Summary
- If you want more new patients faster, it comes down to one equation: Traffic × Conversion = Results.
- Traffic is awareness. The dental industry already knows how to buy it through ads and local SEO.
- Conversion is strategy. It is how awareness turns into booked patients.
- More traffic does not fix a weak strategy. It only amplifies the problem.
- Traditional SEO and demographic targeting are overrated and inefficient today.
- Psychology matters more than demographics. Intent beats age, income, or location.
- Google, Meta, and local SEO work best because they align with intent.
- Practices that grow sustainably do not rely on traffic alone. They rely on strategy.
- Strategy is the missing multiplier. Without it, traffic is fragile. With it, traffic works harder.
If you are looking to get more new patients in a shorter period of time, this equation right here is called the direct response marketing equation. This is the fastest path, the point A to point B path, to getting that result.
So how does this work? Traffic times conversion equals results. In this scenario, we are assuming that results means new patients for you. If we are trying to get more new patients, we can either increase traffic, increase conversion, or increase both, and you get exponential results.
Traffic, if you think back to the old days, is like having a brick-and-mortar store with signage outside, which still applies today. Traffic is the number of people and the number of cars basically driving by. They see it and become aware that you exist. If you think about it, traffic is just quantity of awareness. If you increase quantity of awareness, then naturally you are going to get more new patients. That is the pursuit a lot of people take when hiring agencies and things like that.
The other variable is conversion. While traffic is quantity, conversion is quality. For every person walking by, how likely are they to come into the store, come into your practice, your office, and actually become what you want them to become, which is a new patient. Conversion is about how we get traffic to become what we want. I will get back to this in a second because traffic is very well established. There is a big market already for it.
Now conversion has a big question mark around it because we do not really know how to increase it. It is very abstract. So let us get back to this right after traffic.
Like I was saying, traffic is very well established. There is a whole industry just for dental marketing and dental traffic. You have agencies who run ads, local SEO, traditional SEO, demographically targeted mailers, and similar tactics. As an industry, we have become very good at it. Because it is provable, I can get you traffic. I can run an ad for you. I can do local SEO for you. It is very easy.
There are a lot of different types of traffic, which is what separates agencies these days. How they invest the money you give them basically dictates how good of an agency they are. The best traffic-building tactics and approaches you can take right now are advertising and local SEO. With advertising, the two main platforms are Google and Meta.
Local SEO is separate from traditional SEO because local SEO focuses on showing up as a local service business, not showing up across the global entirety of the internet, because that is not our concern. You have much less competition in local SEO compared to traditional SEO.
The less effective approach for building traffic is traditional SEO. There is a hyperfixation on traditional SEO right now in the dental industry. My hypothesis is that it is because traditional SEO used to work. It stopped working around 2016 to 2018, with 2018 being when it essentially died. Before that, a lot of practices did very well with it. They won the SEO game and it exploded their offices.
Unfortunately, Google saw that people were paying third parties to rank well on their platform and decided that instead of paying third parties, people should be paying Google. As a result, traffic got pulled into ads. That is the main reason traditional SEO does not work anymore. The practices that did well with it promoted it with good intentions. They would say, “This is how I did it, and you should invest in SEO too.” Now there is this momentum of people doing traditional SEO, but it just does not work the way it used to. You can check out my other videos on SEO to see exactly why.
Next is demographically targeted traffic. If you check out my free open course, it explains why we shifted from demographic targeting to psychographic targeting. If we look at traffic and conversion, and we are trying to get someone to take action, it is much more aligned with psychographics than demographics. I do not care where you live, your income, your skin color, or your gender. If your psychographics are wrong, you are not going to become what I want you to become. If your psychographics are right, and you are not the demographic I was targeting, it will still work.
Advertising and local SEO are in a unique position because we can leverage psychology on platforms like Google and Meta. There are other types of advertising, like newspapers, but that is demographically targeted. Google is psychographic because we know what people are searching for and what they are interested in. Meta is psychographic because we can target by interest. Local SEO is similar because we can target based on searches.
If you are still doing demographic advertising or demographic traffic building, a large portion of your budget is being wasted, approximately 84 percent, on people who are out of alignment with your psychology.
So enough on traffic. We have done very well there, but we are still absolutely clueless when it comes to conversion. How do we get someone who is vaguely aware of us to become a new patient? That entire bridge, from awareness to becoming a new patient, is strategy.
Strategy is simply how we are going to get someone from here to there. How do we move someone from being aware to becoming a new patient? There are infinite ways of doing this. There are infinite prices you could charge, infinite services you could provide, and infinite ways you could position yourself as a practice and say, “This is what we stand for. We are not like other practices because we do this instead.” That is strategy.
I know a lot of practices that have done very well with traffic, but their conversion is terrible, so at the end of the day they get no results. I also know practices that do not run ads at all and do not work with agencies, but their conversion is very good. They have a good strategy and understand this concept innately, so they are able to thrive.
What I want for you is to have both. Have a solid strategy so that when you work with an agency, or if you choose not to, whatever traffic you have is multiplied by the effectiveness of your strategy. That is what is missing today.
I saw an article recently that said demand for consultants and advertising agencies in the dental industry is going to go up by 20 to 25 percent in the next year. Practices are looking to leverage agencies more and more. I do not think it is because agencies are so effective. I see a lot of agencies doing very ineffective work for their clients. I think the real issue is that people do not have a strategy. We lost that a long time ago.
Because of that, we have become reliant on traffic. If that continues, it is not going to save anyone. You can build more and more traffic, but if your conversion is low, the results will still be poor. Traffic tactics like ads and local SEO work, but their effectiveness gets worse every day. That makes it more and more important to develop a strong strategy.
That is what I want for you. Check out my course. It is completely free, with no strings attached. See if you can develop a strategy for yourself. It will help you leverage the traffic you already have or the traffic you want to build in the future, whether that is on your own or with an agency.