[Webinar Recording] How To Find New Patients With Local Dentist Search

Local Dentist Search Training: Webinar Presenter

Adrian is the Vice President at My Social Practice, an agency providing expert SEO support, social media marketing content, and strategy to dental practices.

Adrian has been involved in Google maps SEO for more than 12 years and has helped thousands of companies grow and thrive through digital marketing. Adrian and his wife Emilie have four children and live in Suncrest, Utah.

The most effective way to increase your new patient flow is through first page rankings on the Google map (AKA the Google Map 3-Pack). Google Maps SEO is a local search for dentists strategy that all dental practice should understand.

More than 2/3rds of potential patients use the Google map to find local dentists. 92% of these patients find the dentists they want on the first page of search results.

Most dentists aren’t aware that you can optimize your Google business listing, resulting in out-ranking your competition on the Google map. It’s like website SEO but for ranking on the Google map rather than organic listings, which are below the map.

If you optimize your Google listing and begin ranking on the first page of Google maps, you’ll dramatically increase your new patient phone calls. We know because we’ve been doing this for years and tracking it.

Watch this informative webinar which shows how dental practices can increase rankings, website clicks, phone calls, and new scheduled patients with Google Maps SEO.

My Social Practice offers a fantastic dental SEO service that will help your practice grow and and find new patients through via Google maps.

Adrian Lefler (00:04):
I hope that you guys are going to really enjoy this if you haven’t heard me speak about this before, I think you’ll find it quite interesting. So, just to… I’m going to begin by just telling you a little bit about who I am just for some context and my company, we have been in the dental industry for 12 years, almost 13 years now, when we first got started in digital marketing, we started as a social media marketing company, and we’re kind of known in the dental industry as the premier social media marketing service. Since then, we’ve worked with lots of companies. We’ve built a huge social media following. If you’re not following us on Facebook or Instagram, please do, we’re always giving out like free advice and downloads and lots of great information. So please follow online if you’re not.

Adrian Lefler (01:05):
In addition to social media, we offer reputation management service. We develop and build websites, and we also have an SEO service called Google Maps SEO, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. I’m going to go in and kind of give you… Lay the groundwork for how you optimize and the benefits of optimizing your Google business listing. One other thing that we do every year is we have a dental digital marketing conference. We do it in April and this year it’s on April 22nd. And if you go to dentalmarketingconference.com, you can register for it if you want to watch it online, you want to fly out here to Utah, we’re having it at the Ultradent facility. We might change the venue on that, because I think Ultradent has shut down and they may not be back open before the 22nd, but I don’t know why anybody want to come out here to Utah than to go hiking or skiing or something. But if you do want to come, you’re welcome to come.

Adrian Lefler (02:12):
But we’re going to record everything and put it online. And it’s really, really great information. We get into the weeds on digital marketing and what’s really working to grow practices, retain patients, find new patients within the dental industry. So, you’re welcome to join us there. All right. So, that’s a little bit about the company. I’m one of the owners of the company. I’m the vice president. I used to be the president, but I got demoted I think by my two business partners. I’m not sure why. I should probably have to talk to them about that, but I work in the marketing department. Now, I run our marketing team. So what I’m going to be showing you, I’ve done for hundreds of dental practices across United States and in Canada. All right. So let’s get started. What is Google My Business? So when you do a search on Google, specifically when you do a search for a local business, you’ll see the map, the Google Map will come up.

Adrian Lefler (03:15):
You can also get to this from your mobile phone. Right? If you download the Google Maps app, you’ll basically access the same database through your Google Maps app, as what shows up in the map in a search result, just like on your desktop. And the information that’s listed there, and you can see in this graphic, I searched dentist in Los Angeles there. And that was the listing or there’s the listings right there. And this listing I’ll use it as an example. West Coast Dental of Los Angeles came up. Okay? So, this information here for West Coast Dental of Los Angeles, their reviews, their address, their phone, a link to their website, directions to their office. All of this comes not from their website, it comes from their Google My Business listing. It’s the business listing for… It’s a businesses listing in the Google database. Okay? So, a lot of people think that actually the information comes from the website, but it doesn’t, it actually comes from this listing.

Adrian Lefler (04:24):
And another way you can find the Google My Business listing information is if you do a direct search, so you can see up here in the search phrase here, West Coast Dental of Los Angeles. So I just typed the name of that same practicer, and you’ll have what’s called the knowledge graph. That’s the vernacular for what this is called, but it’s basically all or most of the information that’s listed in the Google My Business listing on the right hand side of the page. So, the map doesn’t show up when someone is searching directly for the name of your practice, because Google’s smart enough at that point to just show your website and then show your knowledge graph. But if somebody is just searching for a generic phrase, dentist in, dentist near me, cosmetic dentist, endodontics, whatever it might be, you’re going to get the map with the listings in the map. So, that’s what the Google My Business listing is inside of Google. Okay? And we’re going to talk a little bit about why it’s so important.

Adrian Lefler (05:31):
So, in this search, if you look up in the little search bar and these are all just screen grabs that I did when I was creating the slide presentation. I searched dentists in Salt Lake city, which is where I’m located. And at the top of the page, there were ads. Now this is above the map, right? So, you’ve probably seen this when you search, you do a search, there’s the map, but sometimes there’s two, three listings above it and they say ad next to it. So, this is what… They used to call this PPC or pay per click or paying per click. It’s basically, the proper name for it now is called Google Ads, but it’s a bidding strategy. So if you want to be at the top of the search engines, above the map, in the ad section you set up a Google Ads campaign. And I’m not going to be talking about this today, but I’ll give you just a little snippet of how it works.

Adrian Lefler (06:36):
Basically, you set up an account with Google Ads, you put in the phrases that you want to bid on, you’re given some direction on what other practices are bidding at for those particular phrases. And then you put a budget in and you run it. And so if you’re in the… For example, this particular phrase, dentist in Salt Lake city, all four of those practices are bidding on that phrase. And the one at the top, best dentist in SLC, URL’s Avenues Family Dentist, they’re bidding more than anybody else. So that’s why they get the top listing. So this is called Google Ads. It’s above the map. And this is how Google makes their money. Right? The next section down below the ads is the Google Map, which we talked about. And over on the right here, I’ve got this 68% number and I’m going to go back one slide on the Google ad section is 10%. This is… There’re several consumer studies.

Adrian Lefler (07:41):
So these are studies that are done by digital marketing companies, not necessarily dental marketing companies, but digital marketing companies about the perception that patients or I should say consumers have regarding the different results in a search. Right? And these numbers are based on the amount of trust that people have towards ads versus the Google map. Now you can think about your own search habits. Right? If you’re looking for a local business and you want to get some information about maybe the different companies that are local, how often do you skip the ads? I do it almost every time just unknowingly, because I just know that I’m not getting an objective view of that company because it’s an advertisement. I usually go here to the map and it’s likely that most of you do the same thing. Okay? So about two thirds of people trust the Google Map over 10% trusting paper click or the Google Ads. And then down below, we have what are called the organic listings. These are the website listings and about a quarter of people trust the organic listings.

Adrian Lefler (09:04):
So, if you’re to take 100 people and ask them, “Well, where do you go when you’re looking for a local business to get information about the practice? Two thirds of them typically go to the map. Okay? That’s what this means. So, I’m sharing this because it’s important to understand the behavior of the typical consumer so that you know where you want to focus your efforts, your advertising efforts and your marketing dollars. Okay? Now, with the Google Map, there are only three listings on the front page. Okay? Google’s tested this over the years, it used to be seven listings in the map, now it’s only three, they do allow for an advertisement to show up in the map. As you can see right here in the middle. I don’t know if you can see right above this number one, this is an ad right here, but these other three listings are listed on the front page simply because they’ve most likely optimized their listing and their website so that they rank for the phrase that I put in, which was dentist near me. Okay?

Adrian Lefler (10:13):
So, the kicker here is that if you’re not on the front page of Google, you’re probably never going to be found. You’re at least not going to be found if people are searching for phrases that are not a direct search phrase. Direct, meaning they’re not typing in your name. If they’re looking for a dentist near me, or best cosmetic dentist or dental veneers near me, or whatever, something like that and you’re not listed in the top three, only 8% of people go to the second page. And in Google, there are no map listings on the second page. So, you got to get into the top three listings in order to rank on the front page. And that can be for any multitude of keywords. So, one practice might be able to rank on the front page for the word dentist, but they may not rank for dental implants, but they might also rank for say, cosmetic dentist or family dentist.

Adrian Lefler (11:17):
So each phrase you, each keyword, we call them keywords. You can rank higher or lower depending on how well you’ve optimized your listing and your website for that specific phrase. Okay? And I’ll talk a little bit about how to do that today. I have several webinars online that I’ve recorded. So if you guys have more interest in getting into the weeds on all the things you can do, you can email me and I’ll send you the videos if you like. The recordings. Anyway. So, the whole point here is you got to get on the first page in order to capture the two thirds of people that trust the map. And you got to be one of the top three listings to be on the front page. So, you got to get into that space. Okay? All right. So, the whole kind of message here is if you’re going to do SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, you want to optimize your Google My Business listing. The map is the key. All right. So, let’s talk a little bit about how Google values a Google listing.

Adrian Lefler (12:27):
Okay? And there’s three basic kind of general parts to this. Relevance, distance, and prominence. I’ll talk about each one really quick. So, relevance has to do with the search phrase and the actual location of the person who’s searching related to your listing and what you’re listing and website are optimized for. Okay? So, if someone searches for endodontist and you are a dentist, you are likely not going to show up, or it would be more difficult, I should say. Okay? Or vice versa. If you are a dentist and you offer dental implants and you haven’t optimized you or site for endodontics or dental implants, then it’s going to be really difficult for you to rank for that phrase. So, it has to do with relevance. And you can understand why Google would do this, they want to give the consumer who’s searching for something that they want to learn about or find out about, they want to give them their best result possible. So, if this search phrase is not relevant, you’re not going to show up. If it’s not relevant to your listing, you’re not going to show up. So that’s one thing.

Adrian Lefler (13:44):
Distance has to do with the actual physical location, the latitude and the longitude crosshair at the center of your practice, that location and where the person is searching from. So, in digital marketing, you’ve probably heard of SEO, search engine optimization, and you may have heard of that same phrase, but they put local on the front of it. Local SEO. SEO and local SEO. The difference is local SEO is the optimization tactic that you use if you have a physical location. Okay? If you don’t have a physical location, you’re an online place, or you’re a mobile dentist or something like that. Right? Or you’re just selling stuff online. You don’t do local SEO, you do just general SEO and you’re trying to rank higher at a wider range for whatever phrases. But because we’re all dentists and we work in this industry, you all have a physical location.

Adrian Lefler (14:55):
So the type of SEO that you’re doing is localized SEO. And that’s what the Google Map is. It’s a localized result. The address that is attached for somebody searching dentists near me, Google’s looking at where that individual is standing at and searching from and the physical location of your practice. And the further you are away, the more difficult it is to rank for somebody who’s searching from that particular place. And I’m going to show you a lot more about how that works here just a second. So, that’s distance, the distance of the… We’re talking about GPS connections and internet connections. That’s what Google’s looking at to identify where people are searching from and what they’re searching from. Okay? What they’re searching for. Excuse me. All right. And the last thing is prominence. And this has to do with how… I should say the weightiness of the value of your listing in your website. Okay? And this gets into a whole ton of optimization tactics. It’s link building if you’ve ever heard of that, it has to do with having a website that’s got real… No, I shouldn’t say real.

Adrian Lefler (16:17):
It has custom original content rather than just copied content. How often you’re publishing to your blog. It has to do with the technical aspects of your website. And then it also has to do with the optimization of your listing, your business listing, which we’ll talk about. So, if you have a website and a business listing, and you have no links, meaning no one anywhere on the internet has written an article and is linking it to you, you have to do SEO. Because the way that Google views the internet and creates value, and I should say weightiness to a particular business over another is through links. It’s the number of links that you have and the quality of links that you have primarily. And there’s a bunch of other stuff, but this is a big one. So, when I say prominence here, what this gets into is the actual optimization tactics, the link building and so forth that relate to your listing and your website. Okay? So Google’s looking at your link structure and all this stuff to decide who’s going to be the best result.

Adrian Lefler (17:32):
So those are the three. We got relevance, distance prominence. Okay? Now, we’re going to talk a little bit about how this works. All right. So, this is a really cool example. This screen here is my… This is Draper, Utah. So I live in Draper, just south of Salt Lake city. And if you look down at the bottom, there’s that little red circle down there if you can see my cursor, that’s where I live. Okay? And I live up on the top of a mountain. So there’s nothing up here. And the closest dental practices to my house are these four dental practices. Okay? Spangler and [inaudible 00:18:19], Marcus, Welch, and Matthew Smile Dental, Dr. Neibaur is an orthodontist, and this is a staffing company here. So I did a search, and I basically did a search, I said, dentists near me. And I was searching from my house. So I’m sitting at this desk in that little red circle, so to speak, and I search dentists near me.

Adrian Lefler (18:42):
And what you would think is that any kind of search that I do, or I say dentist near me, or best dentist near me, or something that relates to a location, you would think that one of these four practices or all four of them are going to show up, because those are the closest practices to my home. They’re all about four to four and a half miles away. Okay? So here are eight searches. And I don’t know if you can see on your screen there, the actual search phrases, but I searched near me search phases. I searched dental cleaning near me, dental clinic near me, best dentist, dentist, dental implants near me. They all say near me. Family dentist, emergency dentist, dental crowns. Okay? And I took a screenshot of the maps section. Right? And I’ve just kind of piled them in here. So there’s eight of these searches. So when you look through all of the listings here, which I did to check and see where those four practices were, and if they were listed, there was only one of the practices listed one time.

Adrian Lefler (19:57):
And it was this guy here, Dr. Jeffrey T. Welch. Okay? All the other search phrases, it didn’t list the closest practices. Now, that seems like super sketchy, right? Because you would think that Google is going to give value to somebody that’s really close. Right? Rather than encouraging me to go further, but because of the prominence effect, because of the value of the listing and the linking and the optimization, it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, actually a lot of times Google will actually show a practice that’s further away from you or further away from the consumer, the potential patient who’s searching, than the closest practice. And it’s because of the optimizations tactic. So, when I looked back through all these listings, I noticed that there was one practice that was listed more than any others. They were listed four times. Draper Parkway Dental. You can see they ranked for dental cleaning, best dentist, emergency dentist and family dentist. Okay? Now, where is Draper Parkway Dental?

Adrian Lefler (21:13):
They’re clear out there, they’re seven and a half miles away from my house. They’re three miles further than the other four practices, which is pretty… I was kind of dumb struck by that. Anyway. So, 7.6 miles is the actual driving distance. No, [inaudible 00:21:38]. So I went back in and I did eight more searches. But this time I put in Draper, Utah. So, think about the way that a patient would search for your practice. They’re going to search dentist near me, or they’re going to search dentist in a city or a town. Right? They’re going to search for something that’s near them. So, me where I’m in Draper, I may search dentist near me, but I also might search dentist in Draper, Utah. Right? So when I did those searches, that same practice came up seven times out of the eight searches. And all the other practices, the other four, the ones that are the closest to me, didn’t show up at all.

Adrian Lefler (22:30):
Okay? So, we have this one practice here that’s twice the distance from the other practices and they show up 11 times in those 16 different search phrases that I did. And only one of the practices shows up once. Okay? So, let’s talk about how this happens and why and so forth. And then I’ll explain a little bit about the value. What does it mean in terms of dollar bills to show up and rank in that map at a wider radius than somebody else. Okay? If you have any questions, you can chat them into the chat thing there and I’ll get them at the end of the webinar. Okay? So, if you have questions, I’m going to… What I’ve talked about so far is kind of a setup. Now, we’re going to go in and we’re going to describe how you can actually see how well your practice is ranking and then I’ll run some reports for you if you’d like. So, this practice, VP Dental, Cosmetic and Family Dentistry, they’re a client of ours and they are down in Raleigh, just north Raleigh, just outside of the city.

Adrian Lefler (23:42):
And I’m going to show you an example of how this whole thing really shakes out. All right. If I… So, the little red pin right in the center, that is the location of the practice. Okay? They’re at that pinpoint. If I am staying about a half a mile west of their practice, where this lady is right here, and I do a search for the word dentist, that’s the search phrase that I used. And I look at the Google Map and I count down in the Google Map the listings till I find VP Dental listing, they’re number two. They’re the second listing. Okay? If I go a half a mile kind of northeast, and I’m standing where this gentleman is standing here and I do the same search, just dentist. There’re 13th. Okay? So why is that? Why is it that if you go a half a mile away from the practice in any given direction, you’re not ranking in the same place, you’re actually ranking worse or better in different locations. Okay?

Adrian Lefler (24:59):
This has to do with the way in which your list sting is optimized for the towns and the neighborhoods around your practice, as well as your website and how it’s ranking and the competition in the area. Okay? So what we do to try and get a better picture of where a practice is ranking, because you can’t do stand in your office and pull your phone out and do a search, dentist near me, because if you’re standing in your office and you search dentists near me, you’d better be at the top of the list. Right? Because you’re literally in the practice. Google would see that as a consumer searching for a close practice. And if they’re in your office, you should be ranking number one. Right? But if you start moving around the ranking shifts… So what we do, is I’ve moved these two images of the woman and the man. I’ve kind of moved them off. And what this is called, this is a Google Maps ranking report. Okay?

Adrian Lefler (26:12):
And what we do, is we take the practice latitude and longitude, and they’re right at the center. So, where my cursor’s at, that two right there in the center, that’s where their practice is located. Okay? If you plug in, we have a piece of software that allows us to basically tell Google, “I’m standing at that location.” We get the latitude and the longitude and we tell Google, we’re standing at this location and we’re searching the word dentist. And then we count down to see where their listing is at. And that’s how we get the number. So you can see it’s not a clear circle. Every time you run one of these reports, they’re always a little funky. They’re not in an exact circle. They adjust according to the pressure of competition and the density of the population, a whole bunch of stuff. But what this would tell you, is if you were Valerie Preston, the doctor for VP Dental, you would go, “Oh, okay, well, I’m only ranking for the word dentist in about a half a mile radius around my practice, at least on the front page.”

Adrian Lefler (27:25):
As soon as you jump from one, two, three, those are the only… These five little buttons here. If you’re driving right around those areas and you’re searching the dentist, she’s going to show up there. Right? But as soon as you get further and further away, you can see how she starts dropping in the ranking for the key word dentist. So, the question is, what do you do? How do you affect this so that you’re ranking on the front page at a wide radius? Hopefully this make sense. Okay? So here is… That’s actually the same graphic. This is still for dentist. This one is for dental implants. Okay? So you can see it’s a totally different, same practice, it’s VP Dental, dental implants is the phrase. And we ran it and they don’t rank anywhere on the front page for dental implants. Okay? So this grid, I’ve looked at thousands of these. When something looks like this, this means that this listing is not optimized really well for it. You should rank kind of on the front page somewhere right around your practice. It makes sense.

Adrian Lefler (28:51):
But this is an example of Google doesn’t see this listing as relevant at all to the keyword dental implants, but she offers dental implants. So, kind of a bummer. Because even if you’re standing right outside of her practice and you search dental implants near me, she’s not on the front page. So she needs some help. Now, when we started working with her, she wanted to rank for cosmetic dentist. That was the key that she wanted to go after. And the way that we set up the campaign with her was to go after one keyword at a time. So, this is what happened over time. This took quite a while. It doesn’t happen overnight, it took several months, almost a year I believe. But we basically got her to rank for the keyword cosmetic dentist all over her around her area. Now what this tells you is the kind of the opportunity of optimization for a particular keyword.

Adrian Lefler (29:56):
If you can rank like this for cosmetic dentist, you could probably get her to rank like that for another phrase like family dentist or dentistry or dental office or something like that. So, anyway, that’s kind of what the opportunity is and you can kind of relate that to other keywords. Now, just… I don’t remember if I mentioned this, but let me just give you some geographical… These are all a half a mile. Oh, I did mention that. I did. These are all a half a mile apart. So this radius is about a three and a half to four mile, four in the corners radius around the practice. Okay? All right. Thanks. But what does this mean for my practice? So what I’m going to do, I’m going to show you three case studies of practices that we worked with them, we did the optimization, we basically got into their Google My Business accounts and began optimizing and so forth. And this is what happened. So this is Shady Grove Pediatric Dentistry, and she in Rockville, Maryland.

Adrian Lefler (31:05):
So, on the left or I should start up here. So this is… The keyword is children’s dentist. That’s the keyword with an apostrophe of the S. Okay? On day one, we ran the report and you can see here, if it’s the one… She’s ranked… Her practices dropped at number three right there in the center. She’s ranking on the front page in about a half a mile radius. She drops off the front page at about a mile, but you can see how she’s… Versus that other graph I just showed you where it dropped straight to red, it was 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, at 20 we just put a white X in there. That’s why those… Let me go back here. These white Xes, this just means that they’re at least 20 listings or more deep in the map at that point. Okay? So, she’s not… This is actually a really good example of somebody that we could probably optimize pretty quick, because she doesn’t drop off of the map so fast.

Adrian Lefler (32:18):
You can see at the corners here, she’s 8, 11, 14, 9. And so, it’s kind of like, she’s not as far off, the further you get away is that other graph. Okay? So after the optimization, we came back in 90 days and you can see, it starts to make a huge impression. Right? She’s got rankings all on the front page, all the way up here, which is almost three and a half miles away and so forth. And then after another three months, about six months in, this is what it looked like. Now, I’ve written in here. Seven, if you notice the title at the bottom here, Seven in Google 3-Pack, 102, 116. That’s just the number of points that are at one, two or three, which means… And that’s kind of how we, when we look at this, we kind of measure the effectiveness of the optimization by counting how many points they’re at, they’re on the front page or not. Okay? So you can see it’s obviously super helpful.

Adrian Lefler (33:24):
This was the other keyword that we went after, pediatric dentist. She’s a pediatric dentist. So it makes sense for us to do that. On the first day there was 41. So she was ranking better for this. After 90 days, she’s at 108, after six months, she’s at 110. Now, one thing you can notice is that after three months to six months, there wasn’t a lot more improvement. You see at, at three months, she’s 108 nodes on the front page, three more months, she’s at 110. So, she’s only gained another two, but in the first three months she gained 60 or so. 65 or six or something. Right? What that shows you is that you’re kind of hitting the limit of optimization for that particular keyword. It doesn’t mean you stop, you have to keep doing stuff because you’ll lose your rankings, but you don’t have to put all your effort into it.

Adrian Lefler (34:25):
So it’s just a little kind of pro tip there. I’m going to show you this video. So this is best pediatric dentist for Shady Grove. And I’ve basically taken the grid from each month and I’ve layered them over the top of each other, and I’ve made a little video and I’m going to play it for you really quick. I’m going to let it run a couple times so you can see kind of what happens. So, that’s what we begin with. See how it kind of bounces around? It’s not uniform. I’ve seen one start and we get a whole bunch of green and it bounces back because we lose a bunch of green points and then we have to go back in and re-optimize. These bounce around a lot. But that’s kind of a cool way to kind of see what happens when you start doing some optimization on your Google My Business account.

Adrian Lefler (35:21):
All right. So what does this mean for of practice? So three months prior, so this is the three months before she started working and doing the optimization versus the last three months that we were doing the optimization. So, these are organic views. This is how many times somebody did a search and saw her practice in the listing. And it’s not the Google Maps listing, it’s the listings below the map. Okay? So, so even though when you do the optimization on your Google My business account, even though you’re not focusing on organic and the website rankings, you get a benefit for it. Right? So you can see it went up 340%. Okay? That’s these listings down here. Google maps views went up 242%. So this is how many times she showed up on this front page of Google for a search phrase, whatever search phrase it might have been. All these statistics are in your Google My Business account. You can get these from anywhere.

Adrian Lefler (36:39):
So this is when she showed up here in this section for somebody. Google tracks all this for you. There are website visits. So, if you’ve used the maps before, there’s a link in the listing to the website. And people will click on that and Google tracks it. It’ll say how many people clicked the link in your Google Maps app or from a desktop. So she went from 190 visits to 374. That’s this little website link here. It’s different on your mobile phone and then calls because there’s a click to call button as well, went up from 79 in three months to 122. Okay. So, and that’s that little call button there on your mobile phone. There’s not a call button on the desktop. It’s only on mobile. Okay. So she, I called her and this is what she said. She says I’m, I’m, I’m receiving so many new patient phone calls from Google maps that I’m hiring a second hygienist that love this. Okay. So she didn’t give me an exact dollar figure for the additional revenue, but you know how many hygienists in a pediatric world, you should probably know better than me.

Adrian Lefler (38:00):
How many hygienists you need to manage your current patient flow. And she had to go hire another one. I think she, she did pretty well. I’m going to show you one more example here and I’m going to go a little quicker through it so that we don’t another case study and then I’ll take some questions. So, this is VP Dental. This is the other, this is example I used earlier on, but I’m going to go into a little more detail. So, this is the word family dentist, not cosmetic dentist like I showed you before. She wasn’t on the map anywhere on day one. On day 60, she had five nodes and then by day 90 she had eight. And she’s gone up by… We’ve actually been working with her for about a year now and it’s even higher now. I probably need to update the slide. But this is… Oh, actually no, I did it here. Let me show you this grid again, this map again. So, this is like the first year, all the monthly listings.

Adrian Lefler (39:03):
I ran actually quite a few of these as I watched it kind of grow over time. You can see it. It built quite a bit. Right? Now took several months. So you kind of see how it works. Anyway. Now, what did that mean? She tracks all of her new patients and she tracked them if they came from Google Maps. So it wasn’t just, “Hey, how did you find us?” “Oh, I found you on Google.” No. She was asking her new patients, “Did you find us through Google Maps?” And if they said, yes, she tallied it. And she’s been doing that for years. And so the average monthly patients that she had prior to doing the optimization, she had about 10 a month. And she went up to average 19, that was for three months straight. She had 19 new patients from Google Maps.

Adrian Lefler (39:57):
So you can see, these are patients that scheduled and came in. And then her monthly revenue from those patients was about 7,500 bucks a month. Okay? “Within a few months we doubled our new patients.” This is what she told me. “We’ve tried so many different SEO services, but this is the first service where I actually see new patients. I highly recommend Google Map SEO to any practice looking to grow. We would not be where we’re at without you.” Now, I have other examples of endodontic examples. I’ve got a whole bunch of case studies that kind of go into detail on this, but I’m going to jump to the end here and take some questions. So, I’ve been referencing how to do the optimization, but not going into detail. And frankly, there’s just so much around. I can’t can’t do it in 45 minutes. But I have some recorded webinars that actually will tell you how to begin doing it. Okay? It’ll give you the first 10 steps.

Adrian Lefler (40:56):
I will email that recorded webinar to Gabriel and Maxwell. And you guys can send it out if you guys want to watch that, where we actually lay it out. Okay? I’ll do is, it would be nice for you to find out how you’re ranking for certain keywords. So, I’m happy to do this for free, I’ll run somewhere reports. They take a few hours to run, but I’ll do it. And if you guys would like that, if you could just tell me your practice name, the phrases you want to go after and how to get a ahold of you, I’ll run the reports and they have somebody from our sales and marketing team, shoot them out to you and follow up. And the way I can do that is if you… I’ve got this QR code, if you hold your phone up to the screen right here, it’ll give you… And to open up your camera, it’ll put you on a link.

Adrian Lefler (42:02):
You can go to that link and it’s going to look like that phone image right there. Request free Google Maps ranking report, click start, it’ll ask for four or five pieces of data so we can reach out to you and then we’ll run the reports. And it’ll probably take us at least until tomorrow, maybe Friday to get them to you. But why don’t you give us at least a couple phrases that we can run. You can kind of see how you’re ranking, which neighborhoods around your practice you’re ranking in which ones you’re not. And then when you get into actual optimization, you’ll know a little bit better where to start. Okay? All right. So, I’m going to leave this QR code up here for a second and I will take some questions. Gabriel, do you want me to stop the screen share at this point?

Gabriel (42:59):
It’s up to you? Yes. There’s… Yeah.

Adrian Lefler (43:02):
I can leave it on though and we can just do the questions.

Maxwell (43:05):
Yeah. I think we should leave it on so we can have your QR code remaining out there for now.

Adrian Lefler (43:09):
Okay. I’m happy to take any questions. Did you guys get any?

Maxwell (43:15):
Yeah. So, let’s start with the one that we have in the chat. Once your Google Maps is optimized and helps you rank higher, how often do they need to be optimized? As in, how long do you need to stand to date with these things? Is it necessary to do both Google Maps SEO, and SEO within our own site to rank higher as well too?

Adrian Lefler (43:36):
Okay, good que… There’s like two questions in there and I’ll answer both. So, one question is after you’ve done the optimization, does it stick and do you need to keep kind of doing it? And then the second question is what’s the relationship between the Google Maps listing and your website and the optimization on your website. So, let me handle the first one first. So, I have noticed that if you start the optimization and you put maybe six to nine months of time into it. Now, when we do the optimization, we’re probably putting in five to 10 hours of optimization time in a month. It’s typical. Okay? And when I send you the webinar that shows you kind of what to do, you’ll see what I’m talking about, but it’s basically getting into the listing and adding information, you’re adding services, you’re making sure all your information’s correct.

Adrian Lefler (44:34):
There’s a linking strategy. And I go through a lot of that. Okay? What happens is if you stop doing it, I see the listing results taper off. It’s not quick though. It seems like to me over several months, you’ll just kind of see yourself kind of fall off and as other people, other practices are continuing their optimization. So, my opinion and what I’ve seen is that you get a quicker bump on the beginning, and it’s a slow taper off if you stop doing it. Okay? Now, in regards to the website versus the listing, the reason that we call this Google Maps SEO, and we’re kind of talking about it the way that we do, is because the actual optimization tactics is a tactic of linking the Google My Business account. You can actually get a link for it. And sharing it on your website and vice versa, and also getting links to the Google My Business account, but then relating it to the website.

Adrian Lefler (45:41):
So the issue here is that Google’s not just… They’re not just looking at the Google My business account. They’re looking at all of your online assets. Your website first, your social media accounts, anything else you’ve got online and how it relates to the Google My Business account. But what most people and businesses just generally don’t know, is they don’t even know how to create that linking structure. So when Google looks online and they see your listing and they see your website and there’s one link from your Google My business account to your website and there’s nothing else, versus somebody who has 50 blog posts and all of them have links to the Google My Business account and you can post on your Google My Business account, you can actually post like a blog. You can do that. It’s one of the things you do, you can link back to your website. When they start seeing all these links and you start getting hundreds of them, all of a sudden the linking structure strength rises across the board.

Adrian Lefler (46:45):
So you can’t do one or the other, you have to do them both, but the strategy is you can’t just do the website optimization, which is what most SEO companies do nowadays, or they’re not familiar… At least my experience is that most people are not familiar. Even marketing gurus aren’t really familiar with how to optimize the Google My Business account. So, you do them both together. And that’s what creates the uptick in the Google Maps rankings. Hopefully that answers your question.

Maxwell (47:19):
That was a very insightful answer. I appreciate you for that. Thank you. Our next question. Does optimizing the map require always… Does it always require the help of an expert or is there one that we can do ourselves?

Adrian Lefler (47:32):
No, you could totally do it yourself. It’s just frankly, a pain in the. It like takes forever. So, the webinar that I se that I’ll send to Gabriel and Maxwell, when you watch that, it’ll basically show you what you need to do. And the one that I’ll send you is the first 10 optimization tactics that you can do. And a lot of these are kind of one time things. I’ll give you an example. Let me just… I’m going to pull something up really quick. I’m going to show you… How much time do we got? We got about five minutes.

Maxwell (48:18):
You have more than five minutes actually. It’s 4:50 right now, we have until 5:00 PM. Yeah, we’re good on time.

Adrian Lefler (48:24):
So, let me show you what a listing looks like. So, this is my brother-in-law. He’s an orthopedic surgeon and I’m helping him out just on the side with this. So, I’ve logged into his Google My Business account. This is what it looks like when you log in. Okay?

Maxwell (48:41):
Can you show a picture? I believe we cannot see the share yet. We still see the presentation so far.

Adrian Lefler (48:48):
Oh my God. Hold on. Hold on. I got to bring it to the [inaudible 00:48:51]. So let’s see. Oh, I got to close out this other one. Can you guys see it now? Nope. Hold on one sec. Share screen. Okay. Can you see it now? Now. Oh my gosh, it’s stuck.

Maxwell (49:13):
There we go.

Adrian Lefler (49:14):
Now? Okay. Sorry guys. It was stuck.

Maxwell (49:17):
No problem. Thank you.

Adrian Lefler (49:18):
I need to stretch that. Okay. So, I’m in the back end of a Google My Business account. This is the admin portal. Okay? Let me bounce this up a little bit. Make it bigger. So you can see the name here. Garrett Davis. That’s my brother-in-law. If you go into the info tab, and I talk about this on that other webinar, what you’ll find is you’ll find all the basic information for your listing. Okay? The name, the primary category. He’s an orthopedic surgeon, your address, your service areas, services, your website link, down here all the services. Okay? So when you get in here, if you’ve not done this before, I have not found one dental practice yet that has filled out all the service areas. Google allows you to in here, put in up to 20 service areas. Now, why would they do that?

Adrian Lefler (50:21):
They do that because they know that a business sources consumers patients from more than just one city or one town or one neighborhood. So, you can go in here and you can list up to 20. But every single practice I’ve looked… Every Google My Business listening I’ve looked at, there’s just one area. The main area that they’re in. But what have happens is if you have Sundance, Utah listed in Daniel, Utah, and [inaudible 00:50:53] are likely to show up in those area… When people are searching for that area or from that area. So this is a one time optimization thing, just go in there and get all the towns and so forth. Now, the kicker with this, is that grid report that I will run. If you look at the grid report and you look where you’re not ranking, not like clearing the hell out away from your practice, but right around the edge of where you’re falling off the map, those are the towns or the areas that you want to put in the service area.

Adrian Lefler (51:27):
Okay? So, because you’re not trying to rank 10 miles away right now, you’re just trying to expand the circle of influence in that Google report. So that’s why that Google report’s so helpful. Is because it tells you where you’re not ranking. And if there’s a particular neighborhood you’re going for, you want to put that in here if it’s kind of right on the edge. So to get back to your question, there are things like that, that are simple things. It might take you an hour to go in and do that and you’re done. You don’t have to go back in and change it. Okay? But there’s also posts right here. And posting is a big deal. Posting is like posting graphics, videos on an ongoing basis. And there’s a link strategy to it. So you have to write new copy, you have to get images, you got to shoot videos and post them and then link them to your website and your blog articles and so forth.

Adrian Lefler (52:22):
And that becomes… And you got to do a lot of it and it’s a pain. So, going back to your question, can you do it on your own? You can, just it takes time and time we all know like nobody’s got any time in the dental industry right now, at least the dentist don’t. So, yes and no. So, you can do it, you can do it until you’re like blue in the face and then you can hire somebody or maybe you enjoy it, maybe enjoy it. And if you do, call me, because we’re looking for some employees. So anyway, hopefully that helps.

Maxwell (53:00):
Awesome. Thank you for sharing. Another question that we have coming in. If there was one thing within SEO and Google’s algorithm as a whole that we need to remember for the rest of our working days, what is that topic key term or subject?

Adrian Lefler (53:18):
Well, there’s a few ways I could answer this. So, if you’re talking about just a general optimization tactic, I would say the key is there’s two things, it’s linking and custom content. Okay? So getting more links pointing to your website. So, getting a link at the ADA website somewhere linking to your site or a local business mentioning you online somehow. Right? A link and then new custom content. Those two things are most important part of SEO. And that has to do with your website as well as your Google My Business account. If there’s one thing that’s like a tactic for Google My Business, I’ll show you. So this right here is called your primary category. You can still see my screen, right? Yeah? Okay. So right here, right at the top, right underneath your name is something called your primary category.

Adrian Lefler (54:25):
And Google allows you to pull in your primary category and additional categories. Okay? When I’ve gone in here, I have seen practices list. These are choices that Google gives you. You don’t make them up. You have to search… Like here, I’ll just show you. I’m going to add another category and I’m going to search dentist. See, I have to choose from dentist, pediatric dentist, cosmetic dentist, dental insurance agency, so on and so forth. Okay? So you choose from Google’s list of what your category is. And what I’ve seen with a lot of practices, is there’s an option for dental clinic. So you can list yourself as a dentist or a dental clinic. And who of a consumer, which consumers are searching dental clinic compared to dentist? It’s like a hundred to one, or probably even bigger than that. So what I’ve got in here, sometimes I see people listed as dental clinic, they don’t rank for dentist, they rank for dental clinic, but nobody’s searching it.

Adrian Lefler (55:36):
So I would say one key tactic is get in here and make sure your primary category is the service that you are. Dentist, orthodontist, endodontist, periodontist, whatever it might be. And then I would say add one to possibly two additional categories, but probably no more than that. You can at least… I think you can list up to 12. But what I’ve done is… Actually when I started doing this optimization, I put in as many as I could thinking that more is better, but what ends up happening is Google doesn’t know what you’re really serious about, and you don’t rank for anything really well at all. So, you want to stick to what you are.

Adrian Lefler (56:18):
So a lot of dentists will put dentists as their primary category and if they offer Invisalign or ortho treatment, they’ll put orthodontist as an additional category. And if they offer dental implants, there’s a dental implant provider option, you’ll have dental implant provider as a third, or if you’re an orthodontist, usually orthodontists unless you have an associate, then you probably just want to stick with orthodontists. So, anyway, that’s probably a tactic that I would say is a really important one, probably one of the most important because your primary category has a lot to do with what you write.