In this episode, Ash welcomes David Herman, founder of Web Marketing for Dentists, who draws on over 20 years of dental marketing experience to explain how specialized marketing helps dental practices achieve real returns on investment. David discusses the unique challenges of dental marketing and how his agency uses data-driven strategies, including tracking PMS data and return on investment, to provide transparency and results for clients.

David shares examples of quick and significant marketing turnarounds, noting that dentists can expect to see a return on their investment in as little as 30 days. He emphasizes the importance of individualized marketing plans—understanding the dentist’s preferred procedures and leveraging patient reviews and targeted content for better SEO. The conversation also covers actionable tips for startups with limited budgets, such as optimizing websites for speed, building out procedure-specific content, and prioritizing Google reviews. David concludes with strategies for balancing pay-per-click and long-term SEO, ensuring dental practices can continue to grow despite rising digital marketing costs.

To find out more and connect with David, visit: WebMarketingForDentists.com

Key Topics Discussed:

• Why dental-specific marketing expertise matters
• The challenge of educating dental consumers
• Ensuring HIPAA compliance in marketing efforts
• Using PMS data to track ROI accurately
• How quickly can dental practices expect results from digital marketing
• The agency’s unique 30-day contract and trial offer
• The importance of individualized marketing by dental procedure
• Value of video and audio for patient connection
• What dental procedures are easiest and most profitable to market
• Website optimization tips for startups
• Strategies for getting more Google reviews
• Differences between pay-per-click advertising and SEO
• Long-term digital marketing considerations for dental practices

Welcome to Beyond Bitewings, the business side of dentistry, brought to you by Edwards and Associates PC. Join us as we discuss how to build your dental practice, optimize your income, and plan for your future. This podcast is distributed with the understanding that Edwards and Associates PC is not rendering legal, accounting or professional advice. Listeners should consult with their business advisors before acting on any of the information that is shared at Edwards and Associates PC. Our business is the business of dentistry. For help or more information, visit our [email protected] hello and welcome to another episode of Beyond Bitewings. In today's episode, we have a very special guest. His name is David Herman with web marketing for dentists.

He's been doing this for over 20 years. My goodness, for two decades. And that was one of the reasons why we decided to have him on as a guest so he can share his knowledge and his expertise on why it's important to utilize someone who specializes in this niche for your marketing needs as opposed to someone who caters to the general market. So without further ado, David, how are you doing today?

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me on.

Yeah, absolutely. Now, if you like, you can say more about yourself to our listeners.

Sure. Yeah. I've been working with dentists for 20 years. Probably worked with. Well, the number is over 2,000 now. And it's been, you know, my daily grind. So obviously a lot of time spent not just talking to dentists, but thinking about dentistry and how it gets presented to a basically uneducated mass of consumers who really don't know anything.

Right.

That's kind of where it starts. You're marketing to a group of people that you would wish were more educated. What's the. The old adage is an educated consumer is our best customer. I think that was Sims. Right. But that would be. That would be true for dentists as well.

It's just, it's hard. Nobody has the budget to really do education. There are ways to kind of tap into what people do understand about dentistry and try to paper over the cracks of what they don't know. So it's an interesting marketplace to be in. And my previous experience is marketing for all sorts of other companies. I worked for ad agencies, I worked as a marketing director on the client side. Lots of different companies. Mars Confectionery, Procter and Gamble, General Motors, and most of that was a little soul destroying in the sense that you did a lot of work and you put your ad out and the car looked great in the ad.

And then you say, did it make a difference? And everybody's like, we don't know. With dentistry, we really do feel that we make a difference. Sometimes tears are brought to our eyes sometimes because we really make a difference. People who've come to us and said, you guys are my last gamble here. Right. And we're like, we didn't ask for that. That's too much pressure. But it works out.

And it's really positive when it does, because we're helping dentists and the dentists are helping other people who really need that help.

That's true. You're helping the helpers. Right. And that's important.

That's literally our line.

Really?

Yeah. We use that internally all the time. Helping the helpers.

Amazing. Amazing. Because that's. That's what it sounded like. It's like, yes, you're not directly helping the patients, but you're helping the helper. So indirectly you are.

If we're helping directly, I can guarantee that I, for one, would have passed out after the first few minutes.

You and I both cannot do that.

And in fact, we have some dentists. Sometimes you'll see the before and afters that we get sent and we're like, we are not showing that that's true. Even the after is like, just like, you know, little drops of blood around the edge of the tooth. I'm like, no, come on, give me the one from the week after where everything's kind of healed a bit more.

Yeah. And you actually brought up an important aspect of marketing in the dental world, which is compliancy. A lot of times marketing agencies, they don't pay attention to HIPAA compliancy being specific to the dental world. I'm sure your team is always making sure that any kind of material that's being put out there is compliant with HIPAA regulations and that none of that is being broken.

Sure. And we have business associate agreements with all of our dentists to make sure that we ourselves are just an extension of them. And everything is password protected, encrypted. All of the information is secure from a HIPAA point of view. Mostly, the leads themselves are not really revealing too much in terms of their own health situation. They are, you know, they would like to see a dentist. Right. They would like to see a dentist about veneers.

Right. Something like that. So there's not a lot of detail that we come across. There's actually more now that we share PMS data. So with a lot of our clients, we will pull PMS data into some of our systems, which Are encrypted and password protected in order to work out the return on investment. So we basically pull all the new patients for, like, let's say the last two years, all of our leads, match them up together, and that way we can work out, oh, of the new patients that you had in the past two years, 50% came from us, 20% came from us, 80%, whatever the number is, and work out really pretty accurately how much money they made out of the marketing on the back end versus what they pushed in at the front end. Because marketing always seems like an expense. But if it's invested properly, that money, it is an investment, and you get a return on it.

So if we can calculate that for us, it's a way of not only reassuring our clients that their money did not go to waste. You spent $50,000 on a marketing campaign last year. Where did it go to? Well, you feel much better if you know that half a million came out the other end in terms of production. But also it gives us goals, sets goals for, you know, the next year. So the next year is, okay, we're going to spend 50,000 again, but we would like to beat half a million. Can we do that? Would it be wise for us to maybe up it to 75,000? Would we get to 750,000 automatically? Like, does it scale in that way? The answer is always a little bit complicated. It should scale.

Right, Right. And of course, there's a lot of variable factors there, so that's understandable. But speaking generically, that's how it should operate. Like, even. Even when you're looking at it from a business perspective, if you're using some kind of a benchmark or a percentage, it's like, okay, this is what I'm bringing in. This is the percentage I'm spending on marketing. And if it's a campaign, of course it's going to be higher than what you usually spend, but then you want to see the return. Now, I would like to also move to the other part, which is, let's say if somebody decides, okay, you know what, I'm going to utilize, let's say, company like yours, and they decide, this is the amount of money that I'm going to put in, typically, how long would you say it takes for them to see the difference that, oh, this is when I'm getting the return on my investment?

That's a great question. So sometimes day one, we have had. We have had first days that were crazy. So we. We ran an ad. I mean, maybe we spent 50 bucks, 100 bucks, something very small. And somebody came in day one and paid in cash. So we were already positive from day one.

We've had months as well where first month is $75,000 and we spent $5,000. That does happen. It also happens that we have $0 months. We don't have zero leads, but the flow is kind of slow. So depending on how quickly you see people and what their financial status is, motivation to get things fixed quickly, those people can hang around for a little bit trying to decide. In fact, some of our clients have told us that for implants in particular, they've had people come back two years later and start a procedure and they see that they're tracked back to us. But they were like, that was not the return on investment speed that we were hoping for. But you'll take it.

Right?

Right, right, right.

So 30 days is a very short amount of time. But for a lot of our clients, that is all we get. I mean, people want things to move quickly. I would love to be able to have all of my clients say, take six months. I have time. I have had some clients who've said that we're always a little nervous about that because we want to show also in month one that we have a return that we at least have, you know, four patients who were booked and got some kind of treatment planned. That's, you know, $60,000 of treatment was planned. I'll take that as a start.

Some of that is surely going to close. And again, if it doesn't close, it doesn't feel quite as bad from us. We teed up $60,000. It didn't close. Maybe there are other factors involved that aren't to do with, with the marketing. Maybe some of the sales process internally needs to be fixed. That's, that's kind of positive for us. But I would say that for most people, I think 30 days is, is a decent amount of time.

We would take that challenge, right? I would take the 30 day challenge. Most agencies are going to try to stretch out and say three months, six months. We need to sign for a year to not do that. In fact, my very first client from 20 years ago is still on a 30 day notice period in his contract. He can quit today and in 30 days he's gone. I think that's unlikely based on the fact that we're pretty, we're pretty tight on the return on investment, but we don't mind having those kind of contracts in place. In fact, it's one of the things we hold up as like one of Our uniquenesses is we are willing to work on 30 day notice periods. Like forever.

You know, day one, when we go live, you can get calls. In fact, if by day two, by the end of day two, we don't have any leads. We're already launching an investigation internally into what's going on here, why we're not generating leads.

It's interesting that you're saying this because I've spoken to other marketing folks and almost always, you're right, they, they would say something along the lines of three months at least. So for you guys, for you and your team to aspire to that 30 day, that's, that's fantastic.

Yeah, we like, we like to be fast and listen, if you, if your guests want to reach out to me, I can do a special offer.

Right, of course. That'll be great.

I'd say if, if, if people mention this podcast, they can pin me down to this as well. We'll do, we'll do 30 days for free. Like, we'll be free. You'll have to pay Google, Facebook, whoever it is that we're utilizing. But we would do that for free for people coming from this podcast. They just have to mention the name of the podcast and we're on the hook. You can keep that recording and then reuse it, but for 2025, it's valid.

Okay. That's amazing. Well, thank you for doing that for our listeners.

Sure. We take that challenge as well. Because I'll tell you, mostly marketers have kind of covered themselves with like a really bad reputation in general, but definitely within, within dentistry, there are innumerable dentist clients that I have who came to me like burnt from previous relationships.

Yes.

There is a type of agency that will just keep spinning. They have a very good inflow of desperate dentists, and they don't mind what the outflow is because probably once they get on board, they'll just, they'll just stick. Dentists can be very conservative, which means it's sometimes hard to get in, but they very often don't terminate. We're kind of quite aggressive about saying this is working. Right. We're seeing the leads come in, but you're making money out of them. Right. Like, we ask those questions, it's a little bit uncomfortable because sometimes the answer could be we're not actually.

And then we need to know where to go. Right. There is a plan after that. If the answer is no, then we ask for feedback. Is it the quality of the leads? Are they from too far away? Do they not have money? Is it did we choose the wrong procedures? Are there any procedures that are working? Are you going to plan on answering the phone anytime soon?

Right.

Fix it so that somebody else can answer the phone. Right. You know, there are places to go to say, well, why is it not working? Right. You have to keep on asking the why question. What is it? The five whys I think is a famous thing. Keep asking why is that happening? In order to get to the base issue. So we like to do that and we have some fixes for some of those issues when they come up.

That's great. I mean, would you, would you like to share a story with our listeners about where somebody called you in completely hopeless or burnt out from their previous marketing team and then you guys were able to answer some of those whys and help them out?

Sure. Well, I think, you know what, if I could, I'd share a quick story about Google's relationship with us.

Okay, yeah, that's a good one because.

That was a little bit the same situation. So Google called us in 2017. We had been happily under their radar for a very long time and they called us to come visit and they said we see that you guys have a lot of dentists and we have a partner program. We'd like you to come in and talk to us. So we flew into actually to the Austin office, Austin, Texas and we met with some of the executives there who were running this program and we said, why do you reach out to us? So they said, well, you know that we have this Google Ads program and we run Google Ads ourselves and we looked at our results and we basically keep dentists for three months. Right. Is our, is our average and your guys average is 22 months. So they were like, can you just explain to us why you're so much better at using Google Ads than we are? Because we made it.

So it was funny because first of all I didn't even know what the meeting was going to be about. I thought they might be like, you guys are locked out. We are throwing away the key, you can never use Google Ads again. But they didn't. They just wanted us to be partners with them and essentially grow the business for them. They're very interested in how much you spend, right. Rockets to build and you know, self driving cars, a lot of places to put the money. So they just need the money to come in.

And that was, that's almost their downfall as a marketing company is that that all their interest is just like throw money at it, pay more money, be number one. Like you know, Bid whatever it takes to get in that right position. We have the opposite position, which is we want to pay as little as possible for our clients, want to take full advantage of Google's system, and we want to track everything that comes out the other end and work out the return on investment. What Google was doing is they were just setting things up as fast as they could with the team that they trained, and they just weren't looking at all the details. They weren't looking at being strategic on different procedures. Everything was kind of pushed into one big dentist campaign. They're saying dentist. It's good.

Dentist is actually our least favorite keyword. We don't like dentists. We want people to be specific. Right. You want a dentist, maybe look somewhere else. We have some new patient campaigns, but mainly on new patients that we want are implant patients, invisalign patients, cosmetic patients, denture patients, people that have something of significance going on in their mouths. The worst thing for us is to spend, you know, spend $400 bringing somebody into your office. They come in and they do a $100 cleaning.

Right, right. You already lost money with us. Right. You're already negative. Not great. So we really try to avoid that. So we explained that to Google, and Google was like, okay, we want to with you. We'll give you resources and we'll give you access, and that's why we're still a premier partner today.

And then, I guess for an individual story, probably our greatest story is with. And I won't name him specifically, but we had a dentist in Atlanta who called us, and he wasn't desperate. He just was doing one or two implants every month. And this is somebody who I'm thinking of because we just became very close to him, and we. We got his practice to the point where he was doing 20 to 25. Wow. Month in pretty short order. I mean, it took a few months to get to that kind of volume, but he built himself a whole new office because of it.

In fact, he gave us a testimonial, which I think is still on YouTube. When he's standing in his own kitchen in his house, and he's like, this kitchen was also paid for. So when you see people being personally successful like that, when he hired more people, he expanded his office. It looked brand new. He hired more people. It's like, you know, we hire people. It's like, we love to help the community in general. Again, helping the helpers means helping other people.

Whether it's, you know, the patients that came to him who were very Happy. I think he was a very talented dentist and. Or whether it's him, you know, putting a kitchen in his own house, or whether it's him investing more in his own business, it's really about people wanting, you know, wanting more. Some people are very happy with what they've got, and that's totally fine. But if you want more, we can get those leads coming in. But most people, I would say 99.9% of the dentists that we work with are really very good. And many of them also realize, I don't want to do implants, right? I want to do Invisalign, right? I have. I have a different calling.

I want to do tmj, right? I want to do sleep apnea. Like they. There are so many different procedures underneath dentistry that when I first started with dentistry, I had no idea how broad it was. There are so many verticals within dentistry that it's actually been. It's been a really powerful experience to work with so many people who just want to go in different directions. Everybody is their own individual, and that helps with marketing. People do end up explaining their individuality. They start out saying, I'm just a dentist like everybody else.

I do crown and bridge, right? And then eventually you see, oh, but what really brings you pleasure is this procedure, right? Or helping this kind of person. So everybody gets to go in the direction they want to go in. And marketing can only really help people go in the direction they want to go in that they're excited about. Otherwise it's, you know, really, you're pushing water uphill, right?

So essentially what you're saying, David, is that the consumer or the dentist, they need to know their destination for you to be able to guide them.

Yes, or we certainly have to facilitate that discussion. And often it does start with people saying, I'm the same as everyone else, I'm just a dentist. And then we have a conversation and we find out that, no, in fact, you're quite different, right? Everybody is a different individual. You've been doing this for 25 years. So actually there's no competition between you and somebody who's been doing it for five, right? That it's just you're a different level of dentist and that five year experience dentist will be on a different level when they're 25 years in. So little things like that can make a big difference. You happen to have been trained in an emergency department in a hospital, so you've done a phenomenal amount of implants. It happens, right? People have these experiences.

So it's like, wow, you've actually done more implants than many oral surgeons. Right. They just haven't done as many as you because you did that many in your two years in a hospital. So that becomes something that we can actually go out and market. It's just life experience. They didn't have a plan for that, but, you know, they didn't have a plan inside life, but life had a plan for them.

That's right.

That, that's the direction that we're now, now headed. Headed in. And we can, we can use that for marketing and in fact, more even that it's that we actually want to start showing the dentists a lot more. So we're doing a lot more video. Lot more video. I mean, truthfully, the video part is less important than the audio part. A little bit like podcast, it's all audio based for dentists. Because when people are with you, they're not really with you visually.

There's a bright light in their face and you have a ton of PPE on you, so not really connecting to your face. But they hear the voice, right? And it's the voice that makes a difference, people. I like that voice. That voice is reassuring to me. I would listen to that when that person spoke about whatever is. I understood it for the first time. Right. There's a connection there.

And people want the voice of their dentist, I think, more than they want the visual. It's just we do it with video now because it's easy to do both. So it's very powerful. People want to hear that. And if they call, having watched the video when they come in, they're going to be sold. Because again, it's. You don't use a model or an AI avatar for you. We actually have you speak to the camera.

And again, we do it much like you are doing with this podcast. We set people at ease. And thankfully, people are quite at ease in the, in the zoom world and in the world of, you know, just talking on the phone, speakerphone is fine for everybody now. We're very used to that. So just getting people into that mode where they can talk and be themselves and say those things online, on a page to everybody all at once that they have said many, many times to individuals. We want to kind of grab some of that. They'll have amazing metaphors for the way they speak about certain procedures. It's just powerful to have somebody talking the way that they talk about a procedure.

And again, it's all individuals, right? Expressing what an implant is, what Invisalign is in their own language. And then people connect with that.

Yeah. It's very important for the provider to be able to connect with them and actually be able to educate them as they're speaking. Because, you know, as that old adage, what you don't know, you don't know. Right. Sometimes we just think, oh, it's just my teeth, whatever, I'm going to go and just get my things taken care of, you know, take a day off of work and that's it. They don't go into much detail. So unless the provider can do that through these platforms, whether it's their webpage or other social media platforms, it's going to be hard to connect with those patients. Now, one thing I did notice on your website, I did, and I'm understanding this more as I'm talking with you, is that you are not too focused on the canopy of just dentistry.

You guys go into the various branches of dentistry because even under your services that you guys provide on your website, it doesn't just say dental something. It goes into like cosmetic dentistry marketing or full arch implant marketing, or full mouth restoration marketing, Invisalign marketing or TMJ marketing. So that tells me a lot about how invested you guys are into this world and for your clients. So that's pretty amazing. And that in itself is assuring me that you guys are knowledgeable enough where you guys can pass that on and have the credibility to be able to help your clients.

Yeah, I mean, we have, I think the Last count was 36 Procedures within dentistry that we are advertising as kind of separate lines, again, depending on the particular dentist and direction they want to go. And there's probably more just in terms of flavors. Right. There's some people who just have like flavors of dentistry. Like it's very homeopathic or biological dentistry. And so we have, you know, a lot of that is very touchy feely and it's about targeting a certain demographic.

Yeah.

Of patients that are going to want that and are drawn to that. So, yeah, it's, it's valuable. And we also have people come to us and say, well, what works the best? Right. I can do all 36. And they'll say, what works the best? And there's an answer for that as well. If you want me to go into.

It, it's case by case. Am I wrong?

No. But I can tell if I had my druthers, Right. If I had somebody walk through the door and say, this is what I want to do, I can tell you what my top five are. I mean, probably the easiest people to get in are probably emergency patients. Right. They're highly motivated by something even stronger than marketing, which is actual pain.

Pain.

Actual pain wins. So people can be very desperate in that situation. And we have very high conversion numbers. We'll have 100 people come to the page, 35 of them pick up the phone and call. My only surprise is, what are the other 65 doing? Why are they not calling? I don't understand. So emergency always gets great people in, and especially if the dentist loves emergency patients but loves root canals in particular. I mean, I don't know, it's 50 to 60% of the emergency patients end up being root canals. So if you don't like root canals, you better at least like your endodontist.

You're going to be repairing him a lot. So, yeah. So anybody who likes root canals. Root canals is also, if you're a general dentist, who likes root canals. That's amazing. We love that. It's a great little niche. And then I would say it's all the big procedures.

It's dental implants in whatever form they take. Could be single, could be multiple, could be some kind of snap on denture, could be an all on four, on six, all on eight, or a version of that. Some kind of full arch restoration. Invisalign is tremendously popular if you want young people to come to your practice. By that, I mean like between, you know, 20 and 45, 50, that's the demographic to target. And then veneers, which is probably the hardest one to target. But it's. And it's so emotional.

It's the least driven by price and the most driven by emotions and connection with the dentist. So that's probably my kind of my top five. Maybe I, maybe I mentioned a few more in dental implants that kind of veered off, but that's probably what we love the most. Do we do tmj? Sleep apnea? Yes, we do that. Do we like dentures? Yes, but often because those go up towards the full mouth restoration implants. They go in the implants direction. You know, other things we stay away from. It's funny because crowns came up today in a meeting I had right before this, this podcast that it's funny how crowns has never been a big procedure for us.

Like just people looking for a crown. Right. Difficult to turn that into a very solid procedure. Maybe it's one of those things as well where when somebody's going to the dentist, they're expecting their dentist will do the crown. It's like it's like, you know, I'm not going to get a second, a second opinion on a filling, right? My dentist said this is what the filling costs. That's what I do. People aren't searching around. When people are looking for something that's unusual, an implant, veneers, Invisalign and a big ticket item.

Then I think people start to think, am I with the right dentist for this? I mean we hear it all the time from dentists that do veneers, that they'll end up doing veneers on somebody. And they get an angry call from the person's regular dentist saying, why are you doing the veneers? I do veneers. And so the dentist says, well, yeah, but they didn't know that, right? So that's why they came to me. Right? You have to market also to your own, to your own people. A lot of people do that in the waiting room and they say all the procedures that they do, you got to do that. Because we pluck people out. We know from anecdotes we have from dentists. We pluck people out of the dental office's waiting rooms.

If you keep them waiting too long, they start to look around and we'll find them, pluck them out and they'll just drive five minutes around the corner and go see somebody else.

David, that's amazing. Thank you for sharing that story. Now again, it is completely up to you if you want to answer this.

Or.

Add anything to this, but I'm just curious. So for some of our listeners that are just starting out, let's say with a startup practice and they don't have the budget to, let's say, work with a marketing company like yours or some of the other big players out there, Are there any tips that you can share with them that can help them at least start improving their lead count?

Yes, there are. So a couple of things that we see very often that I think are pretty easy to fix. So websites, sometimes websites can be bad, right? What do I mean by bad? I mean in particular slow loading websites. There is some data from Google on how long people are willing to wait before a site loads until they decide to go back and click on something else. The answer is 2.5 seconds.

Sounds about right.

Two and a half seconds people start to say, oh, this site's not going to load. It seems harsh. I think there's some commentary on the speed with which society is moving these days, but 2.5 seconds is the number. So what I often say to people that call me for advice is I say, listen, go on your site, or I'll go on their site in a, you know, in a new browser, right? So you need a browser. If you use Safari, just, you know, pick up Chrome or Firefox or something, use one that you don't normally use. Because what happens with a website is once you go one time, it caches a version of that website locally on your computer, and then when you go back again, it just brings the local one. It doesn't. It doesn't go fetch it from the Internet.

So one of the solutions to that is just pop up another browser, use somebody else's computer, use somebody else's phone, use phones as well. Because mobile is very important. Most people will see your website on a phone. So often we look at it on a desktop. But actually 70% of the people that we see going to our websites and we control hundreds, 70% of them are on mobile devices. So go look at it and time it. Like, type in your web address, press go and start a stopwatch. And if you're hitting three seconds and nothing has appeared, it's probably time to talk to your web designer about that being a problem.

Usually they can fix it, but the squeaky wheel gets the oil. If you don't say anything, they're busy fixing somebody else's.

That's right.

We very much favor WordPress as a content management system. It's just a backend piece of, you know, what you're building the website on. I think Google also favors them. They are the biggest content management system. So if you build using WordPress, anybody you know, you can fire your web designer and every other web designer will be able to work with it. It's just ubiquitous. Then I would say also content is also a big problem. Often I'm on websites.

They're like a very short brochure where they'll have one page that says services, and it'll have like 25 different services with a tiny blurb about what they do that is insufficient for gaining position in the search engines, which really should be your goal with, with a website. A website is not just a brochure and you hand out a card and then people go, there. It is that, of course, and it is there for your, for your existing clients. But you want to be found and you do not get found. If you don't have a root canal page and an emergency dentistry page and a dental implants page, you need all of these pages and you need to write some content for them. I mean, you could get ChatGPT to write the content for you, maybe give it a head start by telling it how you like to do dental implants. So it's a little bit unique, that's really useful. And then probably the final thing that I'll say is just to get reviews.

If you have happy clients, get them to give you reviews. I mean, it should be as easy as saying to your front desk, hey guys, five bucks for every new review you get this month. See how that goes, right? If you get 10 and you pay 50 bucks to the front desk, you know, 10 reviews is infinitely worth more than the 50 bucks you're going to pay. Maybe make it 10 bucks per review. I don't know. Whatever your financial capability is, motivate your front desk to try to get people to leave positive reviews. Five star reviews, right? We don't want anybody who says, I don't give five stars because nobody's perfect. It's like, we know that, but thank you very much, we'll ask somebody else instead.

Five stars is what you need because you've got to end up with 4.5 to 4.9 stars. You could end up with 5 stars. But honestly, the data says that people trust 5 stars less than they trust 4.9 stars. So you got to be in the high fours. And that seems real to people. And people understand that. That says something about the quality of your practice. Plus it's actually the number one factor for SEO, right? For search engine optimization.

If I want to optimize your site, I'm going to tell you, please get me reviews every week. The recency of reviews, the number of reviews, very important. So to keep on getting reviews and have a system in place, of course, there are many pieces of software out there that will do that for you. I've always tended to like the fact that because you have face to face contact with your, with your clients, which I usually don't because they're all over the country or in Canada or, you know, sometimes across the Atlantic and in the uk. I don't get to see people in person that much, but since you do, it would seem useful to actually have those people, you know, write something there and then in the office, right? To send them a link and have them write it kind of in front of you so you can inspect what they're doing. But those are a few tips to really help out. And hopefully that's useful for people. And SEO, I think, is one of those things.

We do pay per click ads, which is you pay Google for the right to be in the right slot. You pay Facebook for the right to be in a certain slot, and that has a return on investment value. The SEO matrix is slightly different for roi because you invest early on for a long time, maybe six months, maybe a year before you start to see the return. But then the return comes back exponentially. I mean, I cannot beat with Google Ads the kind of return that you get from investing long term in SEO. SEO is very useful to invest in. It's just Google Ads gets you more immediate results. And essentially we prove ourselves through Google Ads.

So the offer that I made to your listeners to call me and tell me they want a free month is exclusively for Google Ads, because that's the one where I can make an impact in 30 days. I rarely can make an impact on SEO in 30 days. It's going to take six months, probably a year. But the returns are huge after a while because the payment is not going out to Google. The payment is going to whoever's keeping you in the number one, number two, number three position.

Yeah. Especially with the competitive market these days. I think it's, it's worth spending that money. And if.

Yeah, and it's also, you're offsetting the risk of not being able to afford at some point Google Ads. I mean, Google Ads, the, the expense of the, of each click just keeps on getting higher and higher. They, they keep on wanting more money and they have more, more of your competitors are coming to Google Ads every day. So it just drives the price because it's an auction. So at some point the auction will become too expensive. I mean, there are lawyers in New York City that are paying $100 for a click now, probably more already. But the data says that those people actually, because of the kinds of clients they sign up and what the value of those clients is for them, they can afford $100 a click. I.

There are not many dentists. I mean, if you're doing all on four, maybe you need a really high conversion rate. You've got to be converting 10% of those. So then you're spending $1,000 to generate a lead, but it's for all on four. So maybe you'll end up with $25,000 of production or 50,000 if they do that whole math. It can work, but it becomes impossible for something smaller, a root canal. You can't pay $100 per quit. And at some point, it may be that Google Ads is priced itself out of that particular market.

It's possible so to have SEO on the back burner, keeping you with a solid number of leads that you will maintain probably for the rest of your career once you invest in it. Seems like a good plan long term.

That's a good way to go about it. Absolutely. Well, David, thank you so much for sharing the tips and the knowledge that you have. It's amazing. And thank you for that special offer that you're offering to our listeners as well. It was really a pleasure to have you on our show.

You're very welcome. It was a pleasure to be here.

It was a pleasure.

Thank you.

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