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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!
Hello and welcome to the Dental SEO 101 Podcast, episode number five by First Dentist. My name is Ross Dunn and I'm the director of SEO and co-founder of
First Dentist. All right, let's start with some non seo. Let's get right down to some business here. Google now sees more than 5 trillion searches per year.
That's astounding, especially when you look at the stats here. Here's some search volumes. So back in 1999, Google saw 1 billion searches per year. We're not
gonna go through every one of these, but it jumped to 14 billion in 2000. That was a pretty significant jump up to 73 billion in 2008, between 2004 and 2008 to 365
billion in 2009, up to 2 trillion by 2024 between
two 2016 and 2024, and finally 5 trillion in 2 2025.
Holy smokes, that's some growth for you. In case you're
wondering, this works out to be 158,548 searches per second.
Inconceivable. It's just amazing. Also Google has recently lifted its 2019 ban on fingerprinting for advertisers. What does this mean? First of all, what is fingerprinting? This is a method
of identifying a user across different sessions. Now, these are browser sessions by collecting data points such as browser type, os resolution, et cetera, to create a digital fingerprint.
Now, this fingerprint is
huge. That's what they can use to track you outside of Chrome. Maybe you go to Firefox, maybe you go to a different maybe you're. Changing
to A VPN, it doesn't matter because they have all these other signals they can then correlate to figure out approximately who you are.
That's creepy. And Google should never have removed this ban on fingerprinting. It's part of what they considered ethical back in the old days, but. They've thrown all the ethics out
the window, obviously, and I can't even fathom how they could argue that otherwise. So how can you block it? I did mention Firefox, but it does have one advantage that might help a bit.
Firefox. Enhanced tracking protection blocks a list of known fingerprinters and limits the information your browser exposes
at all times to compact combat suspected fingerprinters. Now, will this work? It's hard to say the people running these
systems are so advanced that I'm not even sure Firefox will be able to
block it, but at least you'll have a better experience if you do that.
If you're concerned about privacy anyway, by allowing this fingerprinting, advertisers will now be able to track you across the web and you'll start to see more.
I'm not sure if air quotes a reply here, but accurate advertisements and I don't really like the idea that they can follow me. So I'm not behind this at all.
Another piece of news here is Google is being sued by Chegg. I've never heard of this company. It's a big, a publicly traded educational company, and they're suing Google over AI
overviews. Now, the AI overviews, if you don't recall, are the reviews or essentially the AI response in a search engine result before you see the classic search engine results.
We're all used to seeing, they have stated that the AI reviews
are materially impacting their acquisitions, revenue, and
employees. Quote, Chegg has a superior product for education as evident by our brand awareness, engagement, and retention. Unfortunately, traffic is being
blocked from ever coming to Chegg because of Google's AI overviews and their use of Chegg's content to keep use visitors on their own platform, unquote.
That's pretty compelling. And this is the reason I bring this up is because it plays a major role in the future of AI in search results, which will impact every practice, every
business. 'cause if you write something exceptional and your content is then used in an AI overview, but you're not getting traffic from it, you're gonna have a problem with that.
Or we should anyway. So Chegg is presenting three main arguments. First is reciprocal dealing. They call it meaning that Google
forces companies like Chegg to supply their proprietary content in order to be included in Google search function. Second is
monopoly maintenance. Or that Google unfairly exercises its monopoly power within
search and other anti-competitive conduct to muscle out companies like Chegg.
And third is unjust enrichment, meaning Google is reaping the financial benefits of Che's content without having to spend a dime. I would not want to be Google's
lawyers trying to like argue against these facts. To me they're facts. They're. Incontrovertible. So we'll see what happens here. Right into general SEO news now.
Some of this that I'm gonna cover today particularly this first one might be a little bit it's not too technical, but it's a little bit more than what you'd normally
hear, but it's important. So I felt it was worth putting in. Topic here is using the date published plus the date updated can wreck your organic click-through rate.
Now
let's put this into English. If you're
posting both the original publication date and the updated publication date on your content, you may want to think twice 'cause
it could confuse Google. An SEO professional by the name of Abby Gleason posted to LinkedIn this comment back in September.
They visually added the date updated to a post, alongside the original date published, resulting in both dates appearing side by side on the post. Why would this happen? Essentially if you
created a great piece of content and it's driving a lot of traffic, you're getting quite a bit of. Quite a bit of views, maybe even some business out of it, but you're noticing it's getting dated.
You're gonna want to go in there and refresh it, and that doesn't mean write a new article. You're going and actually refreshing that existing article. And
then you want people to realize that this has been updated, so you may have the original published date, and then having updated in, and then another date.
Having
both dates visible on the page at one time
resulted in a sharp. Decline in click-through rates and traffic. This is because Google showed the date published instead of the date updated. Yeah. So if someone's
looking in a search result and they're considering clicking on yours, but they see the date is old, not the actual updated date, you're gonna get less clickthroughs.
When you're doing this, always present a single date, whichever best represents the freshness, but not both. What else? Here in schema, what about schema? And if you're a little more technically, you might've
asked this question or thought of it anyway. It does not appear to be a problem to have both dates appear in your schema markup that's in the background content of your page that is not viewable to visitors.
This is likely because the meaning of each date is perfectly clear to Google in that
situation, because they're marked up, minimize the presence of other dates on the page.
In short, if you follow the best practices and find incorrect or that incorrect dates
are being selected, consider removing all but the most relevant date on the page.
All right. Now a couple key notes on local, and these are really important. If you have any problem with your Google business profile suspensions that are applied by Google,
which are happening more and more often, take three to four weeks minimum to appeal. So be careful. Don't go around changing the title of your business just for the a heck of it.
Actually I'll get more into that a bit in a bit here. Now, another bit here, and this is very important, is if your homepage is ranking organically, use a location page
or service page as your website, URL and your Google business profile. If you do that, you could break Google's filtering. 'cause right now Google is filtering out.
One or the other.
So let's put it this way, if you are showing up in the local, you're next to that map on a search result page. And you also normally appear in the classic
organic results below where there's the listing of search results that no longer happens. If you have both. Google's gonna decide on just keeping the local.
If you had both, you can fix this. Sometimes it's not always the fix, but this is the best way to do it by changing the. Let's simplify this. This happens when both of them have the same URL to the homepage.
Homepage or to another page. So in this case, if you know that the URL in your classic organic results goes to the homepage, make sure that your Google profile is linking to a second page in your site.
It could be, but whatever it is has to be relevant. And in the best case scenario, that would link to a
location page, a page talking about the particular location that you are offering services in that has a little
more detail on it, perhaps some, but. Whatever,
talk about the area, show your team, all that stuff.
If you have multiple locations, that is, if it's not, then just have it go to a page that's relevant to visitors talking about new patients, or whatever you want. Play around with this a little bit. Don't change it. Too often though, we recommend
making some very concerted. Considering it very closely before you make this update and consult with your SEO, if you're not sure which one to use, just make sure that's different than the one in the organic search results and you're make.
You should get lucky and be able to get both appearing. That was
really difficult to explain. I hope that made sense. Alright.
Now I mentioned avoiding major changes to your Google business profile. This is actually a bit of a follow up on that. I was
looking at the local search forum, that's localsearchforum.com, and noticed an a thread where people were discussing this.
They're saying that more profiles are being suspended than ever
before for seemingly innocent updates to your Google business profile.
Reviews of suspension are taking over a month. Which is severely detrimental to businesses and those suspensions mean you're not showing. You wanna stick
to minor updates while you build the trust with your profile and only make major changes sparingly once a year, if you must. So what's the difference?
What's minor? What's major? A minor change would be updating your hours. Google actually wants you to do that. They want you to know when there's holidays,
when you're gonna be closed, different times that you're perhaps working less hours in one week, whatever it might be. Adding photos is a minor update.
Adding video is a minor update. These are all things that Google wants you to do. It gets a little more major. Not completely, not the top.
Like the most major change you can make is the title. You don't wanna change the name of your business in a Google business profile unless you
have to. It's very precarious right now to do that, even if it's completely legit. Their systems are just a bit of a mess right now. I'd be very careful. And middle ground would be changing
services, adding and updating your services. I think that would probably be in the lower scale of concern. It's always good to have them there, especially if you didn't have them before.
Add them. Definitely if you are making changes to them, you should be fine. I wouldn't worry about that too much categories, however, are causing problems. So if you make a change to your category, consider
that a significant, almost major change. Unless. Now, even if you're removing one, I just wouldn't mess with the area right now, assuming Google gets this act together and things get better instead of worse.
I can't guarantee that because Google Local is a dumpster fire has been and
always seems to will, always will be. It seems so we'll never know what happens.
Survey 42% of people say Google search
is becoming less useful. This is a search
engine land article and a survey by Vox Media. Apparently 61% of Gen Z and 53% of millennials are using AI tools instead of Google
or other traditional search engines. 76% say that more than 25% of Google shopping results appear to be sponsored or promoted.
Big shock there. Google is getting greedy. Only 14% described those sponsored results as helpful. 42% said Google and search engines are becoming less useful.
55% said they get information from community though their community more than online search platforms. 52% said they used AI chatbots or alternative platforms.
Such as TikTok. Don't recommend that for information. Instead of Google, 66% said the quality of
information is deteriorating. There is a verge slide, so about this if you wanna check it out on
theverge.com. They quote that legacy tech, such as Google and social platforms are rapidly losing ground as trust and authenticity fades with more people flocking to ai chatbots,
niche communities, and platforms like TikTok, this signals a massive shift and opens the door for disruptive and entrance that can offer more authentic, trusted experiences.
What can you take away from this? AI tools, that's the one thing that got my attention right away are being more often used than traditional search engines. And we're
gonna see that more and more. And that's what's got Google worried. That's why we're seeing it. We're gonna see a lot more AI being rolled out by Google this year.
Like dramatic amounts. They are, they've gotta protect their base. They're already losing market share, thankfully. And again,
from an SEO's perspective, when we're working on our dental sites, we're focusing on ensuring that the content within the
site is overview worthy. That's tricky. And I say that
because every dental practice may say the same thing.
So how do you differentiate yourself Detail that's one way being more detailed in your content. Another is providing more regular content on your site, pardon the pun, but
that's like pulling teeth with dentists. You guys are busy and we are always we have to hassle you and it, we don't like to, but we will to ensure that content is put out there.
If you need us to create it, we'll do it. Obviously, that does increase fees. The fact is though, if you want to stay relevant, you gotta create the content that AI wants to see. And it's gonna be
an ongoing battle as this gets stronger and stronger. The force of ai, I think that's a positive because again, if you work for it, you will stand out from the rest, and that is what we do for you.
We want to ensure that's the case,
and I love it when we get that opportunity.
Here's
another part on AI. AI search engines often make up citations and answers. So according to a new study from Columbia Journalism Review, AI chatbots, I sounded very Canadian there, didn't
I? AI chatbots and search engines often provide wrong answers and make up article citations. The study focused on how tools access, present and cite information from news publishers.
The study performed a total of 1600 queries. It randomly selected 10 articles from 20 publishers. They then selected digital excerpts from these articles to formulate
their queries, deliberately choosing excerpts that would return the original source within the first three results if searched in a traditional search engine.
Their focus was to assess how well chatbots could identify article headlines, original
publishers, dates and URLs based on the excerpts. The findings were a little concerning,
but humorous in some regards. Okay. First of all, chatbots provided incorrect answers to more than 60% of the
queries. For instance, perplexity had a 37% incorrect response rate, which isn't actually that bad while grok three.
That is Elon's system had a error rate of 94% not going there. Okay. Confidence in incorrect answers. Premium models often provide confidently incorrect answers more than free versions. Raising concerns about user's
ability to discern accurate information. Next, disregarding crawler preferences, many chatbots bypass robot exclusion protocols leading to potential misuse of content from publishers who had explicitly blocked access.
That's a big issue. Nothing you need to worry about unless you're blocking sections of your site from Google. But the fact that they aren't paying
attention to those blocks is a big concern and I can only imagine what publishers are gonna be thinking of that. Fabricating citations, chatbots
frequently fabricated links and cited syndicated or incorrectly
attributed articles undermining the integrity of the original sources.
Finally, inaccurate attribution even when chatbots identified articles correctly, they often fail to provide accurate URLs affecting publishers', traffic and visibility.
Wow. So overall chatbots produce incorrect answers to more than 60% of all queries across all tested models. Be careful with what you get out of those systems.