Why SEO is ineffective for dental offices.

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If you’ve tried to grow your dental practice, you’ve probably heard of SEO. It’s the idea that you can manipulate your website, the content on there, the links and stuff in order to rank higher when it comes to searches like dentists near me. And as a result, you can reap the rewards of that. And the idea of SEO is promoted a lot by speakers like dentists themselves who have found success with SEO in the past and also companies like marketing agencies who offer SEO promoting the idea of SEO to

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you. But I’m actually here to tell you that SEO is ineffective. It doesn’t work the way we used to see it work. And I’m going to tell you why also. But first, let’s get into why I think people are promoting it. So marketing agencies I think have an obvious reason to promote the idea of SEO. It’s easy to generate content back in the day. Well, okay, let’s actually talk about what it takes to rank higher on SEO. So, let me teach you what the game is. So, what Google does is it

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ranks websites based on what the user is searching. So it wants to show relevance and the relevance also has to be built upon trust that Google has to trust the website that it’s going to be matching with the person who is searching for that type of content. So there’s a lot of factors at play here, but the main ones are going to be one the actual content on the website and two is going to be trust website trust. So content, let’s say you search for can I eat popcorn while I have braces

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on. What Google’s going to do, it’s going to look through all of the web pages that it has saved in its database and it’s going to look for the thing that matches the content that matches that search as closely as possible. So if you’re an if you’re leaning into SEO, you have a strong incentive to create web pages for any possible search that someone could make. So what agencies would do is we would look into search volumes and see what people are searching, find all the top

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ones, and focus on those and just build pages for all of those and then perhaps even look into less searched ones with enough volume to make it um make it a reasonable payoff. and build pages for that so that there’s high relevance. All right? But Google won’t just connect a very relevant website to a user because if a random website that is potentially scam, potentially dangerous creates very relevant content, it doesn’t want to connect it with its users. So what Google does is it assesses the trust of

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a website through things called backlinks. And the idea of backlinks is that if many websites are pointing to this website as a credible source, there is more links like let’s say from um I don’t know the white house.gov. If it links to your website and then here on Wikipedia.org or it links to your website and maybe like yahoo.com there’s a link to your website that signals to Google that that website that has a lot of backlinks is trustworthy because a lot of these other websites are pointing at it. So back

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links become trust and the actual content on your website becomes relevance. Now, when people figured this out, there was a whole series of people trying to manipulate the the content on their website in order to artificially rank higher and Google releasing patches and software updates in order to remove a lot of the bad actors. So, back in the day, we saw instances of web pages that literally had this the keyword like dentist near me over and over and over again. And it’s so Google did an update.

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And then people would do that where now it was at the bottom of the page and it was all white so you couldn’t see that it was there. A human couldn’t see that it was there but a robot could therefore tricking the algorithm and and so on and so forth. So like uh people figuring out how the system worked and hacking it. Google trying to fix it. People figuring out the system and hacking it over and over until one day Google said we had enough. At the time, uh, Yelp came around and they said, “Okay, we’re going

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to show businesses that are going to be local.” And Google was struggling with SEO because you were, if you were looking for a dentist in Los Angeles, there could be a dentist in Long Beach who had invested a lot into SEO. And so, users were getting frustrated because they weren’t seeing relevant local business information. So, Yelp came along, took a lot of the users onto the Yelp platform. That’s bad for Google because if people are searching on Yelp now, then advertisers who want to be

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found for those searches are going to invest into Yelp, not Google. So, what Google did, let’s say, okay, this game is ridiculous. This back and forth, let’s just get rid of it. And they did. They pushed SEO all the way to the bottom. And now, if you do a search that indicates that you’re looking for a local service business, so something like a dentist, something like a restaurant, um try it out yourself. try looking for a um a local service business or in a different area. Then now what you get instead of SEO results,

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instead of the rankings is you get Google business, Google business places or or Google um Google places which is which shows Google business profiles. All right? And traditional SEO results get pushed all the way to the bottom. And back in the old days when we did SEO, if you were ranked anything but the top three, it was considered losing that the top three people were getting around 90% of the traffic. So if there were a thousand people searching for dentist near me every month, 900 of those go to

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the top three and the ones below it would have to fight among themselves for the 100. And as Google Places comes around, Google Maps, there’s a lot of different naming variations that Google has tried. It pushed traditional SEO results all the way down to where the losers typically were. So now when we look at it, the volume of traffic that actually goes into the person ranking number one for SEO is minuscule. So, we have a lot of clients and we have done like good SEO for them and they’ve ranked one for

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a lot of very valuable and high volume searches, but the results don’t happen there anymore. All of the results happen in the Google Places area. And here’s the issue. So, now everyone’s focused on Google Places. They say, “Okay, this is where Google’s prioritizing. We should prioritize as well.” And you definitely should be, but what can you really influence when it comes to Google Places? Because back with SEO, you could influence the content on your website. You can

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influence the number of backlinks you had. With the age of AI, people were pumping out content. They were purchasing backlinks for like $50. You can get a 100 backlinks. The whole thing was just a mess. And so now Google shifted us over to this Google Places platform and people are figuring out, oh wait, you can also optimize here and people are playing this game. So, one I saw from uh my staff member. She told me people were putting images with captions on them with the name of the place that uh people were searching for. So, if you

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were looking for, let’s say, dentist in Newport Beach, they would upload a photo and it would have a caption that also said dentist in Newport Beach, hoping that the algorithm would read the actual image. Uh but then and and she was asking like, “Is this something we should do for our clients?” I say, “No, there’s this history of people always gifying and trying to hack the rankings and trying to manipulate stuff and at the end of the day, it ends up being wasted energy and wasted time because

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Google always just comes and wipes it out. So, the other way people try to manipulate it is with reviews. Now, reviews is a key one. Um, people are dumping so much energy and incentives into reviews and it’s just a repetition of history that reviews are being abused and what’s going to happen inevitably is that Google will find some alternative solution in order to address it. So all the people I see who are going all in into reviews um they have a rude awakening coming. they are trying to

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gain like don’t get me wrong like getting good reviews is not a bad thing but think but people like incentivizing reviews in order to get an absurd amount of reviews uh and making that their own strategy I’m saying that’s the problem and what’s going to happen is that Google owns Google they own the search results they own the Google places system so who would you bet against right And that’s the um yeah so don’t go all into reviews. All right. So why do speakers still promote the idea of SEO? Why is

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this idea still around even if it’s so ineffective that our clients who do very well um with SEO who rank very highly and for very good keywords get almost no results. Um why is it still promoted? So I think the speakers who promote it, like the actual dentists who have found success with it in the past, they come from that past where it did work, but now it just doesn’t work that way. But in 2018, that’s when Google really shifted over to Google Places and SEO was unofficially dead. So anyone who found

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success with SEO before that has a massive like they just want to share. They just want to spread how their their experiences, how they came um found their idea of success and it’s just outdated, right? And and they’re not marketers, they’re dentists first. So, they don’t know exactly what’s happening. So, I think that’s why they still promote that idea. And of course, marketing companies who provide SEO have a huge incentive now to promote more of it. one, um, it’s not working that well.

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So, they need more clients because a lot of clients are dropping out of SEO. They’re they just don’t see the value in it anymore. So, they’re making a big push into getting more people to do SEO. And at the same time, SEO to provide is getting easier than ever before. Back then, we had to outsource and hire actual writers to write content for us, but now it’s just all AI generated. So these SEO companies are finding massive savings. They’re getting their margins are getting huge and but at the same

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time they’re losing clients. So I think that’s why there’s this big push recently for more SEO and spreading the idea of SEO. All right. So long video with a kind of with a lot of rants, but here’s the um conclusion. If you’re looking to grow your dental office, SEO doesn’t work. It doesn’t work the way we think it does. And I don’t think that you should be putting much of an investment into it. Um, sure, do have a good website. Make sure it’s optimized for SEO so that people can find you, but

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I wouldn’t invest any significant amount of money into actually ranking higher in the Google platform. And I also wouldn’t do the same uh when it comes to Google Places as well. So, the trend we’re seeing is that Google is shifting the ability for organizations like you to influence where you stand. They’re trying to make it up to the user as the judge uh as the final judge of where businesses should rank and that’s that’s they’re incentivized. They have a massive incentive to make their platform

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match reality. So the work we have to do is to stop obsessing. How can we manipulate the system in order to rank higher? We have to start obsessing. How can we serve the people we seek to serve at to such a degree that inevitably the platforms whose job it is to accurately reflect reality uh will reflect you highly. So that’s the new approach that we should take. And if you’re looking for growth quickly, if you’re looking to leverage attention and and um uh visibility, the only real platform left

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for advertisers like us or offices like you is going to be advertising. Like the platforms, they know that businesses depend on them. And so the way that or if you want to get an advantage on that platform, now you have to pay for it. In the past, you were paying a third-party agency, but they’ve fixed it. They’ve introduced places. Now, if you want uh better results, you’re going to have to pay Google. And that’s just the unfortunate way the game goes. Um, so that’s why I promote this

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idea so much of do the work of becoming remarkable. Do the work of seek finding out who you seek to serve. figuring out exactly what it is that they want, what what they believe is good, align and resonate with it very deeply and then run advertising and then find the initial people who will come experience that and spread the word about it, who will so that you can leverage instead of SEO instead of leveraging SEO and advertising and all this traditional marketing stuff that you can start to leverage word of mouth

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because word of mouth is becoming more powerful every day. We see platforms like Google empowering word of mouth. They they want the user’s voice to be at the forefront not what the organizations are saying. So we have to make the shift too. We have to stop thinking about how can we manipulate the system? How can we you know what what tactic can we do to get more patients in the door and instead do the harder work of figuring out who do we seek to serve? How can we serve them better? And once you do that,

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you’ll start to leverage word of mouth, which is becoming the main method of marketing today. So, hope you found this video helpful. And I’m sorry I couldn’t give you better news about how you could quickly grow your practice. You’re going to have to pay if it comes to that. It’s going to have to be advertising. But there is good news. You can become remarkable. It’s easier than it sounds. Although the path is difficult. It’s simpler than it sounds. But the path is a journey. It’s not an easy quick fix

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that you can uh whip up in one day, but it’s worth doing. So, if you’re interested in doing that work, I have a full course. It’s free. I’ll put in the description. It’s going to walk you through how to become remarkable, how to figure out who you seek to serve, how to attract them, and so on and so forth. All right. Thanks for watching this video. I’ll see you guys in the next one. Thanks.