by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Have you taken over a dental practice recently? Don’t do this!

Some years ago I wrote about how successful marketing often falls apart when a dental corporate takes over a local practice. What I discussed back then was primarily about how corporates often “knee jerk” into consolidating practice websites into a single corporate website resulting in a huge loss of Google rankings and new patient enquiries. Some of them have learned from their mistakes although this still goes on unfortunately.

Today’s blog is in a similar vein but the outcome was potentially even worse; I’ll explain more in a moment. This is important in that it not only serves as guidance for corporates, but also for practice principals who are working out their retainer period and who are potentially still subject to performance objectives. If the corporate messes up the marketing, it’s going to be difficult to deliver on those objectives.

Background

My company, Dental Media worked with a dentist for many years, helping to build her practice from a squat through to a highly profitable multi-surgery general, specialist and implant practice. To ensure top Google rankings and to maximise patient enquiries from the web, we built three separate websites representing key areas of her business. These sites were optimised over the years so that they all reached top Google positions in what is a competitive city location. Returns were excellent, consistent and helped underpin the success of the practice.

In addition to the websites and Google SEO, we also ran a range of paid ad campaigns to extend the reach of the practice and further maximise potential. These campaigns were also very successful.

More recently, a corporate approached the dentist and subsequently purchased the practice, keeping the principal on for a period of time as is fairly usual these days.

Initially we were introduce and advised that the marketing we’d always assisted with would continue unchanged, however this lasted no more than a couple of months before the corporates own marketing team decided to get involved. What happened over the following three months effectively destroyed the success that had patiently been built up over many years.

The corporate marketing decision

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Dental SEO companies will try to scare you with invalid claims about your website – be cautious.

Today’s blog discusses how some dental marketing companies are approaching dentists using ‘scary’ website audit reports in an attempt to gain business. Unfortunately this is a very questionable tactic and uses somewhat “sneaky” methods to confuse the layperson into believing their website is poor.

Let’s jump in and take a look so you know what to do if the same thing happens to you.

Two clients recently contacted us to advise that they’d received reports highlighting failings with their websites. In both cases this was an unsolicited approach from another dental marketing company where a “detailed” website audit report had been presented to try to establish an initial dialogue. Of course the eventual goal was to sell optimisation services i.e. SEO or even a new website.

We requested copies of the audit reports and quickly established that they were derived using automated SEO tools – both looked impressive to the layperson but were hugely inaccurate. Of the twenty or so “important” website issues highlighted, over 15 of them were either incorrect or irrelevant with the remainder only marginally useful.

Fortunately the clients contacted us to get an explanation rather than simply hire the company to fix a bunch of trivial issues which would have little or no impact on their Google positions.

Automated SEO audit reports – why you should be skeptical.

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Big budgets and pre-qualifying leads become the norm.

The pace of change with Meta paid ads, particularly in the Invisalign and implants sector, continues to be extremely rapid. As I explained in an earlier blog just a few months ago, this has been stimulated by huge competition not just from dentists, but also among the agencies supplying the ad services.

Over the last couple of years we’ve seen agencies having to up the ante considerably in an effort to keep pace with the rapid changes. In the not too distant past, agencies were offering ‘20 leads per month’ and little else, but things have changed considerably. We now see promises of hundreds of leads per month together with pre-qualification and booking directly into the dentist’s appointment system. We’ve even seen agencies offering to pay the dentist if the leads don’t come to fruition in terms of new treatment. These changes are all indicative of an element of saturation and desperation by agencies trying to stay ahead.

But there is another set of changes coming to the fore which again is indicative of the lengths Meta ads practitioners are having to go to, to squeeze acceptable returns from Facebook and Instagram advertising.

The latest dental agency Meta ads trends

This is a summary of how the ads market is shaping up in late summer of 2025:

  • “hands off” promises – i.e. the agency does all the work including pre-qualification and booking of leads
  • more leads generated (but many of them very speculative)
  • pre-qualifying questions in use at the point of contact to “weed out” speculative enquiries
  • much larger daily budgets required

Why are we seeing these latest changes and are they all sustainable?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

A cautionary tale for dentists – don’t make this mistake.

Are you running Facebook/Instagram ad campaigns for your dental practice, or perhaps more importantly, is an agency running these on your behalf? If so, then this blog has some important security information for you.

A few weeks ago, one of our long-term clients had their Facebook (Meta) ads manager account hacked. The hackers waited until the early hours of the morning and then increased the daily spend limit of the account to £15,000. They then very quickly published scam adverts and churned these out to tens of thousands of unsuspecting users – all paid for by the client’s credit card! It was 8am the following morning before the hack was spotted but by this stage, thousands of pounds of the client’s money had been spent.

This is a “churn and burn” attack i.e. the hackers know that it will likely be spotted quickly but by accessing overnight, they can still push out lots of spam ads and spend a lot of money before it gets closed down – very dangerous. Their ads purported to sell personal medical devices which very likely didn’t get delivered to the folks who clicked the ads and paid for them. This was a clever scam, but at the same time appalling. Unfortunately the hackers were able to access the top-level client’s account where there are no controls on the daily click budget – so they could simply change it to whatever they wanted.

What happened – how did the hackers get in?

Our client couldn’t understand how the hackers got in as they use two-factor-authentication (2FA) – and we do too. So in theory this should not have been possible. We are linked to the client’s account to facilitate the administration of the ads, however we are extremely cautious and we knew that the hack hadn’t come via ourselves. This meant that the hack either came via the client (they were adamant that it hadn’t) or something else. It didn’t take us long to see what had gone wrong.

Access from a third-party agency

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

What you need to know before jumping in.

As a dentist reading this blog, you may already have dipped into social media ads? There’s a chance that it worked well for you but also the strong possibility that it didn’t. Unfortunately, social ad campaigns that don’t work as well as expected are becoming more and more common, so what’s going wrong? In this blog we’ll take a look at what’s changed, together with what you need to do to give yourself the best chances of success when advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

Before looking at specifics, it’s worth noting the changing way that marketing agencies are advertising their own services via social media as this gives a good clue as to what’s going on. A couple of years ago, marketers were running their own basic ads that typically offered “twenty leads per month” and little else. As things got harder, it quickly became 30 leads per month, then 40 and so on. Then around a year ago, marketers started to offer to work for free if they didn’t meet the pre-agreed number of leads delivered.

Now we not only see that, but also lead-qualification services where the agency filters the leads, essentially working for the dentist. I’m even seeing the so-called leading Invisalign marketer offering free services – that evolution is a really good indicator of how things are changing and how everyone is trying to compete, supplier and dentist.

Of course what you also need to understand, particularly as the marketing companies try to avoid mentioning it, is that you need a big daily budget to make any of it happen. Unfortunately the leads from social media ads can be quite speculative, with a high proportion coming to nothing. So for the marketer to achieve the objective, lots and lots of leads have to be generated – hence the ever increasing budgets. I draw the analogy of panning for gold; while there are golden nuggets to be had, there’s a lot of rubbish to be filtered through first.

So what’s driven these significant changes in a relatively short space of time and made the social ads space trickier to navigate and get good returns?

Increasing competition

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

So you want prominence in Google but don’t know how or when to start?

Most people would agree that getting your dental practice website prominent in Google is important but just how important is perhaps less-well understood. To help understand a little better, let’s take a quick look at typical visitor statistics for websites in different positions on page one of the Google search index:

  • Position 1 – 32% of traffic
  • Position 2 – 24% of traffic
  • Position 3 – 18% of traffic
  • Position 10 (traditionally bottom pf page one) – 2.5% of traffic

Traffic drops away progressively as you fall below half way and then peters out to very little at all as you move on to page 2 of the search results. You’ve probably heard that it’s pretty pointless having a website on page 2 of Google and it’s not wrong – languishing back there means that very few folk are going to find you from a Google search unfortunately.

Of course there are other ways to get traffic to your website but most of the viable alternatives to a “traditional” Google search involve paying – either ads on Google, social media or both.

Hopefully the data above serves to illustrate just how important good search rankings are for any business, not just dentists. We also know from our SEO work with lots of dental clients, that their fortunes in terms of new patient acquisition improve hugely as their websites climb up page one. Similarly we see the opposite effect when clients gain prominence but then decide that the “job is done”, stop their SEO and slide back down the rankings.

Suffice to say then, that prominent search ranking positions are extremely important indeed.

When should a dentist start SEO for their website?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Content

Here’s why it’s lazy and a bad idea….

Along with most of us, you’ve probably marveled at the capability of AI and how it can effortlessly generate text, images and even video from just a few simple commands. Extremely useful right? Well no doubt AI has some very handy applications and is great for making some routine tasks very simple, but there are other areas where its use can be unexpectedly problematic – one of these is generating content for a dental website or blog. So why is this? Let’s jump in and take a closer look.

Why is AI content bad for your website or dental blog?

On the face of it, using the wonders of AI to generate lots of content for your website certainly sounds compelling and a great idea. After all, search engine optimisers often tell us how great content can bring lots of website visits and help to propel us up the Google rankings – so easy peasy then? Well, unfortunately not and the main reason why it’s not, is down to Google.

Google’s main aim is to return the best answers for questions that users ask when using their search engine and they do this by surfacing web content which achieves that in search results. For example, the dental websites which they consider to be the most useful and authoritative are typically promoted to the top of the ranking results and hence get lots of traffic for their owners.

In an effort to differentiate good websites from poorer ones, Google has developed and finely tuned algorithms to index and “understand” website content so that it can be best matched to user’s search queries. As part of this incremental algorithm development over the years, Google has become extremely adept at recognising unique, compelling content and promoting it, while at the same time relegating poorer content.

You can probably see the issue here? If everyone is using AI to generate content and then publishing it on their websites, how is Google ever going to determine which of it is actually worthy of being top of the web rankings – it’s not even unique in the truest sense of the word. So we can see why they are skeptical about AI content and taking a stand to relegate it where it’s found.

A new challenge for SEO

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Google Analytics

Using Google Analytics for comprehensive conversion capture and analysis.

Are you in the dark when it comes to fully understanding how your dental practice website is performing? Perhaps you’ve installed Google Analytics to get an idea of how much traffic the website receives but other than that, you’re unsure how many enquiries were generated and from what source?

This is a picture we see all too often when dentists approach us for advice about making best use of their website. Many of them have had a website built but then been left in the dark about how it performs. In an effort to get some insights they often have a member of the reception team trying to record enquiries on a spreadsheet, checking to see where an email came from or asking patients on the ‘phone how they found the practice. As you probably realise, this is very inaccurate and simply not good enough to get a clear understanding of how your website is performing.

How then, do we help dentists track website users? Even more importantly, did they make an enquiry and what mechanism did they use – ‘phone call, contact form, chatbot or WhatsApp?

Without this knowledge, you can’t measure your website’s performance and consequently you can’t manage it.

First let’s take a look at Google Analytics and how it can be used to provide a holistic performance assessment of your dental website.

Google Analytics

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Paid Ads

How dental paid ads on Facebook and Instagram are likely to be affected.

In January 2025, Meta started the roll-out of data sharing restrictions to certain categories of websites. We already know that this includes dental websites and so will have some impact on dentists who rely on the Facebook website pixel to gather data for optimising Facebook ads for example.

These new restrictions are primarily around the prevention of unauthorized data sharing, an area where Meta already has somewhat of a chequered history and been subject to lawsuits and fines. So it certainly looks like Meta is now implementing quite stringent actions to try to stay compliant with the legislation and keep out of trouble.

What do we know so far?

To begin with, Meta is placing organisations into specific categories e.g. Health and Wellness and further into sub-categories like “provider” or “patient portal”. This determination is made based on the type of information you’re already sharing with Meta e.g. from your website or perhaps an app.

Meta is then looking to restrict certain “events”, for example those recorded via its data pixel. How your dental website is categorised will dictate which events will be restricted and subsequently not be shared back to Meta. This will then be unavailable to help optimise ad campaigns.

We already know that dental websites have been placed in the Health and Wellness category and we’re also seeing indications of inclusion in the “patient portal” category.

What does this mean for dental advertisers?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in pay per click

Why Google Ads for dentists make sense.

Many of our dental marketing clients run Google Ads, also known as pay-per-click (PPC), alongside their search engine optimisation and social media campaigns. For those dentists who may still be skeptical about PPC, perhaps worried about the cost, in today’s blog I’ll explain why PPC is important and also very effective when done well. Hopefully this will give some confidence that it’s a promotional channel well-worth investigating in the new year ahead.

First let’s have a short recap about what PPC is and then how you can use it to your advantage.

Google Ads – how they work

If you use Google, and who doesn’t these days, you’ll very likely have seen the three or four results at the top of the page which advertise various products and services, including dentistry. These ads are typically very prominent and look very much like the traditional organic (non-paid) results. What is very important to know is that around 30% of all traffic from Google now results from clicks on ads.

In basic terms, Google Ads are a form of auction whereby the advertiser bids on clicks – so every time someone clicks your ad, you pay a sum of money to Google. The more you bid for clicks, typically the higher up and hence more prominent your ad appears in the Google results. There are actually quite a few more factors in play, not just your click bid, but in principle you can consider that Google Ads is an auction of the type just described.

When a user clicks on your ad, they will be taken to your landing page (an optimised page specific to the treatment you are advertising) or a selected page on your website. Alternatively you can also deploy your ads with call assets attached, so people call you directly from the ad instead.

Understandably, competition plays a big part in Google Ads bidding and treatments such as implants and Invisalign tend to attract higher click bids than other treatments. This should be kept in mind when starting an ads campaign and factored into the return-on-investment calculations. Seasoned PPC practitioners such as the team here at Dental Media, will be able to advise.

So now we know a little bit more about what Google Ads actually are, let’s consider how and when a dentist might use them to bring new patient enquiries to the practice.

When should dentists consider using Google Ads?

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