How Dental Marketing is Changing Marketing

Speaker 1 (00:00): I think that every business should start by figuring out how do I create a system where I can reliably and predictably grow by putting dollars into advertising,

Speaker 2 (00:13): Learn modern marketing that you can use to grow your business in today's competitive landscape. This is Digital Marketing Masters with Matt and Carrie Rouse.

Speaker 3 (00:26): Welcome to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm Matt Rouse, your host, and today on our show is Devon Schumacher. Devin, how are you doing? Doing

Speaker 1 (00:34): Good, Matt. Thanks for having me

Speaker 3 (00:36): And thanks for being on the show. Devon is serial entrepreneur who is the co-founder of SER P, which is a business growth consultancy and the parent company, numerous sub-brands, but specifically to help hyper specific segments of businesses. And today we're here to talk a little bit more about dental marketing specifically, but also we're gonna talk a little bit about SEO and some other industry stuff too. So Devon, why don't you tell us a little bit more about SER R and what you guys do?

Speaker 1 (01:02): Absolutely, and I think you can't really have a conversation about dental marketing without talking a little bit about SEO because it all goes hand in hand. So what we do, Ater P Dental, is we help dentists grow their practice. In fact, that's our mission statement. Help dentists grow their practice and have a larger impact on the communities they serve. And we've been doing it for a while now and we have learned a few things along the way that I am looking forward to sharing with the listeners.

Speaker 3 (01:27): Sure. And you know, a lot of times people, they're listening to a podcast and they go, Oh, they're gonna talk about dentists, but you know, I'm a lawyer so I'm gonna like tune out or something. Do not tune out just because you're not a dentist because most of this stuff will work with any service based business or any business that is, you know, a repeat client type business. I find a lot of businesses are similar to dentists in the way that they do, like rebooking clients, re reactivating clients maybe that they haven't seen for a long time. And I know they have specific terms for that stuff in the dental world, but you see a lot of that stuff in things like dog grooming, hairdressers, nail places, like all these are, are are businesses that have clients that come back on on kind of specific intervals. What do you think is kind of the biggest opportunity for dentists that a lot of them are missing right now?

Speaker 1 (02:21): Yeah, you know, it's exactly what you kind of just said and it's that it's the same thing for dentists, that it is for any other business. It's kind of the origin of where we came from and it's that I didn't want to be a marketer when I was getting started in my career, but I had failure after failure of entrepreneurial venture. And the only common thread was that they lacked good marketing. And I eventually started to have to do my own marketing. I was a DJ at the time and more and more music producers and DJs would ask me to help them with their marketing. And the next thing I knew, all I was doing was marketing. So that's kind of where I kind of got this thread. But what it is, is that every business owner, and it applies to dentists too, they have three roles they have to play and that's the subject matter expert.

Speaker 1 (03:05): So for a dentist, you know, you go to med school and you become a subject matter expert, you become a doctor, then you gotta be the business owner and you gotta be the marketer. And I look at the business owner, kind of like the person who has to handle everything from team management to operations, hiring and just knowing the business of dentistry in this case or the business of law or whatever it is. And then the marketer, those principles are gonna apply universally across any type of business. And so what we do and what I encourage, you know, other marketing companies and other business owners to do, is to think about those three pillars, those three roles, and figure out how you can improve each one of them. So for our clients, we actually help them with the business side of dentistry by bringing in dental coaches. And if I had been a dentist myself or if I had run a practice myself, I could advise them on that. And if a marketing agency owner came to me and asked if I could help them on the business side of that, I could do it. But you know, where whatever it is that you're doing, finding a subject matter expert in that area to help fill those three roles is gonna be the key to growing.

Speaker 3 (04:05): And that's interesting talking about the expertise side because in any business, I mean you pretty much need to be the expert in that thing, otherwise people aren't gonna be paying you to do that thing or you shouldn't be a business. But when it comes to running the business, and this comes up in a lot of our shows, is people talking about how much knowledge and effort and time goes into running a business nowadays, just between things like HR and changes in tax law from year to year and changes in, you know, HR related things like holiday pay or sick leave and changes in, in legislation. And then you've got all the things about running your business and you know, leasing and signage and banking and bookkeeping and all the, there's just so much to know and especially in a world where every place that you log into online is changing their interface at least once every six months and it gets more and more difficult to know and do all the things that you have to do. Who has time left to do marketing at the end of the day, Right. It gets tough.

Speaker 1 (05:10): Yeah, that's exactly right. And I found myself doing only marketing and that's why we went into the marketing space. But I think for any business, you know, understanding and, and we use an analogy just internally at our company that, you know, the subject matter expert, the dentist is like the race car driver. The business is like the car and marketing is the fuel. And you can have a high performance vehicle and a well trained driver, but if you don't put the fuel in it, you're just not gonna go anywhere. And we see this all the time. I mean, I guess the most notorious examples are artists where, you know, the best artists of all time, they don't get any recognition until after they die and then someone finds the painting later and knows how to market. Or another good example is there was a book written called Astrological Love I think in 1986 or something like that. Have you heard of it?

Speaker 3 (05:55): I have. I know the story of astrological Love cuz they renamed it.

Speaker 1 (06:00): Yeah. Marketer founded at a thrift store or something like that, renamed the book, bought the rights and just changed the title. And it turned out from a flop to a New York Times bestseller.

Speaker 3 (06:08): Yeah. Went from selling like a hundred copies ever to a New York Times bestseller. Now I can't remember the title of it, it's gonna drive me nuts. I'll, I'll look it up while we're talking so I can bring it up again later states till the end, folks,

Speaker 1 (06:22): How to make women beg for you or something like that. Basically the guy realized that it was a book about seduction and, and picking up women and renamed it. And, and the reason why that's interesting is that what we see when we work with a lot of dentists or business owners is that they have all the pieces, the contents of the book is there, the subject matter expertise is there, they just don't have the marketing. Right. And changing a headline that's marketing, that's knowing how to communicate with your audience, knowing how to speak to their actual desires and pain points, knowing how to talk about benefits rather than services. Nobody wants a comprehensive oral exam and free x-rays. Why would I want that? What am I gonna do with x-rays? Hang 'em on the wall if I don't know what the benefits are surrounding that.

Speaker 1 (07:05): I don't really have any incentive to leave what I'm doing, take three hours outta my day and go to the dentist even if it is free. So when you're running promotions, if you're doing Facebook ads or if you're getting free traffic from seo, understanding the temperature of your traffic and what they actually want and speaking to that is gonna be, you know, one of the biggest advantages that you can do really. And that's, that's really where we see the disconnect is the businesses we work with, they know their stuff when it comes to medical and some of them have the business side handled. If anybody is an entrepreneur or business owner, you know that we never really fully have all your shit together. But you know, there's certain levels of it and a lot of the dentists we work with, they have that kind of dialed. But I think as business owners we fall into this trap of of talking about our expertise and talking about our services and nobody cares. You have to speak to them.

Speaker 3 (07:54): That absolutely true. Anybody anywhere has seen the signs, right? That say free x-rays and $99 cleaning or whatever it is, right? What's kind of a, I mean you don't have to give away all the secret sauce, but what's an example of like an alternate message that a dentist could be using instead of something like free cleaning? Yeah,

Speaker 1 (08:14): I'll give away all the secret sauce. I'll give you two examples. We recently ran an ad for Invisalign that was pretty vanilla. Some dentists, they just, you know, you queue up an ad for them and they're like, no, no, no, change this, change this, change the a and you're like, you know, you signed up for a reason, let us do our thing. But okay, you're the client, right? So we recently ran an ad for Invisalign that was something like a thousand dollars off Invisalign, you know, come in and whatever and the ad, you know, got some leads as they do whatever. They got a sailor two and then the ad fatigued and ad fatigue is basically when an audience is tired of seeing an ad, they've gone blind to the ad, they don't look at it anymore, they're not interested in it. So what we did is we said, All right, now let us do our thing thing and we completely change the pitch from here's a thousand dollars of a thing, a widget that you probably don't really care about that much or maybe you do to just a list of very interesting and engaging statistics and benefits about smiles and charisma.

Speaker 1 (09:10): I don't know exactly what's on the ad, but I can find it for you. But something along the lines of, you know, like 85% of people say that you're more likely to get hired if you have a nice smile or things like that, right? The ad didn't talk anything about Invisalign, it just talked about things that people want. What a dentist customer persona, their buyer persona, what those people want. And the ad absolutely erupted. So that's one thing that you can do is you can figure out who your customer is, who you actually wanna serve and speak to them that way.

Speaker 3 (09:42): Nice. And I've seen an interesting dental ad that it's one of the kind of, one of the more common ones that goes around talking about this kind of example is it's a, a guy with a nice smile, he is wearing a suit and stuff. I think he's on a boat or something and he's holding a picture of himself next to like a shack and one of his teeth are missing when he is smiling and it's just to offset like I was poor and had missing teeth, but now I'm wealthy and have a nice smile. All right? And it doesn't say anything like that but your brain picks up those triggers.

Speaker 1 (10:11): I've seen a good add too that's very similar where it's a guy who's smiling and he is missing a tooth and he is missing an eyebrow. And the headline is like, I bet you didn't notice that this guy's missing an eyebrow until you read this sentence or something like that, right? And everybody he reads it's like, holy sh I think I never noticed that he was missing an eyebrow. And it's like that and it says that's the power of dentistry or that's the power of a nice smile. Be missing an eyebrow and you're not gonna notice if I'm missing a

Speaker 3 (10:35): Tooth, you know, would make a good ad. All right, I think this would make a good ad. Anyway, take a picture of the Mo Lisa and put eyebrows on her but then make one tooth. I don't know if you can see your teeth in it, but anyways, if you can now I'm gonna look just in case. No she's not smiling. Can't see your teeth, forget it. That's not gonna be a good ad , but it was a good idea.

Speaker 1 (10:58): Give her some teeth and say what do you notice that what's different about the Mona Lisa give her eyebrows and teeth and everyone will say teeth, right?

Speaker 3 (11:04): Give her like some odd shaped teeth or something and that would be more like an orthopedic surgeon commercial.

Speaker 1 (11:10): But it's all about, you know, it's, it all comes back to what is, what did the people want, right? It doesn't matter the service or the widget. I mean that's one of the reasons why a lot of these ads and, and the dentists don't get as much growth as they want or any business owner. But the other reason is that when you're running ads or you're running promotions or you're talking to an audience and you're saying here's a thousand dollars off of a thing, you're only talking to a small segment of the population. So statistically about 3% of your market is in buying mode. Like they're ready to buy something. So when you run an ad that says a thousand dollars off Invisalign, of all the people that might want a better smile or might even want Invisalign, only 3% of them are ready to buy.

Speaker 1 (11:51): The next 17% are in information gathering mode. So you can immediately unlock another 17% of the market if you just give them something, right? Help be the person who is delivering them that decision making information. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong is that first they don't know how to communicate to their audience the way that the audience needs to be communicated to, to get their attention. But second, they're just saying like for all those people that are already warmed up and ready to buy and just you know, are gonna be a layup, like here's a a coupon and then you get what you get. But there's a bigger portion of the population that you can advertise to and that you can get traffic coming to because they need info first. So if you're the person that supplies 'em the info, who do you think they're gonna turn to when they're ready to buy maybe next month?

Speaker 3 (12:37): Right? Absolutely. You know, there's been some interesting chatter kind of going around recently and a bit of it was due to some kind of Google advertising testing by some pretty large companies and they were talking about ad fraud and click fraud and all this kind of stuff that happens in ads that people use as excuses not to run ads, right? And usually those cases, what I find is that either they haven't done the targeting correctly to kind of avoid fraud or to to to narrow down to that customer. But also you see a lot of people talking about, well retargeting ads are just retargeting everyone when only like a few percent of people are actually gonna take action or, or purchase something. I think the stat I saw was 86% of people when they see a retargeting ad either would never purchase it or have already purchased it, but that's a matter of actually setting up your ads correctly.

Speaker 3 (13:35): It's not a matter of fraud or anything like that. I mean if you have an account where somebody signs up to go, you know, get a deal or, or whatever it is to go to a dentist and make an appointment, you know that that person is converted and they need to be putting that back into their audience so that they can exclude those people from the advertising. So you're not spending money to re advertise to the same people or sending retargeting ads to people who've already bought your thing. I see it every day. I mean I've recently moved from the United States, Canada and every time I log into my company that handled moving my stuff, they retarget me for like seven days. And every one of those ads is a waste because they didn't put me in the exclusion list for having already purchased. Right?

Speaker 1 (14:21): Yeah. I just bought a like a $5,000 couch the other day and I'm still getting ads to buy the couch from the same company. I'm like, you're burning your cost per acquisition here. You're totally ruining it.

Speaker 3 (14:32): I know it's a failure of targeting for one, but it's also like, it kind of gets you annoyed after a while, right? You're like, I already bought that guys, I don't need to see this anymore , you

Speaker 1 (14:43): Know? Yeah. That's the interesting thing about, you know, how good targeting's getting and how much data the platforms have on us now. And I have this conversation with like my creative friends all the time that are like, I don't use Facebook because they track my information and I'm like, well dude, first of all, everybody like your information's tracked regardless, but I kind of like getting ads when they're relevant to me. I click on ads, I opt into stuff and I interact with things that I want because I like seeing ads for things that I want because I end up buying 'em and I'm happy about it. Whereas if I'm gonna go watch something on tv, I need to sit through like 12 diaper commercials. I'm never gonna buy a diaper. Right? Like give me some ads for stuff I actually want, I'm a consumer, I wanna buy stuff if it's gonna be, you know, up my alley.

Speaker 3 (15:22): Yeah, I mean the, the ad targeting thing is, it's pretty weird how people they draw these, these false equivalences is they say, well I don't want to click on a Facebook ad or something cuz they're gonna track me around the internet. But then they carry their phone around everywhere they go getting tracked everywhere they go in the real world and on the internet and taking pictures of themselves and all the different places and the photos are geo tagged and they upload them to Instagram thinking that Facebook's not gonna get 'em like they're owned by the same company people.

Speaker 1 (15:53): Yeah. We'll have Facebook, Instagram, I mean even if you just allow permissions to your photos for one, just for that one time, they have all of your data. You've been sticking your fingerprint on an iPhone to open it up for the last five years. You think that's not out there somewhere.

Speaker 3 (16:06): Yeah. And your face now.

Speaker 1 (16:08): And your face Now,

Speaker 3 (16:10): Not to get into the whole privacy conversation too much, but you know, I'm happy to get into that if we ought to. But like every time you pass a police car, they're recording your vehicle and your license plate and every time you pass a traffic cam, they're recording your vehicle license plate and they know through the registration that the vehicle belongs to you and they know because your phone's in the vehicle where it's going. Like all of these things, the last thing you need to worry about is if you're into knitting and you get knitting ads on Facebook, that's a good thing. It's not, if you're into knitting and all you get is generic ads for like casino video games that that's not content that you want. Right? They're gonna show you an ad either way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:51): And on top of that, it's also the thing that's powering my entire livelihood and my business, right? There's never been a better time to be a business owner if you want to grow than now because all of that data that, you know, we just talked about other people collecting on you, they are now saying here, we've collected it all for you and we're gonna allow you to target these people using our audience targeting. Right? Facebook's collecting all this data about, about everyone and they're saying you wanna advertise to them now. So as an advertiser, like as an advertising agency or as an advertiser, as a business, it's all there for you. So if, if you're a dentist or if you're a lawyer or if you're whatever and you want to grow all of the data about your customer is in front of you and you can use it and you can speak to them, a lot of people miss the mark because they don't know how to speak to them. But the data's there, It's, it's all there if you want to grow, like you've never had a better opportunity in the history of the planet than now.

Speaker 3 (17:47): Right? For sure. And you know what it's, it's it's anonymized. It's not like I know that Janus in Arizona likes to knit, right? I just say I want to find people who are interested in knitting who live in Arizona, Facebook or Google or whoever the company that's advertising is, is gonna go find those people. We don't get the data right. And that's why people think, like, people think that, oh you have a marketing agency so you know that I like to go to the gym three times a week. Like I don't know that about anyone, right? Unless they tell me that specifically the advertising data is a is anonymized and you don't get access to it, you just get access to target to, you know, those kinds of things about people. And the platform goes and finds the people on the marketer's behalf and if you are anybody right now with a credit card in your pocket, and I think the minimum now is probably about $10, you can use the most advanced advertising platforms in the history of mankind for nothing, right? I mean obviously if you wanna get good results, 10 bucks isn't gonna get you very far. But like what were your options for advertising pre platform internet, right? Like before 2006 it was like maybe email if half of your customers even had an email address and the newspaper and then it was like radio and TV if you could afford

Speaker 1 (19:09): It. Yellow pages maybe.

Speaker 3 (19:10): Yeah. Well yeah and Yellow Pages true. That's a good one. But Yellow Pages were still pretty expensive then, right? We had companies that we were doing work with in the early two thousands that were paying sometimes, you know, eight to $12,000 for half page in the yellow pages.

Speaker 1 (19:24): And what what's kind of interesting is that, you know, with all the technology changes and with all the different mediums and so many of them going out of date like Yellow Pages and such, the fundamentals have never changed. And the fundamentals start with just knowing who your customer is and how to talk to 'em. And what I was saying earlier about, you know, changing the language on an ad that would apply now that applies in the fifties, it applies in the early 19 hundreds. It applies any time that you're speaking to a customer and it just kind of blows my mind how many business owners don't spend the time to do those fundamentals because the platforms will change and the mediums will change. But you know, knowing who you're talking to and and knowing how to talk to them, talk to their benefits, it's never going away. It's evergreen. So learning those kinds of things as a business owner, when you put on your marketing hat, one of those three roles is going to serve you for the rest of the time that you're running your business.

Speaker 3 (20:17): Yeah, absolutely. Knowing things about not just your customers but knowing how to do copywriting and things like that are super valuable. Well let's talk for a minute about, let's say you're a dentist, lawyer, whatever, right? You have some kind of service based business, you have the money to spend on marketing generally, unless you're like just kind of starting out when you're gonna use an agency. A lot of times what, at least what we see at our agency is people have heard of specific things that that other people have told, told them or they read some articles in the dental magazine or in Forbes or something and they're like, okay, I need some seo. So they call us and they say, can you guys SEO are our website or something, right? With very little knowledge of what any of the things that they could do are, what do you think is the best place for a business to start? Is it something like auditing is something that you would do first or is it more, let's take a look at the marketing you're currently doing and I guess that's still an audit , but where's kind of a starting place for a business if they wanna, you know, start marketing their business a little more, take it out of their in-house hands.

Speaker 1 (21:25): Yeah, so we started as an SEO company and I think one of the things that we did wrong in the beginning was that when people came to us asking for seo, we gave 'em seo. And that might sound a little bit weird, but

Speaker 3 (21:37): We did the same

Speaker 1 (21:37): Thing. Yeah. Over the years you learn that, you know, SEO is getting traffic to your website by, you know, ranking on Google and it's people who are actively searching, right? They're in that either information gathering stage or they're ready to buy and they're searching for a provider. It's extremely valuable traffic cuz they're literally typing in, I want what you sell and then you pop up. The problem is that it takes quite a while to rank in some cases, I mean quite a while as relative, but it takes time to rank if you don't have any SEO equity built. And so what we were doing wrong is we were saying we're an SEO company, you want seo? Yes I'll give you seo. And a lot of times we would lose clients because it would take six months and they needed business faster. And what we started to realize is if you're ready for seo, it means that you already have a stable base of customers or you already have an acquisition system that can predictably help you grow.

Speaker 1 (22:32): And I mean, I guess the last thing I'll say on that is being an SEO company, we made the same mistake ourselves is that we tried to grow and get clients by doing SEO in the beginning when we should have been focusing on advertising. Because unless you have six to 12 months to burn without getting business, you know, it's probably not the right time to invest in that. But when you have a stable base or you have a predictable client acquisition system where you can put a dollar in the machine, get $2 out and know how many clients you're gonna get every month, then SEO makes a lot of sense because that's about securing your place and diversifying where you're getting your traffic from and getting a whole new type of person to your website. So where should a business start? I think it depends on where they're currently at. I think that every business should start by figuring out how do I create a system where I can reliably and predictably grow by putting dollars into advertising? And that's coming from a purebred SEO like that I was born in bred seo, so

Speaker 3 (23:31): SEO's in the name of our company, right? Hook seo, you know, and yours for people who don't knower is search engine results page is what it stands for. So we both have SEO in our names, right? But yeah, I mean when we first came out we'd have like people come to us and they'd be like, like yeah we need seo, we need seo, we need seo. And we would just start doing SEO work. And then you know, like 60 days, they're like frantically telling us that they're like going broke. And I'm like, SEO is not gonna save your business if you're 120 days from bankruptcy or less kind of thing, you have a different problem. And you know, if you're at that stage where you're going further and further into the red SEO might help you out at some point, but it's not where to put your money right now, right?

Speaker 3 (24:15): You need something that's gonna have an immediate return and there's probably another thing wrong with your business. You know, you might wanna look at a business coach or someone like that also, but advertising can pay off immediately, right? Because I mean the platforms are so fast now. I mean I had somebody that we just started working with recently a couple months ago and from the time that we kind of closed the deal and said okay well let's do this thing, right? It was 48 hours before they got their first customer designer heard of, right? I mean when's the last time you called a radio station? They said we'll give you a client in 48 hours. I mean the platforms can be set up quickly, launched quickly. In this case they had a lot of stuff already pre-made ready to go. So it was easy, we didn't have to generate all the assets and stuff, but so that's not a typical, you know, response time. But I mean if you want something quick, advertising is definitely the way to do it.

Speaker 1 (25:09): Yeah, that's true. And on the flip side, you gotta pay for it forever. So at some point you want to do SEO because that's how you build your stable base. Like we kind of look at it like, you know, how badly do you need a house? Are you homeless? You should probably go rent a house right now and if you have no money, like you might wanna rent and pay a 500 bucks a thousand bucks a month rather than trying to buy a house. But you're gonna pay for that room forever until you buy a house and mortgage didn't pay it off. So I, I look at advertising kind of like renting cuz you, you really are, you're renting traffic, you're purchasing traffic from these platforms and as soon as you stop paying they evict you. But SEO is more like buying a house and building your content on your website, building links to your website, you know, building up your seo. That's something that's going to end up paying you over the long run. And you can live in that thing without having to continually pay high prices. You might have to pay some property tax every year, right? There's gonna be a maintenance fee. But in general it's the long-term play.

Speaker 3 (26:05): The SEO's not a onetime thing. I see business owners, a lot of times they're like, I need you to SEO my website. I'm like, that is not a thing. Like there is onsite SEO work that can be done, but SEO is something that happens regularly because any term that you type into the internet right now that comes up with a result page, you can guarantee somebody did SEO work to get in the top few spots. Like absolutely there's, there's nowhere on the internet now that anything is profitable where they didn't spend time, money, or effort or all three trying to get into those positions. The idea of Google's fancy life, just write some good content and blog a couple times and, and you know, you'll be right up there on the results page. It's all horse shit. You have to do actual hard SEO work to get into those positions.

Speaker 3 (26:56): And I mean the biggest one right now, especially if you're a business like a dentist where people physically come, there is gonna be your local SEO side, right? And local SEO is not the same thing as your standard organic seo. Cause if you get a local results page now, like you type in dentist Portland, Oregon, it's gonna show you probably three or four ads, then it might show you like a YouTube video or something. Then there's gonna be a map in the map. There might be one or two ads in the ad box for the map box. Then there's the map results, the first three, then there's a button to click to see the rest. And then there's the first organic result. So you're way down the page if you're number one on organic,

Speaker 1 (27:36): Right? And organic still does get a lot of clicks. The number one result, people are just that. That's kind of the thing we've been trained to sort of just flip past the top. So it's good to secure that. But the cool thing about local is when you know what you're doing, you can get the organic result and you can get the map pack and you can, of course you can get a lot of other things we like to build

Speaker 3 (27:54): Out and you can run an ad

Speaker 1 (27:55): And you can run an ads, right? So you're, you're just increasing the amount of real estate that you have there and providing value hopefully

Speaker 3 (28:02): If you really, really, really go hard on the SEO side, you can get in there where you can get on a page as maybe as many as four or five times on one search result page where you have the advertisement, the listing in the map box, maybe a YouTube video, right? That's from your company and then an organic listing, right? And then maybe you have another page on your site that also ranks, or it could be something like Clutch or Yelp or you know, some other listing service that has your listing for your company for that result also. So there's ways that you can get tons. Well

Speaker 1 (28:36): The thing is that what Google's trying to do is they're trying to give their users options and they typically don't like to rank the same domain for multiple times on the same serp. But if you do what you just said that you or you touched on is you can use other people's domains to rank your stuff, right? I mean it's called parasite seo. You can throw out all sorts of different types of pages, but there's other websites out there like WordPress, Blogger Blogspot and things that already have established authority. And you can get pages up there, but most local businesses don't need to worry about that. It's going a little too far, but it is kind of fun to do.

Speaker 3 (29:07): The more real estate you can get on the page, the more likely you are to get someone's click. But you don't wanna game the system either, right? If you game the system too much, then you might get a penalty. Well I don't want to get into talking about Google penalties, but let's just say that it's bad if you do have a Google penalty on your company right now, go get an expert to look at it, an SEO expert because you don't wanna deal with

Speaker 1 (29:30): It. I just did a penalty recovery yesterday actually for a local business and it's not something we do. And it wasn't even my client, it was just a friend of mine who is a chiropractor and uh, I looked at their, their traffic graph and I, I, I don't remember the exact date, but it was like November 20th or something like that. They just fell off the map, which is indicative that you have a penalty if your, if your rankings just go from somewhere to nowhere overnight, you got a penalty and you gotta get that fixed.

Speaker 3 (29:53): Yeah. If you look in your Google analytics or your, your traffic results, whatever you're using to track your traffic and you just see what looks like a cliff in the wrong direction, , then yeah, that's time to talk to an SEO expert. Don't even bother taking the time to sort it out yourself. You might just make it worse. I've seen that happen and you don't wanna make it worse and then go see an SEO expert because then it's gonna cost you three times as much to get fixed.

Speaker 1 (30:17): I will tell you too that the businesses, the local businesses that are most prone to getting those types of penalties are the ones where they are, brand name does not match their domain name. And I see it a lot with attorneys, you know, you'll have an attorney, you know, their business name will be like Johnson and Smith attorneys at law and their domain name will be personal injury attorney dash Chicago or something like that. And the, the people that do those kinds of things. And it's very, very common to do that back in 2000. Anything pre 2000 and probably 16. But really the only time I'm seeing local websites get penalized is when you have a mismatch between brand name and url. So if that's you listening, you even if you don't have a penalty yet, like you need to probably talk to somebody to make sure you're not gonna get one.

Speaker 3 (31:02): Yeah. Or the penalty can be because there's a, there's a mismatch between your actual name and what you've put in as the title of your business on Google My Business, if you're like Devon and Matt's painting company, but on Google My Business you typed it in as LA painting contractor, then you might get penalized.

Speaker 1 (31:22): Yeah, the example I had yesterday, I'm not gonna say the business name, but it was first word, second word franklin.com for the city. That was the domain name and then the business name was, you know, first word, second word, third word. So not, not the same. And then the Google my business was a little bit different as well. And then the title tags of the website where you can say here's the brand name, like in the site title site white model was different as well. And you're basically telling Google, I'm trying to stick a bunch of keywords all over the place,

Speaker 3 (31:49): Right? That's keywords

Speaker 1 (31:51): Stuffing, keyword stuffing. And it's a little hypocritical because at my company's servco we do that stuff all the time on our websites, not on our clients, but we do it on our websites. But it's because we know what we're doing, right? Like a fire juggler can fire, can juggle fire sticks without getting burnt. But you probably shouldn't do that unless you know what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (32:08): . Yeah, yeah. There's a lot. Don't, don't do any shady stuff. People, man, I still have people ask me about things like ghosting, Do you remember ghosting or somebody would put like all the key words in white on their white background. Don't do that, folks don't do you know, I don't know, there's just so many shady things don't do that. Don't put up businesses on the, on the map where your business doesn't actually exist. Cause I mean if you get penalized it could be super hard and it's especially frustrating if you're a real business at a real address and it's you, you've tried to do everything the way that you're supposed to but you still get penalized can be super frustrating. I've seen that happen a lot hasn't happened as much lately, but man, the beginning of last year there's just map suspensions all over the place. Google just went crazy and everybody knocked off the map all over.

Speaker 1 (32:55): Yeah, I remember that. We run a lot of experiments and I experiment on my own site, kind of like the mad scientists who gives themself injections or whatever and I was experimenting a lot with putting up those types of listings and we got like 150 of 'em man. But we don't do it for clients, I just do it strictly for the purpose of figuring out what's happening because Google is not gonna tell you what they're doing. You can only really trial an error to try and get an idea of the scene so that you can create a strategy that's actually gonna work long term. But for businesses, for local businesses, you wanna keep it as clean as possible. And that's kind of the thing is I I, I still don't see them doing that. A lot of the times

Speaker 3 (33:32): The biggest thing that I see businesses doing is they're, they're always trying to work the system from whatever tiny pieces of, of like random internet advice they've read over the last 20 years and just fill in what it asks you to fill in when it comes to things like Google My business or Bing places, if it says description, put a well worded description, maybe use your keyword that you wanna rank for once kind of thing. But you know, you don't wanna put like LA painters who paint houses and paint buildings and hire painters for LA area painting company of painters, you know, don't do any of that kind of crap. Don't name it something different than what your business is named. Just keep it simple, get it up there and then go talk to an expert and have them do their magic and they can get you ranked without getting you suspended.

Speaker 1 (34:24): Yeah, and I would, and I would add to that those are opportunities where instead of trying to gain the system with keyword stuffing, use direct response, use copywriting and put in things that are actually gonna speak to your buyer and you know, maybe don't go too heavy on the, on the click of it, right Click bait is kind of like the keyword stuffing of direct response but you know, use those opportunities to speak to your, to your customers appropriately and you know, you'll get people actually coming to your, to your website. One of the biggest problems I see is that we'll work with a dentist, I've been around for 25 years and like there's other people that are ranking on page one. It's like, yeah, well you spent 25 years of your life establishing yourself in your community as a trustworthy expert and an authority. But now you have to do that all over again to Google cuz Google isn't your neighborhood, right? You have to go to Google and say, you can't just raise your hand and say I've been here for 25 years. You have to prove it to them through consistent effort. And that's really what SEO is

Speaker 3 (35:21): And you know, if you are an established business in your area, you have all kinds of opportunities to prove what an established business you are through things like, you know, if you've worked with vendors or charities or schools or community events and all those kinds of things, all of those places could be mentioning you. They could be linking back to your website. Even a mention without a link is still valuable. You know, there's lots of stuff that you can do to, to prove your authority to Google, which unfortunately is just a thing you have to deal with as a business owner. You know, I've seen people go the way and say, I don't need Google and I'm not gonna bother with it. And it's a tough slog without using the tools that are available that people are already using every day.

Speaker 1 (36:05): Yeah, I'd say pay your dues to Google and do that by establishing authority, providing value, and so you don't have to be a slave to the companies like Yelp because those are the ones that are really actually out to kind of take advantage of you. Straight up

Speaker 3 (36:20): Reviews is a whole nother episode. Speaking of which, that is actually our most popular episode of our show ever was episode one and it was how to get rid of negative reviews on Yelp. So if that's something that interests you, go all the way back to episode one. Devin, thank you so much for being on. If somebody wants to talk to you about marketing for their dental, you know, agency or on our dental practice and uh, or any other type of business, what's the best way for them to reach out to you?

Speaker 1 (36:48): Yeah, if you're a dentist, just go to se dental.com. S e r p dental.com. You know, if you're just a student of marketing and you wanna learn more, go to Cerp University and I try to put out information as much as possible that's high quality. And this year I have a mission to really just kind of blow the roof off and just give away as much stuff as possible to help people with marketing. So.

Speaker 3 (37:09): Perfect. Thanks so much for being on the show, Devin, and, uh, stay safe there in la

Speaker 1 (37:14): Thanks, Matt.

Speaker 2 (37:16): This has been Digital Marketing Masters with Matt and Carrie Rouses. For notes and a transcript of this episode, go to hook seo.com/podcast. Join us next week as we dive into more tips and ideas to grow your business. Digital Marketing Masters is brought to you by Hook SEO Digital Marketing. Our show is produced by Matthew Ross and Scott Berson, mixed and edited by Silent Outburst Productions. I'm your announcer, Daniel D. Craig. We would love to hear your thoughts. Please leave us an honest review with your podcast provider. Your reviews help us help more business leaders just like you.