The amount of Google Reviews your dental practice has and the rating associated with those Google reviews can make or break whether a new patient calls your practice or decides to visit your competitor down the street.

We’re going to dive into why it’s so important to rank among the top 3 BEST and MOST reviewed dental practice in your area with the goal of always getting to that #1 spot because once you reach that #1 spot several doors begin to open and there is a noticeable difference in how many new patients are contacting your practice for an appointment.

So let’s jump straight in…

People are deciding whether they like you, trust you, and want to buy from you before even picking up the phone to call your dental practice. Heck, they are doing it before they even click on your website to explore what your dental practice offers. Think about it, your Google Reviews tell the story of your practice and have the ability to showcase the honest experiences that your patients have had with your dental practice. New patients are more inclined to trust you if they feel like others do as well.

If I am looking up dental practices in Toronto and I see one practice with a 4.6 rating and 18 reviews and then I see another practice with a 4.8 rating with 250 reviews, who do you think I am going to call? It is absolutely critical to make sure your Google Reviews are providing a great first impression of your practice because they are genuinely the new storefront to your business.

When Google is deciding where your practice deserves to be ranked… will it be page 1 of Google or page 10? It will take your Google reviews into consideration. Google is in the business of providing people with the best results for what they are searching for so naturally it’s going to take people’s review of you into consideration.

If you don’t have many reviews, or you have bad reviews, Google will push you further down the page. If you have lots of reviews and great reviews it is going to trust you more and move you up the page. The goal of Google is to provide their customers with a great experience. They count on your Google reviews to do that. So if you want your practice to be seen online then you need to prove to Google that you are trustworthy.

Sometimes a series of good Google Reviews are all a person needs to decide that they trust you enough to pick up the phone and call you.

If you have a high enough rating and the most reviews in your area, chances are high that someone will call you from just those reviews alone or they will head over to your website to explore you further. If you don’t have a ton of great reviews or you are sitting at a low rating patients are realistically going to end their relationship with you there. They aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt and think…”hmm maybe this practice is the best kept secret”.

After years of marketing dental practice we know from experience that if you are going to encourage your staff to assist you with marketing it should 100% be with collecting Google Reviews. They are the new storefront of your business and have the best success rate at bringing new patient leads to your practice.

Happy Google Reviewing!

Do you ever feel like all dental websites look exactly the same? And don’t actually do much to drive new patients to pick up the phone and call the practice? Well, to be honest, it’s because they do and the majority of them are all lacking one critical component….the element of personalization.

So how do you personalize your website so that new patients are more inclined to pick up the phone and call your practice … rather than just tossing you into the pile of …. “This is just another dentist who does the same thing as every other dentist” and who will just end up calling your receptionist and asking only about your price points.

How do you personalize your website and get more potential patients to pick up the phone and call you? Two words.. TESTIMONIAL VIDEOS! A testimonial video is a quick 1-2 minute video of a happy patient who has just had a great experience at your dental practice.

Check this out:

Awesome right? Is every patient going to be this much of a superstar on camera? No, but the goal is to fill your website up with real people who have had real experiences at your practice.

When you have a page on your website that is filled with a ton of friendly faces who have awesome things to say about your dental practice… that is going to resonate emotionally with new patients who are wondering if they should pick up the phone and call you.

A page full of Testimonial Videos will make your website stand out. Imagine you are looking for someone to do your ortho treatment and you stumble across this…

That is the type of content that is going to inspire potential patients to pick up the phone and call you.  At the end of the day, people buy from people they trust so it’s critical to be reinforcing messages of trust from real consumers all throughout your website.

The reality of living in the time of social media and digital marketing is that video converts better than text. People spend their day scrolling through social media and rather than reading in-depth articles they are quickly consuming bits of important information through photography and video content. According to a commonly cited report viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.

Video tends to resonate better with people than text because it allows them to create that emotional connection. It’s like storytelling, our brains are particularly attuned to stories—and that’s exactly what testimonials provide.

A great testimonial video might tell the story of how a patient overcame dental anxiety while visiting your dental practice

In another one of our videos we talk about the importance of collecting Google Reviews because a series of positive reviews can genuinely make or break whether a patient decides to pick up the phone and call your practice. Well it’s the same thing with testimonial videos but testimonial videos can be even more impactful because you are seeing a real person, in real time and hearing their journey while looking at the expression on their face.

Think about it, if a patient sees a wall of testimonial videos of happy and smiling patients, even though they aren’t going to sit there and watch each and every one of those testimonial videos. That page full of happy and smiling patients is going to resonate. It says, wow this practice actually has a ton of real patients who like and trust them enough to actually get on camera for them.

For many dentists, choosing the right name for their practice often poses a real challenge. Should you simply use your own name? Should you include the name of the city or state in which the practice operates? Or is it better to name the practice after the street on which it’s located? What name will get the best results online? Fortunately, we have the answer!

1. Naming a Practice After Yourself

Generally, it’s not a good long-term strategy to name a practice after yourself. At some point, you’ll probably want to retire or sell the practice for one reason or another. A dentist is less likely to buy a practice that features the name of a dentist who is no longer working there. It would mean that they would have to go through the process of rebranding the practice, which can be costly and time-consuming. But even if you never plan to sell your practice, naming it after yourself is still ill-advised.

First and last names are hard for people to remember. A short, clean name like Trinity Dental is more memorable than John Doe DDS. Making your name the name of the practice also makes your practice appear small and unsuccessful in the eyes of many patients.

2. Naming a Practice After a Street Name

Another naming convention you should avoid is using your street name in the name of your dental practice. It has the potential to confuse and dissuade potential patients.

For example, let’s say you own a practice on Main street, so you name it Main Street Dental. That seems fine– as long as you’re the only practice located on Main Street. But what happens if other dentists move into the neighborhood and decide to do the same? Suddenly, there is one practice called Main Street Dental, another called Main Street Dentistry, another called Main Street Dental Center, etc.

Now potential patients can’t remember if the ad they saw online was for your dental practice or the three other practices located along the same street. Maybe they even end up going to one of the other practices, thinking it was yours. At that point, you’re essentially running ads for competing practices– which is far from the desired outcome.

3. Naming a Practice After a City

Like naming a practice after a street, naming it after the city in which it’s located can lead to similar issues of confusion among potential patients.

There was a time, ten or fifteen years ago when businesses registered website URLs based on the city they were in (www.dentistintoronto.com). Assuming they had a strong marketing strategy and top-notch SEO, this kind of naming convention often worked in a business’s favor, allowing them to outrank the competition.

However, this strategy is now largely outdated and doesn’t perform well with Google’s ever-evolving algorithm.

1. Think Like Google

For many, Google’s algorithm is a source of great mystery and frustration. But, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to know why certain businesses rank higher than others.

When sorting results, the algorithm is essentially trying to determine how well-known your brand name is in the area in which it’s located. This is why when you Google something like “restaurant in Toronto” the top result will be a brand name like The Keg, instead of a generic website like resturantintoronto.com.

With SEO, the objective is to improve the brand recognition of your dental practice name in your area. The more Google sees that the people are talking about you or searching for you, the more popular Google thinks you are in your city and the more likely you are to rank higher in search results.

2. Make Your Name Unique

Now that you know what Google is looking for, pick a name for your practice that’s unique in your area and easy to remember. Go with something like Trinity Dental, or Alpine Dental. Use a word that nobody in your area is using. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s simple to understand and easy to spell.

Keep in mind, the name only has to be unique to your immediate area. There may be another practice in a different city with the same name, but as long as you are the only practice in a 50-100KM area that uses the name, it’s totally fine. Google is smart enough to discern when a person is looking for a dentist in their city, and not in the next one over.

3. Already Picked a Less-Than-Ideal Name? Don’t Panic

So, now you understand the difference between a good name and a bad one. But, what if you’ve already named your dental practice using your name or the street name? Should you really change the name and rebrand? Well… it depends on a couple of factors.

1. How many practices in your area have a similar name and how close are they to you? If you have 10 practices on your street all with a very similar name, then your name is probably worth changing.
2. How long have you owned the domain and how much marketing work have you put in already? If you have invested a great deal of time and money into SEO work and pushing your brand name, it may not be worth changing the name. You would look like a brand new practice in Google’s eyes and you would lose a lot of your hard-earned reputation and credibility.

If you do decide to do a rebrand, keep in mind that the process is very involved. It includes updating all of your directory and citation listings, as well as performing a 301 redirect from your old website to your new one. Of course, all of this can be done, and we rebrand dentists all the time– but it’s not necessary if you have a website and a domain that already ranks well on Google.

On the other hand, if a dentist has owned a website for five or ten years but has never done a great job with the marketing, it may be worth changing the name and putting the marketing work into ranking a different name that will have more long-term value.

If you’re in this situation and you’re not sure what to do, you can always reach out to us by going to revupdental.com. We’d be happy to look into it for you and give you some advice free of charge.

Welcome to our final video in our dental practice SEO series, and we’ve saved the best for last. Today we’re going to talk about the final piece that brings everything together with dental SEO, the part that will actually help you grow your practice and that’s conversion rate optimization. This is the part of the process where you take all of those website visitors you’re attracting with SEO and make sure they actually turn into patients. So let’s dig in!

The point of investing into doing SEO or any kind of marketing is ultimately to get more butts in the chair. You want to attract more patients. Just generating a bunch of website clicks doesn’t really do you any good. Ranking #1 on Google is worthless unless that ranking directly translates into more patients in your schedule. This part of the process is called conversion rate optimization and it deals with turning website visitors and leads into real, tangible, new patient opportunities.

If you’re investing money each month into doing marketing and you get a report from your marketing company about of how many website clicks you got, or how many Facebook likes you got… this is like investing your money with a financial advisor and each month they send you a report on how much Monopoly money they made you.

You can’t pay your staff with website clicks, you cannot pay for your dental supplies or your practice lease with Facebook likes. This isn’t a currency. Every dollar you put into doing SEO or marketing in general needs to translate to a very measurable and tangible return-on-investment or else you’re just throwing money down the drain.

To generate a good return-on-investment for your marketing spend, you need to make sure all of that traffic you are driving to your website actually gets people to pick up the phone and call your practice to book an appointment. You need to remember that most of your potential patients are going to check out a few different dentists in your area so you need to make sure your website leaves people with a great first impression where even if they visit multiple other dental websites they are left feeling like you are the best choice. So how do we do this?

The first thing you need to understand is that there is a HUGE… and I mean HUGE difference between what dentists think will impress patients vs. what actually really does impress patients. The reason many dentists do not get great results from their marketing is because ultimately they have a website that was built from the ground up to impress them, the dentists, not the patients they are trying to attract.

What I mean by this is that when a dentist hires a web design company to build a new website, because the dentist is signing the cheque, that company wants to make sure the dentist is happy with the website. They’ll change the colors, and pictures, and different elements of the website to what the dentist likes, what the dentist thinks looks good.

The problem with this approach is that often what dentists think looks nice or will attract patients is really not what will actually impress or attract patients. A good example of this is before & after photos. A ton of dentists have before & after photos on their website because they think this will impress patients but we’ve run numerous experiments and have proven these photos will lower your conversion rate. If you haven’t seen those videos I’ve linked them below and trust me will be shocked at how much these types of photos will hurt your ability to attract patients.

Another common mistake dentists make is they build a website talking too much about themselves. They talk about their education, and all of the different degrees and qualifications they have, they talk about all of the CE courses they’ve taken, they think that this will actually impress patients and it really won’t. It will mostly just confuse and bore people or it will make you come across as you are trying really hard to impress them and it will actually have the opposite effect to what you want.

Another mistake we see all the time is dental websites that talk about their equipment. They want everyone to know that they have a CBCT scanner or a CEREC machine or a fancy new laser or intraoral scanner… but honestly guys… nobody gives a crap. If you want to have a dental website that gets the phone to ring, the website needs to be more about the patient, and very little about you or the practice.

When someone is looking for a dentist, maybe they’re doing some research on invisalign or dental implants and want to see what their options are, these are people that are simply beginning to do their research. They’re not really looking to buy, they are looking to inform themselves. What your website needs to do is educate them on how the different procedures work, what their options are, the pros and cons of these different dental procedures… basically give them all the information they are looking for WITHOUT and I cannot stress this enough… WITHOUT you trying to convince them to pick you.

You are not going to be effective by singing your own praises, this needs to be done by other people, in the form of Google Reviews, or patient testimonial videos, or your staff talking to patients about how amazing of a dentist you are. When someone visits your website they need to walk away with a feeling of “man… this is a really useful / helpful website… and it doesn’t feel like they are trying to sell me on anything like other dentists.”

If you can do this effectively, this will build trust and rapport with people. You need to approach your website design and content with the mindset of “I just want this to be a helpful resource for people, even if they decide to go to a different practice down the street.”

If people feel like you’re not trying to sell them anything, you’re just legitimately trying to be helpful, give them unbiased information with this feeling of “we’re just giving you all the info you want, you make the choice that you think is right for you, we’re not judging” then inevitably they will begin to trust you more and more and once they do they are going to wonder “well… what do you recommend?” and then they will actually be open to listening to what you have to say.

Well let’s say you want to attract more Invisalign cases, what you want is a website that helps the patient understand the pros and cons of Invisalign, the other types of procedures they may want to consider like traditional braces or functional appliances, what the pros and cons are between those procedures, who may or may not be a good candidate for each procedure, common questions people often have about these procedures…you know… does it hurt? Do I need to take time off work? How long does it take to recover? Do the results last?

What you don’t want is a website with an Invisalign page that pretty much only says “Looking for Invisalign? Give us a call!” and then the majority of the page is all about you, your biography, and your education, and all of your equipment, and how fancy your office looks, etc. That is not going to convince many people to call you.

So what type of content would people find really useful and engaging? What is going to make people like and trust you?

One of the best things you can do is actually be honest about how much different procedures cost and what affects the price. So many practices try to dodge this question both on the website and when the person calls. Rather than trying to avoid this question you should embrace it and have a great plan for how you’re going to talk about it with patients both on the website and when they call.

Many people look for information on the prices because they need to budget accordingly, it doesn’t mean they are not serious about doing Invisalign or implants or that they are just shopping around for the cheapest price. They are just trying to better understand what it’s going to cost and what the difference is between what everyone offers. This is an amazing opportunity for you to stand out by actually being honest and open with them instead of doing what almost everyone else does which is avoid the question.

The next best thing to do is to answer the most common questions people have with each dental service. In our part 3 video we talked about on-page optimization and we looked at how to find out what the common questions are that people go online to search for when it comes to dentistry. If you missed that video you can find it down below in the description. Don’t talk about why you think you’re great or why they should pick your practice, just help them better understand their problems and the different solutions that could help them, regardless of if they come to you or another dentist.

One of the best ways to do this is with frequently asked questions videos, as this gives people a chance to virtually meet you, simulating what it would be like if they were in your chair asking you these questions directly.

Lastly, if you really want to stand out from the 5 or 10 other dental practices that your patients are probably checking out before making a decision of where to go to… focus on Google reviews and testimonial videos.

Every dental practice website talks about how amazing they are, and how they treat patients like family, and how the dentist is really smart and really experienced… but you know what’s really going to convince patients any of this is true? If I see your practice has 300 Google reviews, and your competitor down the street has 50… then yeah… I’m going to believe you. If I see that you have a wall of patient testimonial videos, people who were so impressed by you that they were willing to go on camera and talk about how good their experience was… then yeah… I’m going to believe that you’re good practice.

If you want to turn more website visitors into patients, focus on talking less about yourself and your practice and more on just being helpful to people who are looking for specific dental procedures. Do an excellent job of answering their questions without any sales pitch. Give them a chance to virtually meet you using FAQ videos, explain things to them as if they were in the chair beside you asking you those questions. And finally, if you want to stand out from other dentists in your area, you need to get your patients to sing your praises for you in the form of reviews and testimonial videos.

Welcome back to part 4 of our dental practice SEO series. Today we’re going to talk about link building, which is the part of the SEO process that is going to have the BIGGEST impact on how well your practice shows up on Google, but it is also the hardest part of SEO to do. I’m going to try my best to simplify this as much as possible and give you some actionable advice that you and your staff can use to get more links to your website and really improve how well your practice shows up online in order to attract more patients.

Link building is arguably the single most important thing you can do to increase your rankings on Google. It is the biggest factor that Google looks at in order to determine whether to show your practice to potential patients or show one of your competitors instead. It’s a difficult part of the SEO process and funny enough it’s something many SEO companies don’t really know how to do very well.

A lot of people can do keyword research, a lot of people can optimize your website or write some content, but to really boost the visibility of your website you need to know how to do link building.

Link building is the process of finding and getting backlinks to your website, or in other words, getting other websites, ideally good authoritative websites to link back to your website. So for example, if my website has a link to your website, that’s a backlink. If someone wrote an article about you in the local news website that published an article about you with a link to your practice website… that’s a backlink.

Now why is this important? Why does it matter? To answer that, let’s look a little deeper into how Google works and why it is so good at helping people find what they’re looking for.

Back in the day there used to be A LOT of search engines. Meta Crawler, Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, etc. What happened to all of them? Why did they all die out and now Google is pretty much the only search engine everyone uses? Well the reason for this is that Google was able to give people much more useful and accurate search results. And how was it able to do this? By looking at backlinks.

When Larry Page and Sergei Brin, the founders of Google, were at Stanford, they had a very simple but at the time very novel idea. When they looked at different research papers in University they found a correlation between how many times a given piece of research was cited by other research papers, and how useful that research was. So for example, let’s say you were going to do some research on a topic like physics, and you found two research papers on this particular topic but wanted to know which one was more worth your time to read. Let’s say one of the research papers was cited by 100 other research papers, and the second research paper was cited by 1,000 other research papers.

They argued that the paper that was cited 1,000 times by 1,000 other papers was probably better and more valuable than the research paper cited only 100 times… and they were correct. So they applied this logic to organizing websites.

The idea was that the more other websites link to a particular website, the more useful that particular website must be. So for example, if you run a dental practice, and you have a website, and I run a dental practice, and I have a website, and let’s say your website that 10 other websites linking to your website, and my website has 100 other websites linking it it, Google thinks that my website must be more valuable because more people are talking about it and linking to it.

So if you want to rank better on Google, the most important thing you can do is to get other websites to link to your website. But it’s not just a numbers game. Google takes a look at the quality of the websites linking to you as well, not just the number of links you have. So going back to my earlier example, let’s say your website only had 10 backlinks, but they were from really good, authoritative, trustworthy websites in the dental field, and my 100 backlinks were coming from crappy, spammy, low quality websites, then your 10 links would be worth a lot more in Google’s eyes than my 100 crappy links.

Let’s get into the meat and potatoes of it, the practical advice you and your staff can use to improve your practice rankings on Google. First, let’s talk about the easiest links to get, the low hanging fruit. Directory Listings.

Building a profile page on Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, YellowPages, Yahoo, Better Business Bureau, etc… these all count as backlinks because on those pages is a link to your website. Now these are not going to drive a huge amount of authority to your website because anyone can go on Yelp for example and add a new business, and Google knows that, but they are still very valuable links because if other practices in your area aren’t doing this then adding your business to a number of directories may be enough to catapult you to the first page of Google.

The next best types of links you can get are called Niche directory listings or citations, they are basically websites that are directories specific to dentistry. This includes things like RateMDs, or being listed on ADA.org, or the American Dental Academy, or if you’re an Invisalign provider, filling out your profile on Invislign’s website so there is a directory listing for your practice with a link to your website. Because these links come from more dental or medical specific websites they carry more weight in Google’s eyes and will improve rankings more than being listed on Yelp for example.

The next best types of links after this would be professional affiliations and sponsorships. For example, let’s say your practice sponsors the local little league baseball team in your town… you should have your practice mentioned on their website on their sponsor’s page with a link. This carries a lot of weight in Google’s eyes because this is a local organization in your area talking about you. If you’re part of the local Chamber of Commerce, you should be listed on their website with a link to your website. This is another really good link to have.

The next tier above this would be blog posts and articles from good credible websites. If the local paper writes an article about you on their website, make sure they have a link to your website. Let’s say there is a local blogger in your town who writes a blog on parenting. You can collaborate with them to create an article on dental tips for first time parents with young kids and on that blog it mentions your practice with a link to your website.

Here’s a real example, one of our clients in Ontario, Canada is very passionate about orthodontics and functional appliances and we partnered with a local blog in their area, Modern Mississauga, and had an article written to educate parents that there others ways to treat crowding in their kids teeth beyond just removing teeth and adding braces. It’s an informative piece of content and at the bottom it has a link to their website. This is a really good backlink that drives a lot of website authority in Google’s eyes.

Local awards are also really powerful backlinks. For example, here is a local reader’s choice award for one of our clients that drives a lot of ranking power because Google knows this is a legitimate award that isn’t easy to get.

Here is a top 3 best cosmetic dentists in Hamilton award that also drives a ton of SEO value. Because Google looks at the links from that website and realizes that it is a credible, trustworthy, high quality website, a link from them carries a tremendous amount of value. The links need to come from truly legitimate sources, you can’t just create 100 fake award websites and give yourself the first place prize, this would never work.

The very high quality backlinks, the ones that will really drive a ton of value and help you get to the first page on Google are not easy to get. They take research, you have to find people in your area you can collaborate with, it involves you doing a legitimately amazing job where you actually start to win real local awards. It involves being active in your local community, being part of the events, sponsoring local kids teams or other charities that are doing great work, etc. SEO in many way is kind of like doing good PR.

It really depends  on who you are competing against. If you’re in a small town where nobody is doing anything, then all you may have to do is simply create some directory listings like Yelp, Google, YellowPages, etc. You add some nice photos to your listing, make sure there is a nice description of your business, all the hours of operation are correct, and you have a link to your website.

In bigger and more competitive cities where a ton of dentists are doing SEO as well, just building some directory listings is not going to be enough, because everyone is doing the same thing too, so you need to get a lot more creative and find ways to get local organizations and websites to talk about you and link to your website. You need to get much higher quality backlinks. This is what makes really good SEO companies so expensive. To build some directory listings… that’s simple, anyone can do that, it’s just data entry. Anyone can go on Yelp and just create a profile page. That’s typically all you get from SEO companies that charge a few hundred dollars a month.

But often this is nowhere near enough to help you rank better in competitive cities because there are just too many other dentists doing the exact same thing so you don’t end up standing out in Google’s eyes. It’s like…hh you have a Yelp directory listing? Cool… so does every other dentist. Oh you made a Facebook page, a Google my Business page and an Instagram account? Big deal… so did every other dentist in this city.

The really good SEO companies focus on getting you the links that are really difficult to get and drive a lot of authority to your website, the ones you can’t just buy, you have to earn. This includes winning legitimate awards from real and authoritative websites, having interesting articles written about you in local newspapers, partnering with local writers and bloggers to create great educational content that links back to your website, sponsoring the right organizations and knowing how to get the spotlight to shine on your practice because of your involvement with them, etc.

Welcome to the third video in our Dental SEO series where we’re going to talk about on-page optimization, or how to change the content of your website to rank better for the keywords your potential patients are searching for.

If you didn’t see our previous video about Keyword Research, you should start there. For those that did watch the previous video, you’ve done your research, you selected some great keywords to go after, so now let’s talk about how to actually make your dental website show up better for those keywords.

On-page optimization is the part of the SEO process that I think most dentists know about, you know, changing title tags, optimization meta descriptions, adding the right keywords to the page, etc. Unfortunately… this is actually the part of the SEO process that has A LOT of misconceptions. We constantly see dentists (and the marketing companies they’ve hired) trying on-page SEO strategies that haven’t worked for years. So let’s start off by first tackling some of these misconceptions so you can avoid wasting your time and money doing something that isn’t going to get you anywhere.

A lot of dentists we speak with are under the impression that “Google likes content” so they go out and try to write a lot of content like blog posts thinking this will help them rank better. What many don’t understand is that while… yes… Google does like content… it likes well written, informative, and useful content. If you’re just writing content for the sake of writing content like most dentists do, if you’re writing a bunch of blog posts where the quality of information is a mile wide and an inch deep, then no, that is not going to help you rank at all.

A lot of dentists also think ranking better is all about “putting the right keywords on the page”. This is true to some extent but… not really. Google can understand that your website is a dental website and that your Invisalign page is talking about Invisalign. You don’t have to mention the same keyword 50 times on your page like many dentists think you do in order to rank better, if anything, doing this is going to make you rank worse.

On-page SEO used to be a lot of tricks and technical hacks for how to fool the search algorithm into thinking that your page was more relevant than a competitor, but today better rankings are achieved not through fine-tuning all the technical elements of a page but rather by just creating better and more engaging content. Let’s look at how you can do this:

If you want to attract more Invisalign patients for example, you need a high quality, high value landing page talking about Invisalign. To do this you need to create a page that answers the questions people who are looking for Invisalign are going on Google to search for. There’s a really awesome tool to help you with this, it’s called Answer the Public.

Just go to www.answerthepublic.com and type in a dental service like “Invisalign” and this tool will organize and show you a list of common questions people are searching for around the topic of “Invisalign”. Let’s look at some grea t examples and also think about the type of content we can create to help answer these questions for potential patients.

• Why is Invisalign is better than braces?

This is a great question we can answer on our website. We can write a paragraph about the differences between Invisalign and braces, maybe a pros and cons list, or maybe a video showing the difference between the two options.

• What Invisalign looks like on teeth

For this question you can take a photo of one of your patients with and without the Invisalign trays and show people that it’s really hard to notice if someone is wearing them.

Here’s some more good questions:

• Can Invisalign fix overbite?
• Can Invisalign fix underbite?
• Does Invisalign give you a lisp?
• What insurance covers Invisalign?

These are all really good questions, real questions that real potential patients are actually looking for. This is the type of content you want to have on your website that will create value for those patients and also impress Google. You can answer these questions with written content, pictures, videos from you the dentist, videos from your patients such as testimonial videos, frequently asked questions sections with dropdowns, etc.

Using Answer the Public you can find a lot of great ideas for what type of content you should put on the website. Again, ranking high on Google isn’t about different technical tricks, or stuffing the word “Invisalign” in as many places on your website as possible, it’s about building a page and a website that is genuinely very helpful for people who are looking for different dental services.

The mistake a lot of dentists make is they want to do more Invisalign, or Dental Implants, or whatever particular service they want to offer. They put a page on their website saying “We do Invisalign, call us!” … this doesn’t work.

You see, back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, back when if you needed something, you’d whip out the YellowPages book, go to the section of whatever service you were looking for, plumber, dentist, mechanic, whatever, then you’d have a bunch of small ads, one of them would say “Looking for an oil change? Give us a call!” and you’d pick up the phone, call that business, and have a conversation.

That is NOT how people do business today. Today, people want to do their research BEFORE they call you. They want to figure out 80-90% of what they don’t know about a certain product or service before they pick up the phone to talk to you. Your website needs to provide people with everything they need to know about a given dental procedure to make a solid informed decision. When they do call, they are just calling to see if you are congruent with what they’ve read about you so far and make a final decision on whether they think you’re the right practice to go with.

If you want to rank better on Google for keywords like Invisalign, Dental Implants, or any dental procedure, look at the questions that people have in relation to those services, and do an excellent job of answering those questions on a website that looks clean, well organized, and easy to navigate.

One big mistake we see a lot of dentists make is they take really good questions and they write a blog post about it. This is a strategy that a lot of dentists have been taught by marketing companies and unfortunately while it was a very effective strategy maybe 10 years ago, it’s not really ideal today and largely unnecessary.

For example, there are probably hundreds or thousands of people in your area every month searching for “what does Invisalign cost?” Let’s say this was a keyword you wanted to rank for, many dentists who are a bit more savvy with digital marketing think that the way this happens is you write a blog post about this and you have a title like “What does Invisalign cost in Toronto?” and you answer the question in a blog post on a separate page.

This strategy worked very well a decade ago, but today it’s largely a waste of time and will make your website worse because you will have hundreds of low quality blog posts with very little information talking about a million different things that could have been condensed into a few higher quality pages.

If you have a specific question, Google’s algorithm is smart enough to know if your question is answered in a particular section of a certain page and take you right to the answer. You don’t need to have 100 different pages or blog posts to answer 100 different questions, you can put that into the same page. Here is an example. When I search for “What does Invisalign cost in Thunder Bay?” Google shows me a snippet of the answer to that question on one of our landing pages. It is the #1 organic search results showing up right below the ads.

If you have a good landing page, with answers to common questions people have around that particular dental service such as Invisalign, it is going to rank much better than a website that has 30 different blog posts on 30 different Invisalign questions.

Now having a blog post or article on a specific topic can make sense, if you legitimately need 500-1,000 words or more of content to really answer the question properly. However, often what we see is dentists with websites that have dozens of blog posts on topics or questions that could have been answered in a single paragraph.  Don’t do this, it’s stupid, it’s outdated, it doesn’t work.

So to wrap things up, if you want to rank better on Google, it has a lot less to do with little tricks and technical hacks than it has to do with just creating good, useful content that helps your potential patients understand how different dental services work and how they can help them. Content doesn’t mean just text, you want to use pictures and videos as well to better answer those questions.

Use a tool like Answer the Public to better understand the types of questions people have related to these services, or honestly… stop and think about the kinds of questions you’ve been asked by your patients when they come in to do a consultation. Answer those same questions on your website.