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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 nine by First
Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and I'm the director of SEO and co
founder of First Dentist. All right, well, let's jump right into some general
SEO news. Now. I'm going to start off with some gold here.
How can dentists stay competitive in search results
in the new the new world of AI and
Google search and Perplexity and OpenAI and. Well, it goes on and on
and on. In short, go the
distance. Make certain that your website is a living
resource with regular updates that add value.
Now, what does that mean? I know that can be quite overwhelming for people to
understand. Well, genuine opinion pieces,
thoughtful and helpful resources, content that attends to the need of
different Personas such as the blind or the
elderly. All of that information is going to add depth
and value to your website that
frankly, most vanilla dental websites don't have. And
that's what's going to help you stand out. Number two,
since AI will answer most simple questions
immediately, you really aren't going to get a lot of traffic for people
coming to your site just to get, you know, find out what is
the process for braces. That used to be the case. You might
just be the number one ranking for how do braces work
or how long do braces need to be on and all that kind of information.
Well, a lot of times AI overviews, let's say, if people are using
Google, which they still do mostly, are going to answer that
question right away and they're not going to send that traffic to your website. So
technically you're losing traffic. Fortunately, when people
are really about to make the decision of who they're going to go to, they
have their braces done or who they're going to go to to
have a filling or whatever it might be, they're going to do the homework
and dig deeper and actually look and compare and contrast
different practices. Now, with that said,
you still want to add depth to the content you have.
And this is by doing it, by making your content
multimodal. What does that mean? Well,
having different modes of learning, having different modes
of viewing and digesting the content, it
can be imagery, such as infographics,
simple imagery at all, videos,
testimonials, goes on and on. I mean, it can
be a number of different things. I mean, I've covered The main ones right there.
But consider when you write a great piece of content
that you've added to your site to continue adding these
multimodal pieces to it. That way it's not so
overwhelming when you're writing it. If you write a great piece of content, you can
now make a note, okay, next month I'm going to go and add an image
to this, or next month I'm going to create a little video that I can
add to this content. What does that create? Well, it gives you
the opportunity to be a resource for these
AI search results and that is
powerful. I mean it. The only content that's going to show there
and be used in AI results are is
content that has depth, has authority,
shows that you really know what you're talking about. So
build this in and the benefits will be that
you will create a great experience for anyone who's coming to your site. You're
more likely to get backlinks to that content, you're more likely to be
sourced and there's just no way to lose in that circumstance. Number
three, be a pillar of your community. I know it's
not everyone's jam, but it is really
important to become hyperlocal. We've been saying it for years, but now,
and now it's even more important, really build
your reputation in your town, city,
area, wherever you're at. It's, it's critical, you
know, support a sports team and do it consistently. If
you don't want to do that, be charitable and stick
to specific charities that mean something to you or to your staff.
Perhaps each staff member gets the chance to choose a charity and
they contribute
X amount of hours per month to support that charity.
As part of your willingness to help your
community, that's pretty powerful and that needs to be mentioned on
your site. So not only needed do you need to do all of this, but
you need to be proud and provide evidence of this
great work on your website. This will be noticed. And
of course I can't help but be an SEO here. You do
want to hopefully get a link from wherever you're supporting.
If it's a local chapter of a particular charity, hopefully they
will give you a link saying, hey, yeah, this is one of our supporters, we
thank them very much, blah, blah, blah, Get a video with them,
get a testimonial for them thanking you. All of these things
help so much. It feels a little weird asking for this, but
the value, it's win, win, they're getting what they
need and they're more than happy. Most of the time, they're more than happy to
help you out as well. Why wouldn't they? Number four, reviews of
all kinds are beneficial. Third party, first
party videos and case studies.
Anything else I've missed third party might
be Dr. Ogle. I don't know why that came to mind. It's like probably the
lowest quality one. But anyway, I don't know much. I've been looking at these
directories lately. I've got staff that's a little more on top of that. But
there are a number of third party sites where if you do
build a review profile that's going to have some benefit.
First party is when they send you your own, send you the testimonial, then you
get to use it on your own website. Perhaps they send you a video, a
short clip from their phone. Wow, that's enormous.
A proper video. If they're really impressed, you can get someone and send them
over to do video of them thanking you. Create a case
study of before and after along with their testimonial and video.
This stuff is just win, win, win. It's fantastic.
Number five and I can't stress this enough because
they're coming out of the woodwork. Do not
fall for all of the marketing ads pitching dirt
cheap SEO and link building unless you want to pay
a lot more later on when you have to clean up the mess
made by these providers. There's a ton of people out there saying,
well now with emergence of AI, you no longer need to spend on
marketing. And, and I mean I know that sounds so self serving for me to
say that, but it's so, it's, it's garbage.
It's never going to be that. You can't do that. You
can automate this because the simple
fact is if everyone could do it, you'd still need to find a way
to be above the others. And that adds that's meaning to do
more work. You can't just do it the simple way,
at least this simple. So please do keep in mind
that if you go that route I can
nearly guarantee you the benefits are going to be
terrible. Well, there's been no zero benefits and you're going to have to pay
to have the clean the mess cleaned up. We've, we've done it many
times for other clients who've come back or new clients have come to us and
gone, okay, I kind of screwed up here and
there are a lot of people out there with these get rich fly by
night businesses that are trying to secure your misinformation,
your Dollars with misinformation guised amid all this
AI hype. So enough said. I did want to
mention it though. So there five, five major tips
that I think will, well, I know will help you out and
make you your business stronger, your website stronger
and ensure that you have the best position
possible with all of the changes coming in in search. All
right, let's jump into some news now. Well, it's been talked about for
years, but [Apple] is to launch an AI search for
Siri in 2026. Now this is kind of an ongoing
joke in the SEO community like when will Apple finally launch a search
engine? And it's something they never bothered to do. But
Siri, which I've I know from Apple users,
is frankly terrible compared to most systems nowadays.
It was great when it came out, but it's just appalling at
this point is finally getting some serious upgrades. They're
building their own AI powered search engine. Currently it is known
internally as World Knowledge Answers
and will debut in spring of 2026. Their goal is
to transform Siri into an answer engine. It'll be similar to how
Google's AI overviews and ChatGPT work. They will
not be like the Siri we know today or this will not be.
The new system will generate summaries blending text, images,
video and search results. And local search results is planned
to be expanded into Safari as well. Logically,
the overhaul will partially rely on Google's Gemini AI model.
Wow, I didn't see that coming. As you can see I'm reading notes from a
colleague of mine wrote on this particular subject. I didn't know.
I'm shocked that Apple will ever would ever use anything in Google. There was a
quite a battle between them, I thought. Oh well.
Anyway, we'll see what comes of it. They've
certainly taken a long time to make upgrades to Siri, so we'll see if this
is a mess or not. I have a bit of a bad feeling about
it. Time will tell. Google has
released the August 2025 spam update. I'm now in September
as I do this podcast and that
spam update has caused some fluctuations which is
normal for even people who with no problems. It just tends to cause
a bit of a shuffle. Obviously anyone with no issues
are going to be bouncing back or at least we'll see modest changes if
any. Those who have been breaking Google's
guidelines may really feel a hit and I know some are. Some have
lost 50% plus in traffic. So
let's get right back to the content though on August 26th, Google announced
today we released the August 25th, 2025 spam
update. It may take a few weeks to complete. This is a normal spam
update and it will roll out for all languages and locations. We'll post
on the Google Search Status Dashboard when the rollout is done. All right,
this update will be rolling out over the next few weeks. The last spam update
was in December of last year. At least the one announced at this
time. There are no more details on what kinds of spam Google may be targeting
and even in the forums there's nothing yet and it's obviously been rolled out of
quite a few days now. Now a lot of tools
are used in the search marketing realm. We're personally big
fans of Semrush, but there's a lot of AI tools
that are being built and I'm quite a fan of
those. None of them are. Most of them are quite on the. Well, they're
on the down low. They're not very public yet. Sort of shared
amidst us SEOs. But bigger companies like AH
Rest and SEMrush are always trying innovate. In this case,
Ahrefs has launched
a tracker comparing chat, GPT and Google referral traffic.
The idea behind this, and this is a search engine journal.com article,
is that what this tracker does is it compares monthly growth for major
search engines and large language models. You can
select which engines you want to compare against. This makes it easy to
compare one large language model to another. You can.
You can also see traffic share based on regions and industry.
Currently, the data is based on 44,421
websites that are using Ahrefs free web analytics tool.
Data is currently available for December 2024 through July
2025. This tracker appears to be evolving quickly and
data is available. Well was
one second here. The tracker appears to be evolving quickly.
Oh, I see. And data available that the data data available
now is greatly increased over what was there
last week. So it is improving and we're going to see a lot more value
coming out of that. If you're an Ahrefs user and you haven't heard of this,
check it out. If you're totally unfamiliar with it, which
I imagine many are, it's a, it's a cool platform. It
has a lot of tools that are similar to SEMrush.
Both are great analysis tools. If you really want to get
into the dig into the down and dirty details of
how rankings are created and what changes are happening. These are great
sites to do it and they help you monitor your website, etc. They're not cheap
though. Keep that in mind. Google traffic has dropped 50%
after a site hack. Recovery can take
time, says Google all right, this is
terrifying. I see this, I don't know,
I don't know, maybe. Luckily, I've probably only seen this 10
times in the last 28 years where
it's been profoundly damaging.
But if your website isn't regularly
monitored and updated, it is possible to get hacked.
Very easy to get hacked. In fact, if you haven't been monitoring and updating it.
Even when you're monitoring and updating it though, it can still get
hacked and you need to jump on it immediately or the damage is
severe. Very often anyways.
So from here an SEO, and this is a Search Engine Roundtable
article says an SEO consultant had posted to LinkedIn that one of
their websites saw a 50% decline in traffic over a two week period.
Their post reads, our website just suffered a
massive traffic drop from 2000 plus daily visits to about
1100. Almost 50% wiped out in just
two weeks and it's still going down as I write this post. The
source was a hack that injected over
210,000 fake product pages, all
indexed by Google and interlinked across several other compromised
sites. He added that he had quickly cleaned up the hack, removed
all the bad files, but was disappointed that traffic continued decline.
Two weeks later, there are still no recovery in sight.
John Mueller replied that these kinds of hacks can take a bit of time
to settle back down, which is one reason you should always be on top of
things in terms of updates and security. So some of
some advice from us if that is, if you're not,
these are bare minimum stuff, okay? Use strong
passwords and two factor authentication for your website.
Many don't realize you can do that, but there is a way to do it
with two factor authentication. But definitely use strong
passwords. Ensure your site uses HTTPs, that means
it's secure and you see
your website address. Use a reputable hosting
provider. Don't go too cheap, okay? There is a lot of cheap
hosting out there and you get what you pay for. That's why ours is
$50 a month. It includes a lot more than just bare bones
hosting. It's got incredible amount of backups which is what we're getting into
next here. Regular backups and keep backups
for several months, maybe longer. You got to keep in mind
that when many people don't know this, but when hackers hack a website
they often do it a month or two before they
take advantage of the website. And the reason they do this is because most
people don't realize it and they go back in and they go, okay, I'm going
to fix this, I'm just going to restore a backup. Well, they restore the backup,
but that backup has the hack in it. And even if
the surface hack has been removed, often the doorway or the way
they got in to hack your site has been left in there as
well. So it's important to have a long history
of backups. I suggest 90 days. That's what we do
for ours. Every one of our clients has 90 days of backups if they're using
our services. Next, keep all plugins and software
versions up to date. This is kind of no brainer, but
again, it easily falls by the wayside if you're monitoring
this yourself and not using a company that can help you with this.
Again, something we provide for all of our clients at first. Dentist
updates need to be made to your website and
when they're done, you need to make sure that they haven't broken any
functionality on your site. So if a particular plugin is updated that, let's
say, manages your forms, make sure those forums are still working,
make sure they're loading properly. If there's a slider that you're using on your
site that you see sliding images across the page and there's a plugin
that's running that, if you update that, go back, make sure that
slider is still working, try it on different browsers, and
then make sure it's not loading your site
slowly. Oh, there's so many different things. It's amazing how many things we don't even
realize we look for as SEOs and website
managers that occur to me when I mentioned this. But
yeah, it is very important. Utilize
security plugins. For example, with WordPress, you can use WordFence,
which is one of our one tool we see a lot of.
We personally have our own system we use, but it's
very powerful. Ensure your staff is educated on
cybersecurity best practices, like how to recognize phishing attempts.
Phishing has gotten very intelligent. There's a lot of
sneaky ways people can try to emulate you at the
dentist. Contacting staff, asking for something,
and there's been many over the years, I won't get into them, but they need
to understand the basic fingerprint of
a phishing attack so they can ignore these. Or
when in doubt, ask the dentist. Or when
in doubt, ask your manager. Very, very important. All right,
let's jump into some AI in search and we kind of covered some of it.
But this is specifically about AI. LLM that's
large language model traffic is converting about
the same as organic search traffic. This is a search from
Amsiv Agency. It's a large agency
that works with various companies, not just dentists. Of course,
very few are like us. According to some new research,
LLM traffic is converting about the same as regular organic results. The test
research was based on 54 websites over six months
with validated conversions of form fills and purchases. Their
research showed the following data Organic
traffic that's non paid traffic from Google or wherever are
converted at 4.6% compared to
4.87% for traffic from LLMs
like Perplexity, ChatGPT Search, you name it.
It's also worth noting though that this percentage
is. It sounds fantastic, but
that traffic from LLMs accounted for less than
1% of the total traffic to the site.
Why? Well, a simple fact is
AI doesn't really do a great job of sending you
off, sending a person off site to the source, and that's a
problem. That said, as I mentioned earlier,
when people are really getting down to the brass tacks and they're trying to
determine who they're going to choose for their provider, they're going to dig
farther than what AI provides in most cases. Now, if you've used
Google AI recently, or Google Google recently, you'll notice that they've got an
AI mode option. Well, there are some mutterings that this
may become the default Google search experience soon.
Now, let's put soon in quotation marks here, because
lead project manager for Google, Logan Kilpatrick
replied to a post on X on September 5th suggesting that AI mode will be
the default search experience at Google soon. This comes shortly after Google
announced that google.comai leads you directly to
Google's AI mode, no longer requiring you to click on the AI mode tab
in regular search. But
Robbie Stein, VP at Google, I take his word for it a little
more than others, said in response that he wouldn't read too much into
this. We're focusing on making it easy to access AI
mode for those who want it. And yeah, you got
to remember, Google has to make money,
and it has to in this crazy world of our economics.
For some reason, every business has to keep growing, which is
impossible. But that's just how things work. So they need to
ensure that when they're building in AI, they're not
going to lose money. And that has to be done slowly. They can't just
shift everything or they're going to lose a bundle. And
they have other worries too, that are legal concerns and so on and so on.
So it's going to be slower than a simple rollover to no
more 10, you know, no more mixed results on
page. Next up, nearly all Chat GPT users
still rely on Google, at least the data. Some
interesting figures come from similar web shows that
95.3% of ChatGPT users
visited Google, while 14.3% of Google
users visited ChatGPT. In August,
ChatGPT had 5.8 billion visits
compared to Google's 83.8 billion.
I mean, that's huge, a huge difference. But that's
impressive that ChatGPT is at that level.
It's just going to keep climbing. And you have to keep in mind too, ChatGPT,
although it does have the lion's share of the pressure, as a
term, it's almost becoming synonymous with AI search.
Instead of being, it's kind of like, you know, you get a
tissue, blow your nose. Well, a lot of people call that Kleenex because that was
the original brand. So when people say I'm using ChatGPT,
they might be going to perplexity, they might be going somewhere else. And that's, I
think, going to be more and more common. A lot of people just don't say
AI Chat or AI Search. They use to say chatgpt,
and I think that's going to confuse things when it comes to these surveys soon
anyway. Obviously ChatGPT has a long way to go to make a notable
dent at Google, but in some cases it is outperforming
Bing. Search Engine Land noted that their ChatGPT referral traffic is
surging and in August it surpassed what they're receiving from Bing.
So for now, LLMs are small and Google is still
king. But the day may come where the LLMs
may be major players in search of. I don't think that's a May, I think
that's a likely thing. And I
love that there's variety. It's healthier for businesses,
it's just plain healthy for competitiveness
and just seeing innovation, I
love it. 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'd like answered either on the podcast for free
or on more private consulting basis, please email
infoirstdentist.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.