Even the best-designed website will only help a company if it brings in visitors who become customers (in this case, patients for a dental practice). Web pages won’t matter if they don’t appear on the first page of a Google search!
In this article, I’ll discuss why 90% of web pages do not get Google traffic and how this can be turned around with the right strategies.
Why don’t 90 percent of web pages, including those of dental practices, get zero free traffic (SEO or other kinds of organic traffic) from Google?
Google made $209 billion in the fiscal year 2021, and they made all that money from Google Ads. Comparing that statistic with the GDP of many countries, only 56 countries had reported GDP above those figures. This means Google has been more successful than 75 percent of the world’s nations, and we are talking about only some of the Google operations, only about Google Ads. They ensure that 95 percent of business owners don’t get traffic. Google would want those numbers to increase, and one way to do that is to make sure only a few people, less than five percent, get free traffic to their web pages. Google does it to make more money, and who can blame them? That’s capitalism. The other 95 percent of business owners, including dental practices, must give Google billions via Ads. For dentists, that’s still cheaper than offering tens of billions to PPO plans, but it’s expensive when considered the more affordable alternative. The critical point here is, how do we become the five percent of businesses that attract 95 percent of the free traffic?
Five percent of web pages get 95 percent of the free Google traffic. How does a dental practice get into that top five percent?
Both Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were Ph.D. students from Stanford. They both had academic backgrounds and applied everything in universities to their project. For instance, if you want to get into the best dental school in the country, you must be excellent at everything you do and get ‘A’s for everything – exams, interviews, etc. Whether aiming at MD or DMD, you have to be among the top students in your class. The same theory applies at Google: You need to score ‘A’s in six areas to qualify for that five percent. These are;
- NAP – Name, Address, Phone number consistency
- EAT – Expertise, Authority, Trust
- Quality backlinks – How many web pages on your site have quality links valued by Google, and are those numbers growing?
- Original content – Does it have content that Google might consider essential to send more traffic to?
- Reviews – Do you get ten or more reviews that read like love letters every month, where people specifically refer to your services?
- A high value in Google Lighthouse Score
If you earn an A under all these points, you will make that five percent. However, you will have to work hard to get there. Otherwise, you will have to spend billions – tens of thousands of dollars per dental practice – on Google Ads.
What common mistakes do dental practices make that keep them stuck in the bottom 90 percent of Google with little to no traffic?
The number one mistake committed by dental practice owners is they need help understanding the dental buyers and how they operate. Ninety percent of buyers go to Google first, type their search terms, and if your website doesn’t appear on the first page, it’s useless even if you have a perfect website. Most businesses, including dental practices, look at websites they admire and try to model theirs on that, but it would only be helpful if they considered the elements that Google looks at. It’s like copying an exam from someone who will get an F.
Disclaimer: Marketing is crucial for attracting and retaining patients; I don’t pretend to be an expert in this part of my dental practice. I have partnered with an expert marketing group, Ekwa Marketing, to handle this. A dedicated team managing your marketing efforts can be a valuable asset to your business. If you have any specific questions or need advice related to marketing, feel free to ask.
About the Author
Dr. Eric Block DMD, CAGS, FICOI, FICD, FAADS
Dr. Eric Block is a full-time practicing dentist in Acton, Massachusetts, husband, and father of two kids. He is known as The Stress-Free Dentist and hosts the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast.