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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!
DSEO 101 Podcast - E4 - Critical Updates and How to Be Found on SearchGPT
Hello and welcome to the Dental SEO 101 podcast, episode No. 4 by First Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn, and I'm the director of SEO and co-founder of First Dentist. Alright, we've got a lot to cover in this podcast, so let's jump right into it. First off is something every practice needs to know: there are some new FTC guidelines that have come out, and it's all about reviews. As of October 21st, 2024, each review violation—these are ones that are fake reviews—could see penalties of up to $50,000 each. That’s right, $50,000. Now, what's banned under this new policy? First of all, fake reviews, which includes AI-generated reviews and testimonials from users who haven't experienced the product or service. Purchased reviews, both positive and negative, reviews that were bought or incentivized, such as offering 10% off a future purchase or, in this case, a treatment for a positive review. Insider reviews, that's reviews from employees, their families, or practice affiliates. Review suppression, using threats or intimidation to remove negative reviews, and believe it or not, that's not uncommon. In fact, one of my staff members, his sister went through that, and she bowed to pressure, which is sad, I think, in this case, but it is unfortunately not uncommon. False social proof, this is buying followers or views to create artificial social media influence, and company-controlled review sites. This is where you present your practice as well as your practice-owned review platform as an independent review platform. That's a trickier and probably rarer tactic, but again, it is covered under this new policy.
So here's some real-world examples they provided. In this example on Searchengineland.com, Fashion Nova was fined 4.2 million dollars—wow—for blocking negative reviews from its website and allowing only four and five-star reviews. The rental listing platform Roomster was penalized for using thousands of fake positive reviews. This case is still pending. Alright, so let's now jump into some SEO tips. Here are 6 SEO practices you need to stop right now. This is based off an article on Search Engine Journal and has some really good points that I felt worth mentioning. First, redundant SEO practices. Don't buy expired domains unless you have another reason to do so. If it's just for SEO purposes, it's not going to have a benefit. Now, if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll briefly give you an idea of what it is. Essentially, some people buy domains that had traffic going to them and had a certain amount of clout, you know, people liked going to them, they had traffic, and there's links pointing to them, so they had a certain amount of authority. Well, once they expire, all those links are still pointing to it, so people would buy those expired domains and point them to their site to try to borrow or steal that authority. Google's caught onto this, and any expired domain that is passed along that way generally is defunct; it just won't work for you. Now, there are positive reasons to do this though. If you find a domain that has been purchased—or sorry, that has expired—that you think is a great domain that has a benefit for you because people might be searching for it and perhaps it does have authority and all these things, that's fine, buy it, point it to your website, just don't expect it to have big SEO value. It's not that it's going to penalize you, it's just that it is something that you won't get the kind of value you would have many years ago when this practice was quite common and effective.
Buying paid links. Now, I differ a little bit on this. I don't think paid links are such a bad thing as long as they're done very professionally, in other words, it's under the advice of an experienced SEO, or you're buying the link because you know you're going to be getting traffic directly from the website where the link exists. That's fine, but again, if you're just buying links just for the SEO benefit, be very careful, and if you can't—if you're not sure—avoid it at all costs because it doesn't look good. It's a waste of time, and what I should say when it doesn't look good, I mean to Google. If they see that you're doing this on a regular basis, it could look bad, and you could end up with some problems for rankings generally. Not most of the time they ignore this stuff, but again, I wouldn't want to mess around too much with this. Adding the meta index follow. Now, this is a meta tag you can add in the background of your website. This is a little more than basic stuff here, but it isn't very advanced either. Index follow has no benefit. It's telling Google to index this page and also follow all the links. Well, Google's gonna do that anyway. In fact, it's hard to get them not to; that's the tricky part. If you ever wanted to keep them from doing that, it's very difficult.
Next is scraping Google search features, something like "People also ask." If you go to Google and do a search, you'll see a "People also ask" section. Well, this is a great place to get some ideas about content to create, but don't simply copy what you find there. You know, add your own spin to it, get some great insights into it, create a great outline, create an article, maybe add it to your frequently asked questions on your practice website. There's a lot of really good benefits there, just don't just scrape it and use it as is, okay? Questionable keyword use—haha—this is probably a fairly large topic if I really put my mind to it, but at this point, the main point that they used here was don't stuff with keywords. Don't just take a whole bunch of keywords and add them into the page hoping that you're gonna get rankings for them. That just doesn't work. In fact, keyword optimization, in many ways, has changed so much that it's not even the way it works the way you think it does, not the way it used to anyway. Now, it's more about entities and how Google understands the overall concept of the page and how it connects to different entities. Yeah, anyway, I don't want to get into it, but the point of the matter is, don't stuff keywords. It's not worth it. Don't do it; it's just not worth it.
Copying your competitors. Now, don't just copy your competitors, but do it better. Look at competitors for ideas, use your own expertise and experience to improve upon it. There's nothing wrong with that, just don't directly copy what they're doing. And I don't mean just copying their content; I mean, just don't think that what they're doing is the right thing to do. We get that a lot as marketers; we're often told, "I wanna be just like this competitor," and when I ask them why, they're like, "Well, they're doing quite well." Like, but are they doing quite well in rankings? You know, what is it that makes you believe they're doing quite well? And oftentimes, the data we're dealing with is very weak, if existent at all. Sometimes it's just hearsay. So, copying what they're doing is generally not a good idea unless you have some certainty that it's a benefit, and then add your own spin to it. You've got to be unique; unique is very important these days.
Adding more content to your website because you think Google wants it? No. If you want to add content to your website, do it because you know your viewers will want it, your prospects will want it. It's got to have a benefit. It doesn't matter if you think it might help Google; the point is, you want your website to become a value to your patients and to your prospective patients. And make sure that when you do create it, use your own knowledge and expertise to make it excellent and not just boilerplate. Base decisions on—don't base decisions on research of millions of Google search results. Now, what this comes down to is, there's some gray area here, but don't bank on all of your success on an SEO case study that you read that gives you some tips on what you could do. Now, I'm not just saying that. The reason this is gray is, there is always a benefit to reading case studies and learning about what's worked for other people, but don't take them all at face value. The fact is, there are many factors that go into how a website's ranked, and a lot of these people are creating these case studies based on what they can find, but even they're not certain—or they shouldn't be, at least—because they don't know exactly what it was that was done or what really made the difference for rankings. They can only guess based on research, and that research is often lacking. Again, I do it all the time. I look at these, and I think, "Okay, that's interesting information." I put it in a sort of a cruise, and I get a good sense based on what we see on our own websites that we're working on, and go, "You know what, that smacks true. That seems like something that could really be true. Let's test it out a little bit." And we try it on a couple of websites and go, "Oh yeah, this actually does work." And we may or may not share it publicly because it could be something of a real advantage to our clients.
Next up is what sets a winner apart in local search results. Now, after saying what I just said, this is sort of an interesting segue because this is some research we did. Is it 100% sure? No. We're basing this again on our experience, so I would say it's much better than the average, but it's still guesswork to a degree—just educated. So, when we did our research, we were looking at why a particular client was having a difficult time ranking. Sometimes it happens, and we have to figure out what it is that's causing that. And we looked at an excellent competitor, one that had really done their homework and, frankly, was just exceptional. They created an exceptional presence online. In this case, ironically, we had told the client to do a lot of this stuff from the beginning, but they said, "No, we don't want to do that, we don't want to do that, we don't want to do that." So anyway, unfortunately, it just turned out this way. So here are some of the things: first of all, have a great website that works in all ways. This is a loaded comment because there are so many things that a website could have, should have, may benefit from for different areas of business. Like, if you're in a specific region, maybe people are looking for this kind of content all the time; maybe they're not. Anyway, think personality. Make sure that your website—this is some general, really strong tips—make sure that it has personality, that it's not just a boring practice website just showing the dentist or the team and a few stock photos of people getting their teeth cleaned or whatever. Have some photos of life, of laughter, and showing that it's not just a sterile workplace. It really does make a difference, especially for a family dentist or most certainly for a pediatric dentist. I mean, there's just so many different ways this could work. You know, show smiles, have levity, show some images of different patients—if they've signed a waiver or however you want to proceed that way; laws are different everywhere—of them being super happy, they just finished with their Invisalign treatment, maybe they're holding up a card saying, "Yeah, I finished, I've got straight teeth now," whatever. Have some fun with this, and fun will show through, and it'll make it an interesting place to show up. But don't fake it. If a person sees us on our website and then they go to your practice and feel like they are in a sterile environment and no one's happy, that's not gonna work; that's not gonna go over well, okay?
Next, make sure that you have a proper Google Business Profile and that it's maintained. Google Business Profiles are more work than you might expect. Keeping it maintained with the hours, including any vacations, holidays, different hours for perhaps you've got a community event coming up, or you have a staff day where the place is closed—all that stuff needs to be put in there and kept up to date. Google rewards that because it knows that you are caring, you're really making this thing a useful resource for its users. Also, ensuring your categories are accurate, your services described are descriptive, you've got regular photography—I could talk about this for a long time. There are a lot of things that could be done in your Google Business Profile, but it's very important that that is maintained on a regular basis. And actually, the next one is adding photos to your Google Business Profile. It deserves its own point because it's something a lot of people forget to do in-house. Frankly, the staff gets overwhelmed, and they just don't even think about doing photos. But they can have photos of themselves at work, or someone smiling, or holding—or one of the ones I saw was really cool: every time someone had a birthday, they had birthday cakes. Well, show them happily with their birthday cake. It just shows a great culture and a great experience there.
Respond to your reviews. I cannot stress this enough. If someone is reviewing you on Google on your Google Business Profile and they left a nice review, oh my gosh, thank them. They took the time to do that; that's really rare. And you want them to feel happy about it and want to do it again. And by just saying, "Thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate you, we look forward to seeing you at your next appointment," so simple. Just don't use the same one every time; don't boilerplate that, okay? That looks worse. In fact, don't even bother doing anything if you're gonna do that. Make it unique every time; it's not that hard. If it's a negative review, of course, you must respond to that. Take it offline, invite them to call you so you can resolve this. We really want to make sure they're happy. You know, make it really clear, even if they're a troublesome client—you know, they're a patient—you know that there's no way this is gonna work out, don't make it appear that way online, okay? Tell them to call you; let's work this out. We want to make you happy.
Have a great social media presence. This is loaded; that's a lot of work. It is not easy, but if you're doing some of the other things I was talking about, such as photos of people with their birthday cakes and maybe photos of patients hitting milestones, well, this is great stuff, and it should be shared. And it's gold for social media. Well, start using it and show that personality. Have fun; don't be boring. If you have community events where you sponsor whatever it might be—from helping the homeless with dental care or single parents that need help with dental care or whatever it might be—make sure that's well documented. Even do video if you can. All of these things are very helpful and work great in social media. And keep it going; be very active. Whatever you decide to do, if it's gonna be six times a month you're posting on every platform, stick to it. Make that your bare minimum and book ahead. Get someone to do this; it pays off. Holy smokes, the example sites that I've looked at that have done this just have an incredible overall presence in rankings, and obviously, it looks great and makes people want to go there.
Write great content when you write. We talk about this all the time. If you're going to write something for your website, take the time to do it exceptionally. If you're gonna use AI, hey, no problem, do it, but then add your expertise and make sure it's succinct, clear, and is in your voice. You can train AI to write in your voice; there's lots of tips online on how to do that. Strongly recommend that, and then use that same voice profile for future writing so there's a continuity to your writing.
Next up are Google updates for URL structure best practices. It's a little more technical, but it's important to understand if you happen to have a website that's a little more advanced and you have URL parameters in them. They recommend using ampersands and equals to separate multi-key value pairs. No, that's pretty advanced, isn't it? But when it comes down to it, they don't want you to use colons, brackets, commas, or double commas in the URL. If you do that, it can break search, and we don't want that at any situation at all. And that's mostly—this really just applies to any practices that have e-commerce of any kind and maybe something custom. Most out-of-the-box systems won't have any of these issues, but custom ones could, so keep it in mind.
Google's John Mueller recently discussed how core web vitals have limited impact on rankings. What are core web vitals? There are a few metrics that Google looks at to determine whether or not your website is running smoothly and deserves the right to rank. It is not the end-all, be-all. If your site fails this, it doesn't mean you're not gonna rank, but you know, and that's what he's saying here. I mean, it's not everything; it's actually a small portion of how Google ranks a webpage. But don't ignore it either. Here's an example here. Here's a quote from John: "We've been pretty clear that core web vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you see a big drop just because of that." And the example that he's speaking of is Andrew Mcleod said that a site with over 50,000 monthly visitors experienced a drop in traffic within 72 hours of implementing advertisements. So he figured that the advertisements were what caused the drop, and the core values and all that stuff. In addition, John noted in his response, "Having a website that provides a good experience for users is worthwhile because if users are so annoyed that they don't want to come back, you're just wasting the first-time visitors to your website, regardless of where they came from." Unquote. Makes sense, right? I mean, that's not rocket science, but yeah, technical SEOs can get lost in the details of core web vitals and trying to get 100% rank—100% score—based on Google's core web vital tests. It's not something you need to worry about if you're in the 80th percentile; that's fantastic. If you're in the 60th percentile, yeah, there's some work to do, and it couldn't hurt to improve it; it might help encourage people to stay on your website, to visit it, to regularly visit it if it's fast and loads quickly and doesn't have any break or anything that's broken, anyway, I'll leave it at that. Now, one of the most common questions we get is: how long should content be to be successful in SEO? How do you know? Do I need to create a really long piece of content for it to rank well? Well, this is another question that John Mueller fielded, and the question was via LinkedIn: "Hi John, is there an ideal content length that performs better on Google search results? Should we focus on creating longer, in-depth articles, or can short-form content rank just as well if it's concise and valuable?"
Alright, so John's reply: "There is no universally ideal content length. Focus on bringing unique value to the web overall, which doesn't mean just adding more words. If you're looking for a mechanical recipe for how to make something useful, that would be futile. That's just not how it works, neither online nor offline." He went on to say, "We love this. We were gonna chuckle out of this in-house quote: If you count the words in your best-selling books, average the count, and then write the same number of words in your own book, will it become a bestseller? If you make a phone that has the same dimensions as a popular smartphone, will you sell as many as they do? I love spreadsheets, but numbers aren't everything." Unquote.
Well said, John. I don't think I could submit it more succinctly. Create great content; it doesn't matter how big it is. Just make sure it's well-written and unique, and you're set. Another piece here is that Google warns against the over-reliance on SEO tool metrics. This is interesting because we get this a lot from prospects and also colleagues who say that they use this tool, and it's everything. None of the tools are everything. Some of them are fantastic. We personally use Semrush a lot; we think it's a very good platform. But we had to pick one because it gets so darn expensive when you're trying to do multiple platforms. So, in this case, John Mueller warns against over-reliance on third-party SEO metrics. Third-party tools cannot access Google data; they're guessing. SEO success requires consistent effort, not quick fixes that these tools provide or suggest. And that's always going to be the case. There will never be a time that I can foresee where we'll have access to Google's data, and we'll never know for sure. All of these platforms do their best to guess based on data, and again, correlation is not causation. They can't be 100%. Just don't rely and put all your eggs in one basket based on what is coming out of these platforms.
In fact, one of the services that we offer is interpreting what these platforms are saying and helping you prioritize what they are. If you've got SEO in-house, this could be a big help. You can leverage our 20—my, I've got 27 years of experience as of 2024 doing SEO—so you can leverage experience for myself and my colleague who's done it for 20 years and get a prioritized list based on what they see on Semrush. And that's just an example; it could be another tool as well. We can look at them, we can tell you what you should be working on, what you can ignore for now, and that makes a big difference because there's a lot of data. They pride themselves on providing a ton of data. Well, seeing the trees through the noise—and I'm mixing metaphors—but it is difficult to figure out what to focus on, and we can help you do that, and we do for some clients.
Alright, let's get into some AI stuff here, and this is all about Search GPT, which is really interesting. It's ChatGPT's new search engine. It's been around for a little while but mostly in closed beta, and now it's rolling out. So, what does this mean? Well, first of all, and this is the biggest tip you can get, this is very important information: Search GPT uses Bing's index—Bing, not Google. So, if Bing does not know about your website and hasn't indexed it, you're not in Search GPT. That's not good. So, make sure that you do have access to your Bing Webmaster Tools and you have checked to make sure that your website is being indexed and fix any issues that are appearing there, just like Google Search Console that you should be on top of all the time as well. All of these are things that are done by marketing companies like mine at First Dentist, but at the same time, you need to ensure that whoever's working with you, if it's not us, it's another company that they're now considering Bing. It doesn't mean you have to rank on Bing, though. I can't stress that enough. Search GPT uses its own algorithm, so what shows up in there doesn't reflect what's showing up in rankings on Bing. It just means you need to be in the library, let's call it, for Bing, and once you're in that, you have the chance to appear in Search GPT. How to optimize and get top rankings in that? Who knows at this stage? It's far too early for anyone to know. We know tips; we know we have great ideas, and we use tools to improve the chances of that for many of our clients, and we can talk about that further if you have any questions. But it is very cutting-edge and brand new, so just keep in mind though, this is a great tip if you want to be ahead of your competition: ensure that you are well-indexed in Bing, your website is, and that you stay on top of that.
Now, why does Search GPT—why should you care? Well, according to research posted on Search Engine Land, it gives brands four times more referrals versus Perplexity or Claude, which are two other competing sites. So, despite being in limited beta, according to this BrightEdge report, it's sending four times more referrals to brands. That's very impressive. Now, it's growing at a rate of 150% month over month, and I don't expect that's going to decrease. It's probably going to multiply over the years. It's probably gonna be much better than Google. We'll see. Google has a lot of resources and a ton of data. I guess that could be a pie-in-the-sky statement, what I just said, but I have a feeling because they specialize that they really could do much better. I'm hoping they will because I want more competition. I don't want Google being the main player all the time.
So, OpenAI, the company that runs Search GPT, should be rolling it out before the end of this year—it's 2024—or in early 2025. Will that mean that it's completely available to the public without having an account there? Who knows? I strongly suspect you're going to have to have an account with the system to be able to use it, and until that disappears, it won't become very mainstream. But it's also much more system-intensive, in my opinion, or from my understanding anyway, than Google search.
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 answered either on the podcast for free or on a more private consulting basis, please email info@firstdentist.com. Thank you for listening, and remember to tune in to our next episode where we'll be sharing more 101 SEO tips and news on dental SEO.