert from Google regarding suspicious reviews.
The alert is visible on Google profiles when consumers navigate
to the reviews section. So if
you go to the review section you'll see this. In the
screenshot it shows in this case a weed
dispensary. So it's not exactly correlated with
dentists. However, what we usually start to see
begins to take hold in other areas. In this case it says
quote, suspicious high rated reviews were recently removed
from this place. That's a
bit of a concern, right? If you see that on your own profile. Now
let's rewind a little bit if you did this and
let's say you went in and flagged a whole bunch of these reviews created by
a blacks in a blacklist fashion or blackmail
fashion. Would this particular
box appear even after Google manually reviewed those? I would hope not.
I would think that Google would understand that you have
notified them that you're being blackmailed and this would not appear
either way. You don't have much of a choice. You have to do something about
those. If you do happen to do that and you go
through the process and you see this appear, the suspicious high rate of
reviews were recently removed from this place. Warning, please let
me know. I would be very interested in finding out and
perhaps between myself and some of my colleagues, we can put a little more pressure
on Google so they realize that this is simply not fair and unreasonable.
All right. For general SEO news. Well, I've kind of touched
on this already. There is a fairly significant
June 25th core update underway.
Now at this point, all of what we're seeing is
a lot of news from people who are
feeling the pinch, but nothing that
is concrete. And this is very common when there's a big update in play.
Until we hear more, we can't really share much more. I don't
like to set off any alarm bells, as I said, because I don't want you
to overreact and at this point there's really no
point in worrying you. It's just, it's something that's going to
settle and when we learn more, we'll, we'll pass it along.
Google generates nearly 13% of people also
ask answers. So the founder of the SEO2
also ask analyzed 8.4 million English
language people also ask results.
He found that 12.6 of the answers percent of the answers
are now AI generated.
This is the first known study and I find it rather concerning.
Unless it's a very simple question, I don't trust
AI to answer questions perfectly. It hallucinates
a lot of very important
questions. The answers to very very important questions and people tend
to take it at face value. That's not a good idea.
And the fact that they are, you know, generating
these more and more is going to become an issue and there's going to be
some embarrassing situations for Google. I'm certain of it in the news.
But this is very interesting. I mean up till
now that those positions which
are are now answered by AI
were once answered by us. You know, anyone, the average person
who's replied and Google would give you credit for that. So
it is a shame.
Google Search console has added 24 hour comparison
views. This is a new comparison
method among actually two that have been added to the
Google Search console. Now you can Compare the last 24 hours to the
previous period or the last 24
hours compared week over week. Now, this is a small
change, but it is helpful for anyone who wants to easily compare their time
periods. If you're doing something you
feel on your website that could have a positive impact on
your site, and you really, really want to see if it has, this is the
kind of information, that kind of reporting that can help
you. If you don't see this ability now, you will see it
soon. Google noted they're rolling out these changes to all properties over the next
few months.
Now. Core web vitals for those that don't recall,
this is what Google it's kind of a. It's a
classification of various
aspects of how your web page loads.
And based on this information, Google determines whether or not the site's going to
provide a. Or let's I'm trying to keep keep to page.
Whether the page it's reviewing will
provide a great user experience.
Well, there's a bug in it right now, but at least a possible one.
There are reports of core web vitals.
Finding that total. Sorry, rethinking how to say this here.
We're finding that total pages listed as good and needs
improvement have plummeted, but the poor URLs
remain the same. That doesn't make
any sense. We've looked at our clients and we see the same
trend Now. You'd expect that if those good and need improvement
URLs dropped, poor URLs would have to.
Would have to increase. But this is not the case.
So whatever's going on, again,
so many changes are happening right now. Google needs to fix this. If
they're, if they haven't fixed this and it's not a bug,
maybe Google's simply analyzing fewer pages now.
We don't know. John Mueller did pipe in. He says
these reports are based on samples of what we know for your site.
And sometimes the overall sample size for a site changes
that's not indicative of a problem. I'd focus on
the samples with issues rather than the absolute counts.
So perhaps the sample sizes have changed. We just
don't know. At any rate, if you see a decline, stick with what John
says and focus on samples with issues and ignore the
absolute counts. We can only
do what we can with what we're given. So there you go.
It's the shrug of the shoulders Google thing. We just don't have a
choice. We go with it. And if it is a bug. Hopefully they fix it.
If it's not, then I guess we just work with what we have.
And this is another great John Mueller discussion here. So,
barely indexed sites A user on Bluesky asked a
question about indexing. They said that they had their WIX site live for a few
months now and only four pages have been crawled and indexed.
They claim they're not peering at all in search either.
John Mueller responded, if you're hosting your site on a
strong hosting platform in a technically valid way and
it's barely getting indexed often, that's a sign that our systems
aren't convinced about the site overall. Obviously
every site and business is different. It just sometimes feels like folks
focus on building out a topic, ranking pages for the
topic, when their business is actually not directly tied to
the random web traffic for that topic.
Well, I've got a few thoughts that would come to mind if a client came
to me with this problem. First, the site is very new. Just a few months.
It takes time for a new site to become established. It may just be a
waiting game. Continue working on
creating great, highly relevant content. If the
content that you have on there isn't that great, that might be a reason why
you'd want to work on links and citations. Anything that can
build the authority of your site so that Google decides that it's
worth caring about. Now remember, and I've I try to say this
as often as I can, you have to earn the right to rank. A dear
friend of mine, rest in peace, she used to say that
all the time and I believe it wholeheartedly. It's a very good way to put
it. Why you. Why should you rank? Well, you
have to earn it. And showing Google that you have earned
it is very simple.
Building authority. Have people link to you,
ensure that you do have an author page on your
site if you write regularly and that author pages
where people link to. If you write on another website, let's say you
write in an industry journal, if you could ask them, you know, for
the author page, could you make sure that you link back to my author page
on my site? That's where I have everyone linking to so that Google can see
that I have expertise. This will help you. That's one thing
you really need to tell them. It will help them because Google wants to
see that whatever's written has been written by an expert
AI and search. Wow, what a shock. There's a lot about here, a lot to
share here, but let's just jump right in. Google AI
overviews ranked below position one in 12.4%
of cases. Now this is another one of the studies and we're seeing a lot
of them come out these days. The
joke here is that AI overviews are slipping in search rankings. Well,
a month ago, roughly 98% of all AI overviews
ranked in the number one position. So there is a change here.
They would appear above organic, paid and other search features. Now
they're being displayed more frequently in lower positions. In
my experience, I'm seeing more paid ads ahead of them, which makes sense.
Google's trying to, you know, keep their coffers full.
A study by SEO Clarity found the following
87.6% of AI overviews are in position
one, still very high.
7.6% appear in position two, 2.8%
appear in position three, and 2% appear in position four
or lower. Intent stats found by
the study show that information informational continues to
dominate, accounting for 80% of all AI overviews. That's informational
searches, I should say. So these are people just looking for information
about what's happening locally. But what does this mean? Or
how you know, when
did this particular holiday start? And
why? Just really random informational based queries.
Only 12.38% of them are transactional. So
that's how do I book or help me book
or. I'm just giving some examples here.
Where is the nearest dentist?
How do I choose a dentist? It was more informational, I guess. But
anyway, transactional is not as high.
3.31% are navigational. How do
I get to this particular place? And
0.15% are local. And that might be
even more like what's this address?
Or where is the Royal BC Museum?
Something like that. Mark Traphagen, VP of Marketing at
SEO Clarity, believes AI overviews are being pushed down as Google views
user behavior, suggesting that less popular AI
overviews are being intentionally demoted. Makes sense. Again,
it's one of the things that we can rely on most of the
time and that is that Google will always be working
to make themselves more money. So whatever isn't really being efficient.
They're going to move down and move up the stuff. That is, while they also
try to retain our interest in traffic, to their sites,
to their search searches, I mean. Ahrefs study
finds no evidence Google penalizes AI content. This
is just a nice thing to add. I figured a lot
of people are concerned about this.
Does AI? Do search engines care if you use AI?
Well, this study consisted of 600,000 pages
and the top 20 ranking URLs for 100,000
random keywords. It found no correlation between
AI content and Google rankings. More than 86%
of high ranking pages contained some level of AI
generated content. 4.6%
of pages were entirely AI, 13.5 were purely
human written and 81.9% were a combination of
AI and human. Now
we have to take the study with a grain of salt because I would say
it's certain that they were using some sort of
tool that analyzes content to determine if it was written with AI.
Those tools are not perfect. I've had it run. I've run those
tools on pages I wrote 100% myself and it said
part of it was written in AI. So take it with a grain of salt.
But I do like that. It confirms what I think is the
obvious, which is why would Google care if the content
was created by AI if it does a great job? If you
create a fantastic resource using AI that
provides their searchers with a great experience,
Google could care less. That's fantastic.
So just make sure that you do really apply yourself.
If you're creating content with AI. There are some phenomenal prompts you
can look for online, but generally I think anyone who's
serious about creating content that is influenced by AI should become
a bit of a prompt engineer.
You know, I've done a lot of prompt
engineering lately and it's fun, it's frustrating,
but it is rewarding when you do finally have it figured out and you create
content with much less
effort that truly excels. Wow.
I mean, that's a game changer. So do keep in mind that
it is worth doing. It just takes a little bit of work and, and some
practice and, and that's really the way everything is online.
If it's going to be too easy, everyone's going to do it and it's going
to be worth nothing in very short order if it doesn't do
little at all when you launch it. People who just launch
content that simply are just not going to get the benefits that they
could if they put more effort in. Well, on behalf of myself,
Ross Dunn, Director of SEO and co founder of First Dentist, thank you for
joining me today. If you have any questions you would like to like answered
either on the podcast for free or on a more private
consulting basis, please email email info at
firstdentist. Com. Thank you for listening and remember to tune
into our next episode where we will be sharing more 101
SEO tips and news on dental SEO.
That's why only.