It’s important for dentists and all businesses to have good online presence. This helps attract new patients and stay competitive with other practices. One sure way to accomplish this is by ranking on the first page of Google searches, meaning your practice shows up toward the top in the list of search results.
In this episode of The Art of Dental Finance and Management podcast, Art meets with Jeff Gladnick, CEO of Great Dental Websites, to discuss how to build the best website for your practice. Jeff outlines the key elements to consider for your dental website including:
- Content
- Design
- Services
- Smile galleries
- Testimonials
Reach out to Art if you have any questions regarding dental finance and management for your dental practice. More information about the Eide Bailly dental team can be found at www.eidebailly.com/dentist.
Being more strategic in all aspects of your dental practice will lead to increased profitability.
Show Notes and Resources:
The Transcript
Art Wiederman, CPA: And hello, everyone, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Dental Finance and Management with Art Wiederman, CPA. I'm your host, Art Wiederman. I've been a dental specific CPA for 37 years. Welcome to our new listeners, which we get every week on the podcast. I'm a dental division director for the CPA firm of Eide Bailly. Our office is in Tustin, California, and my, as I call it, My World Recording Studio is here in South Orange County, where I live, and I've got a great episode for you today.
I have always been a proponent that marketing in a dental practice is something that you do every day and that the day you stop marketing your dental practice or your business, whether it's a dental practice or a manufacturing business, the day you stop marketing your business is the day your business starts to die. And I when I was starting in dentistry in the 1980s, we had the Yellow Pages. And when I lecture at the dental schools, I ask people, the dental students, how many of you find goods and services through the Yellow Pages? And they look at me and I actually bring a copy of an old Yellow Pages book and they say, they look at me like I'm insane and I say no today the way you do it is, and I pull out my iPhone and I hold it up, and that's how you do it and we look at websites.
So today I have Jeff Gladnick, who's the founder and CEO of Great Dental Websites, and I think that's a great marketing name for a company. I think your company should be called great something as opposed to average dental websites. But his company has great dental websites, and Jeff was actually referred to me by my good friend Rita Zamora, who's been on the podcast, and he's worked with many people that I know, and he's as good as it gets in creating great dental websites, and we're going to talk about what a great dental website looks like today, and we're going to get into his good friend, Mr. Google, and how that all plays into everything and a whole bunch of things about that. We'll get to Jeff in a couple of minutes.
Want to give you some information like we do every week. Make sure that you check in with our partner Decisions in Dentistry magazine, the best clinical dental magazine out there. They have amazing clinical content. I'm sorry, can they have great clinical stuff I can't get the word out of my mouth, folks. I just returned from a seven day, 17 day trip to Portugal and Spain, and I'm still getting over the jetlag. I usually do it better, but if you ever get a chance to go over there, it is some of the most beautiful country that exists and the desserts were my downfall, but that's another conversation for another day. But Decisions in Dentistry magazine has great clinical content. They have over 140 continuing education courses that you can purchase access to at a very reasonable price. Go to their website at www.DecisionsinDentistry.com and check out what they have going on.
Also, check out my mother ship, which is the Academy of Dental CPAs. Twenty four CPA firms, of which Eide Bailly is one of them that represent over 10,000 dentists across the United States. Eide Bailly represents about 1000 dentists, primarily in the in the western United States. We have been the financial first responders through the pandemic. Employee Retention Tax Credit, HHS Provider Relief Fund, PPP and everything else, and we're talking about that in a second here. So go to our website www.ADCPA.org.
So I want to give you some updates. First of all, we are recording here in the middle of October of 2021. And so by now, all of you should have filed for forgiveness for your first round PPP loan. If you haven't, then you're probably already making payments to the bank on the loan and you need to file for your forgiveness. But I'm going to say 99 percent of you have done that. Now the Employee Retention Tax Credit is something that is very available to you. It's a credit that was created as part of the CARES Act in 2020 and March of 2020. It is a tax credit that if you had a greater than 50 percent reduction in your gross receipts in the mostly the second quarter of 2020, you can qualify for a tax credit of up to $5000 per employee for 2020.
We have at Eide Bailly done over 80 dental practices that have qualified and we have gotten doctors over $3 million in tax credits, several of them, we got over $100,000 in tax credits. So it is not too late even if you have filed for forgiveness. And even if you filed your 2020 tax returns and this podcast will be published after the tax deadline, but all of you would have already filed your tax returns. If you are interested in looking to see if you can get some free government money from the Employee Retention Tax Credit, send me an email at awiederman@EideBailly.com. Or give me a call at six five seven two seven nine three two four three.
Now. So that's the employee retention, that's the employee retention tax credit. You can also be eligible for this tax credit for the first, second or third quarter of 2021, and you only need a 20 percent reduction in your gross revenues for either the fourth quarter of 2020 versus 2019 or any of the first three quarters of 2020 one versus the same quarters in 2019. And that credit is, instead of 5000 per employee per year, is 7000 per employee per quarter. If you think you've qualified for that, we would strongly urge you not to file for forgiveness yet on your PPP round two loan because you have until pretty much spring of 2022 to do that. And by not filing for forgiveness, we have a lot more latitude to take a larger credit.
So if you want some help on that, let us know. Even though you file for forgiveness, it's fine. We've got a lot of doctors who have done that, and our average credit's around $40,000. That's a lot of money that funds a retirement plan and funds a year of tuition at most colleges. It's a really good deal. The other thing I want to talk about. There's two other things I want to talk about before we bring Jeff on is the HHS Provider Relief Fund. Now, most of you got two percent of your revenues in the third quarter of 2020 from the Department of Health and Human Services. The HHS Provider Relief Fund was a fund that was set up by the CARES Act, the same act that set up the PPP and the ERTC back in March of last year, $175 billion of money that represented money to help health care practitioners. And that means hospitals, critical care units, nursing homes, dentists, physicians to fight the COVID 19 pandemic.
Well they gave out two percent of the revenues of most dental offices in July, August, September of 2020. Well, they're not going to give you a free money, folks, unless you tell them what you did with it. So the reporting was supposed to start in January of 2021. They didn't quite get around to it. They finally got around to it in July. And basically what they said was if you got money between April 10th and June 30th, and that would only be for dentists who do Medicare Medi-Cal CHIP. If you got that money, then you would be able you would have to file by September 30th. Well we're past September 30th. They did give everybody a 60 day grace period.
But for most of you who either got the HHS money in August, the two percent or and or and I guess the phase three money, then that phase three money could have been six figures for many of our practices. It actually was. You have to file between January one and March 31. So that's coming up. You need to prepare for that. So you want to go on to the Department of Health and Human Services website and take a look at the workbooks that they have so that you can gather your expenses that qualify. And you know what to put together for lost revenues.
We have a help line here, help email, if you will. That is prf@EideBailly.com. So if you need some help with that, shoot us an email, we'll engage one of our folks to help you with what you have to do, but you can't look at this thing until January one. But if you don't report by March 31, you are pretty much guaranteed you're going have to give that money back and they're not going to give any more grace periods.
So anyway, the last thing I'm going to share real quickly is Congress right now, and the president are in the process of trying to negotiate there somewhere between a two and three and a half trillion dollar stimulus bill, which is going to include infrastructure, climate change, child care, all kinds of social programs that President Biden and the Democrats are trying to pass as part of what they ran on in November of last year, that is going to include a significant tax increase, pretty much for the wealthy. So you want to be watching your news and everything like that to see how that goes. We're going to be doing a podcast as soon as the new tax law comes out. And we'll tell you all about that.
Last thing and then we'll get to Jeff is our dental series is continuing. Our last series of Twenty Twenty One is going to be on November 17th with Rachel Wall of Inspired Hygiene. We're going to talk about great hygiene departments. Go on to our Eide Bailly YouTube page. You've got all of the podcasts and all of the webinars that we've done. I recorded one last night with my good friend Clint Johnson, of Profitable PPOs, and it was a great webinar. We had a lot of people on it and we got a lot of good business information. So go on to our Eide Bailly YouTube page, and if you want to register for these webinars, go ahead and go to www.EideBailly.com/dentalseries and you can do that there.
All right, so with that, let me get to my friend Jeff Gladnick. Jeff is the founder and CEO of Great Dental Websites out of Denver, Colorado. We do these recordings on a Teams, Microsoft Teams platform, so he kind of turned his computer and showed me downtown Denver, which is a beautiful place, and we're going to talk again about websites and kind of how they work and what works for you. So Jeff Gladnick, welcome to the Art of Dental Finance and Management.
Jeff Gladnick: Thank you for having me on Art. I was just listening to the tax advice you're giving and just reminded me about the pandemic. And I was in Australia when it happened and barely made it back here by about 48 hours to spare before they shaved the flights off. And then, you know, the whole world went to hell. And I remember you're talking about the decrease our clients were just calling us nonstop of like, well, we've been shut down by the government. We don't know when we can come back on, what do we do with our marketing and we're just helping them like tear it down, which is very tough for us, too. But yeah, that was a crazy time to be alive. I'm glad that era is past. Yeah.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, it's interesting, Jeff. The dental profession, in my opinion, came through really, really well. I mean, imagine if you were running a restaurant, yeah. Or a gym or bar. I mean, I have one of my best friends from, you know, 40 years ago in at Long Beach State, his wife is an event planner. The business was over. It was done. It was shut down for a year. I mean, she started doing some virtual stuff, but it was amazing. The dental profession was out of business for eight to 12 weeks in most cases, and I'm sure that as soon as they got back, your phone started ringing, right?
Jeff Gladnick: Mostly, yeah, the business recovered by October of that year, although our cost structures have gone way up since then. But there's still some softness in our new client side of the business from dentists who just can't fully staff, and I know this is a problem across the economy and lots of businesses. We still hear from a lot of our clients that they cannot fill hygiene positions, front desk, dental assistant positions. They're just struggling to get fully staffed.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Yeah, it's a problem not only in dentistry, it is the number one problem in dentistry by far is finding people. I mean, you read articles about the workforce and stuff. We don't need to go down that road, but that is an issue. It's an issue in my business, in the accounting profession. It's an issue in every profession. And so that's another conversation for another day.
But why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey, your career? I know you had mentioned to me one of the things you did was you invented a something that had to do with the ski industry. So tell us about your whole journey and how you got to where you are today.
Jeff Gladnick: So I was an engineer by training and trade. My dad is a dentist. My brother is a dentist. There are eight dentists in my family. It was kind of a family tradition. Yeah. Well, you grow up around like uncles and aunts, and that's all you hear about at Thanksgiving is people talking about teeth. And, you know, that's one of the jobs available to you as a five year old, you're like, there's fireman, there's police officers and there's dentists. I knew there was like at least three jobs.
Art Wiederman, CPA: That's it. Those are three choices. That's all you could do. So professional football player was not in it for you, huh?
Jeff Gladnick: There's baseball players. Yeah, but I didn't really get it. Yeah, that didn't seem like I was. I didn't think I was going to be a professional baseball player, although I would have loved to. But those are the practical jobs. Then it's firemen and police officers. And so I was just at the risk of offending the audience, I always thought it was disgusting, sticking my hand in people's mouths, you know, touching blood. And this just never had an appeal to me. I remember my dad sent me with glee, an article explaining that the keyboard was like five times more disgusting than the human mouth or something. At one point, he just loved that article. And this is what you've chosen, Jeff. You didn't even think it through.
But the gravity of dentistry strong and I went to school for computer engineering. I became very good with software and especially building content management systems, website publishing systems. And my dad and my uncles wanted a new website and they got outrageous costs for them. And I told them I build them a system so they could all do it. And then, you know, the other aunts and uncles got wind of this free website deal and wanted in on it, and it slowly became a company and people referred us. That was like 14 years ago. I thought I'd be out of this in a few months. It's been 14 years. We have about 950 clients. A second office down in Australia, about 40 staff. So this has become a serious business.
Art Wiederman, CPA: It does sound that way. So. So Jeff, let's give our dentists some great information about what they should be doing on their website. So I know that when I talk to dental contractors, they, you know, they go to a doctor who says, I want to build a new dental office. And one of the first questions they ask is what is the vision for your practice? What is the vision for your office? Yeah. So what should be the vision for a dentist who wants a website? What should they be thinking about and what are they telling you that they want?
Jeff Gladnick: Well, it's got to reflect the practice because oftentimes, you know, people buy websites, you know, like they're buying it off shelf and it's sometimes the imagery, the demographics of the people. You know, we had a client who very politely and patiently told us that like the pictures we weren't using, it's like these people just don't look like my patients and we didn't understand. We gave him a couple more and no no no. And what he really wanted to tell us is, guys, we're in Chinatown. Almost all of our patients are Chinese, and these are just like random, different demographics. And it's important to have, you know, the demographics of the people on your website reflect the demographics of your patient base or the patient base you want, so that that could be a mismatch.
Colors should match your logo you know you don't want to use. It's very popular to use the soft blues and things that are calming and as opposed to like red, except for certain cultures. Maybe you're in Brighton Beach in New York, and you've got a lot of Russian patients? Well, red is a different story there. So there's little things like that with color, imagery. And of course, you know how snazzy it is. How focused on the higher end of the market you are can attract the right type of high end cosmetic patients, or it can turn off the salt of the Earth patients who may be union employees at a factory near you who think that you're just the wrong fit for them. You're the fancy dentist that's going to overcharge.
So you really have to think about what type of patients you're going for, if they're older, you may be focused on dentures or you may be focused on families. And so all these things have to go into how you select images, how you do the graphic design, how the copy is written to appropriately attract the right audience.
Art Wiederman, CPA: So I want to ask a question because this is something that I want to. I'm very passionate about helping doctors reduce their dependency on PPO and insurance plans, and a lot of them see their only way they can get new patients is by signing up for every PPO on the market, and that is very dangerous to do. Again, go to the Eide Bailly YouTube page and watch the webinar Clint Johnson I did last night, October the 13th, and he'll tell you why.
And so how can you design a website that is going to attract. I don't know if there's a way to attract non insurance patients, cash patients, fee for service patients. Is there something that you do in what you do that goes towards that demographic?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah. So I don't know how many of our clients are fee for service. I'd like to think it's a majority, I'm not really sure off the top of my head. I know a lot of our clients also work with insurance. Some few of them specialize in insurance cases, but I think most of them are trying to attract fee for service patients. A lot of that comes down to the marketing, and there are some things that you can specifically do to get this client.
So, for example, like most people live in neighborhoods where the average housing price is kind of in a strata. So, you know, if you're in a really high income neighborhood, there's probably not a lot of people there on Medicaid or Medi-Cal or something or who are going to make health care decisions purely based on insurance. They may have it, and they love to use it, but. If they it's more important to them for quality. And you can absolutely set up pay per click Google AdWords campaigns and just literally draw like a box around those neighborhoods. And it's not 100 percent accurate. There's a little bit of like balloon, let's call it of the targeting. But doing this type of like sniping of high income neighborhoods can help you limit where you advertise to the people who are not likely to make an insurance based decision. That's not going to be the sole basis of their health care choice.
Art Wiederman, CPA: So is there something? And again, we're going to get into all the aspects of website. Is there anything on the website that we can do to specifically target these non insurance patients?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, I know a lot of people have started to integrate dental membership plans. I'm not sure how you feel about that. I know that.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I think it's a good idea in many cases, yes.
Jeff Gladnick: I know a lot of people, you know, are using that as an alternative and people kind of effectively buy their own insurance and that kind of makes sense to me. It's not as important to have insurance for dentistry as it is for their health insurance. The way that you write can be a little bit higher. You know, on the educational spectrum, you can set the tone. We typically will try to write it on average, like an eighth grade education level, but you can bump that up if you're targeting a higher demographic that may impress them.
Having the right types of, these are just general things that will help you. You know, win patients, before and after cases that show off your work, video testimonials, there's a lot of, you know, higher end, a little bit higher costs, but not much. A lot of it you can do yourself. Types of media that people will need in order to feel comfortable moving forward on a big case. You know, a huge cosmetic case for some. Someone may spend hours researching and going to different dentists and you've got to get through all the gates to have them become comfortable with selecting your practice.
Art Wiederman, CPA: OK, and we're going to get into, you know, that's one of the things we'll talk about is video testimonials and what should be on the website. But let's talk about what a consumer is looking for. I read some statistics a while back that I use in some of the lectures that I do, that a consumer, as they're clicking around the internet, you've got somewhere between nine tenths of a second and 1.5 seconds to grab the interest of a consumer.
So talk about what, Jeff, what's a consumer looking for on the internet there? They know they want to find a dentist. They've decided that they're going to go on the internet. They're going to they're probably going to Google it and they're going to they're going to start looking at websites for, you know, let's just say, Denver, Colorado dentist or dentist, Denver, Colorado. What's the consumer thinking and how do we set the website up to address what the consumer is thinking?
Jeff Gladnick: So you're right, there's a lot of searches for dentists near me or dentists in the name of my city. A Good Review strategy could help a lot with this. It's not the end all, be all. And you have to remember that thirty five percent of users who some people say, Well, I just have a Google My Business page or a Facebook page which went down. You know, if you remember Facebook going down completely, it was like a week or two ago. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, but 35 percent of people after they read the reviews, the next action they do. And this doesn't mean they don't do it on their second or third action, but the very next action they do is go to the website.
And so the reviews are, you know, just another gate that people have to get through, just like, you know, how well you rank being another gate. You know, the first gate is, can they even find you? And do you have an opportunity to say, Hey, look at me. Reviews are the next gate of like, well, a lot of other people think I'm good. Maybe you will, too. And then when they get to the website, there's more gates. You know, will they see patient testimonial videos there? So they say, OK, well, that feels more real than the review that person's actually talking. This doesn't seem like as an actor, you know.
And then will they get to see you because that's another gate? Am I going to like this dentist or are they going to be weird, do they? Am I scared of the dentist today? Do I think they're going to hurt me? So those are some phobias that people have in having videos of the dentist talking can help with that same thing with them before and after cases. That's another gate. It's proof that you can do this. You've done this before at least once and it went well. You'd be happy with this result, too.
With the reviews, though, I should say something about that. Don't be super stressed if you get a negative review, it's going to happen eventually. Think like what is like two or three percent of the population are sociopaths, you know, a lot of them have teeth.
Art Wiederman, CPA: That's scary. They're out there. Billions of people, Jeff.
Jeff Gladnick: I know it's depressing.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Maybe I'll go back to Spain and have some more sangria. I don't know.
Jeff Gladnick: I think there's various. Who knows what it is over there? You got drunk sociopaths and sleeping in the middle of the day coming out at night.
Art Wiederman, CPA: They do. I learned that in Spain. They take siestas from two to five. We had some free time on the tour days and my wife says, yeah, I really want to do some shopping in our free time from two to four and nothing was open, they were all closed.
Jeff Gladnick: So they have a bimodal sleep schedule and you could do that as a human being, it's actually slightly more efficient. I once put myself into a poly phasic sleep cycle where I would only sleep about four to six hours a night max. And my goal was to get it down to two. That was a little harder. You can do it, but you have to strip away any semblance of a social life. If you go for the two hour option, you have to sleep every six hours on the dot for a half hour, you go right into REM sleep. But if you miss it by like 15 minutes, you're hosed for like two days as you like your body struggles to recover.
So it would just be so strange because I would, I tried this for a few weeks. I think I was on like a four hour target, and I would have to like to stop what I was doing, go take a nap. And you know, it doesn't matter. You're driving, pull over and take a nap. You're having people over your house. Stop. You have got to leave and go take a nap.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, I'm glad I got you when you're not napping, that's good.
Jeff Gladnick: No, I had to give that up because I kids that went right out the window.
Art Wiederman, CPA: There you go. So we talked about video testimonials. You like them. Do you like to have on a website or do you like to have the doctor talking about what he or she does? Do you like to have, I mean, live patients and in the website you have some recommendations. Do you just put a happy patient in front of a camera and say talk? Or is there some coaching involved or how does that work?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, so I like both. I want to have the dentist on there for a different reason than I want to have the patient. So for the dentist, I want them to just kind of. The whole point of this is it's really it's almost irrelevant what they're saying. I want them to kind of have like their dental outfit on look like a dentist, ideally be in operatory because to impart, you know, professionalism and confidence. But I want the potential patient on the other end of the screen to feel confident that they would get along with this person as a health care provider. Because we've all been to like, you know, health care providers and like, I just don't like this person. And they're just a bad fit.
And so what we want is the right fit. We want somebody to like. And this is where personality can comes out. If you're very serious and you want people to know that you take this very seriously, I wear a suit tie. You know, I just look straight at you. I don't make any jokes. You know, this is this is what you're going to get here, that will attract a certain type of patient. On the other hand, you may be more of a gregarious and outgoing and you lots of crack jokes and smile and, you know, you know, rib your patients a little bit, and some patients love that.
But the last thing you want to do is have this mismatch where your website or your marketing is presenting one thing and you're completely the opposite. And then people show up expecting one experience and they get the opposite of what they wanted. And so that type of fit can be done very well with video.
For testimonials, this is the one thing where I tell people I don't know if I would hire a professional to do this. I would rather have, because authenticity is the main quality of these videos that we're going for. You know, we had one client that we actually started mailing a little smartphone tripods to after we saw this because he had these great videos he was recording, but he had these shaky, disturbingly shaky hands for a dentist. And these videos are just kind of like just shaking all the time.
And so we, you know, just having a smartphone that you prop on something or a tripod, is fine quality because it looks authentic, like, you know, I want to see a little disheveled necklace or the hair is a little off or, you know, they're not wearing like that. Lighting is a little off. I don't care about all that. I'd rather have that than somebody with like a Barbara Walters filter and like the makeup and the lighting and everything sounds perfect, like have something in the background because I want people to believe this is absolutely real.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I'm a human being.
Jeff Gladnick: And we just filmed them impulsively and sporadically, and they're just giving you their raw experience as it happened just to share this is a public service. So those are typically the two most common ways that we're working with patients for video and we love it when our clients do that because the things are typically pretty free or cost effective, and they usually you can use them in ads and all over the place.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I got a lot of other things I want to talk to you about, but I want to give you a second to talk a little bit about what you do and how folks might get a hold of you. So, Jeff, talk about if someone's looking for a dental website, either a new one or an upgraded one. How would they work with you and how would they get ahold of you?
Jeff Gladnick: Oh yeah. I mean, if you're already convinced at this point, if you heard enough, you could just go to GreatDentalWebsites.com. GreatDentalWebsites.au if you're in the Australian market. The way it typically works, you'll talk to one of our staff. We'll kind of try to understand. Well, we'll speak with you usually like two or three times the first time. We just want to understand what you're up to and what your goals are. We'll do some research will present you with what we see are the problems, opportunities, challenges and ways we think we can help. If that all sounds good, we'll give you a proposal. If you like the proposal, we'll move forward. We don't have any long term contracts, so you know, if you decide we're the wrong fit, you can just fire us.
We still have a 92 percent retention rate. That's how we like to do business. We've worked with over, you know, we currently work with over 950 dental practices and we're almost entirely focused on dentistry, except for a handful of other, you know, obligations for, you know, family members or friends of friends that fit well into our system.
Art Wiederman, CPA: OK? Is there a phone number of people who can get a hold of you?
Jeff Gladnick: Yes. Seven two zero three nine nine seven zero seven one. I can't remember the Australian number off the top of my head, but just go to our website GreatDentalWebsites.com or the .AU and you'll find it.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I know that our podcast is listened to in over 70 countries. Maybe more the last time I checked. But I think the United States is the main place that's listened to. So let's get into some specifics about what should be part of a good dental websites. I got some different things I want to ask, but let's start with content. I mean, I'm one who likes to write. I like to write and write and write until people want to throw up about reading what I'm writing. How much content is good? How do you suggest the dentist put the content into the website?
Jeff Gladnick: We typically spend about 25 to 35 hours of copywriters time writing content for their website. We go through an interview process with them and you know, I mentioned like the mismatch that can happen with the copywriter too. You know, you want the copywriting to sound like the dentist wrote it. So that's why it's important to interview them and get a sense for how they talk and how they describe things. The other content we typically want on there. And you also want enough content. When we you talked a little bit about search engine optimization and people looking for like dentists in Denver and those, there are a lot of searches for that, but there's also a lot of searches for specific services.
So veneers in Denver, veneers in Capitol Hill in Denver, Invisalign Capitol Hill in Denver, and those searches are sometimes better to get in aggregate because there's lots of them. And for all these different services, because the people already know what they want. They're not just randomly my mouth hurts. Let me figure this out. They know exactly what the problem is, and they're looking for a solution. So having enough content on what we would call your service landing pages the page on your website about Invisalign or the main page goes a long way in attracting those type of searches for very qualified visitors.
In addition to that, we want media like before and after cases, pictures of your office, video testimonials, dental videos of the dentist, that sort of stuff. FAQs, blog posts, financial options, technology. A lot of these things we will organize and relate on to these service landing pages. So when somebody lands on your page about implants, they may see the technology of your same day circ machine. They may see before and after case of a dental implant. They'll see a video testimony of a dental plan will see you the dentist giving an explanation of why you guys like this circ machine and why you think it's a good use of their time, et cetera, et cetera.
The blog post or FAQs wondering if this is the same quality as one that goes to the lab. All these types of things we like to incorporate together onto those landing pages and that performs extremely well for SEO. That's typically the way that we kind of a very raw approach to a rough approach of how our architecture works when we're building websites and why we're doing it that way.
Art Wiederman, CPA: How about the design of the website? How do you lay it out? What do you like? What don't you like?
Jeff Gladnick: So there's I mean, a lot of this is tailored to the individual's tastes. And, you know, we'll take their logos and their color palette into account here. Similarly, their creative director will interview them to figure out what websites they like and not necessarily dental. Some people show us like, I like Tesla's website. And this is why. We want to understand, you know, what their personal opinions are. We try to marry this with what we know works, because sometimes people want design options that are just going to be very bad for, you know, user experience or for, you know, for Google. That they're going to violate SEO best practices with something that they really like design wise, but they won't like the results of it.
So and then we'll present them with, you know, mockups, get their feedback, refine the mockups and then build the site. There are some conventions that you should always kind of think about with design that you really need to adhere to. The homepage or the logo should always be in the upper left. Like, don't put the homepage in the middle, don't put the homepage link or the logo on the right. Everybody expects this to be in the upper left. Don't try to reinvent the wheel. We know that vertical navigation menus, you know, once going across the top of the website horizontally perform better than menus that go along the left side of a page.
You need to have a design that's mobile responsive, so Google previously would allow you to have but they still allow you. They were OK with you having a separate mobile website that had different content, different design. They don't like that anymore. They want you to have a responsive website that will work the same on a tablet, a phone, a bigger phone. You know, some people have this giant God awful phones that barely fit in your pocket or a desktop or laptop or a big monitor. So the design has to work well, and it's more of a challenge than it used to be on a variety of different screens. One day maybe we'll be walking around with these Geordie La Forge Google Glass things. So the design is going to have to work for that too.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Probably not too far in the future, I would think. You talked, we've talked about smile galleries. You like to have those on the websites.
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, yeah. You want you want proof that the dentist can do the work. You want to show examples of your real work. Some of those cases will rank well by themselves when someone's looking for a specific type of service. Sometimes you'll get not just one result on the Google search result page, but you'll get two or three. And the more content you give them, the more FAQs blog post, smile gallery cases, the more of a chance you have for that to work. Those images, if you add a little bit of metadata to the images which our software does by default will appear in Google image search if someone's looking for veneers, you know they will figure out where you are, where they are. It can tell if you've embedded geolocation data into the image and it will show them these images. And when they click it, it'll take you to the before and after case, and then you see it in context.
Art Wiederman, CPA: And you also like to have service overview pages as part of the website.
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, I talked about that second ago. You know, all the we want to have a lot of content, usually 500 words, describing the service. The benefits of the service. A lot of people will. Dentists will make the mistake if they write the content themselves, just telling you clinically what they're going to do. Nobody wants to hear that. They don't want to hear, yeah, there's going to be a drill, there's going to be a knife. Oh, this is not good. We want to hear about the benefits, you know? And you know your experience and the technology you're using and their experience of how they're going to experience this as a patient.
So and there's lots of words you can do, you know, instead of, you know, injection, you know, it's anesthetic, you know? And so instead of pain, it's discomfort, there's lots of words that dentists will use that are completely accurate. But the wrong thing to tell patients.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Right. That makes a lot of sense. My biggest pet peeve on websites when I'm looking for a service is I can't tell you how many websites I've seen where I can't find the phone number.
Jeff Gladnick: Oh yeah, the I mean, on a mobile site, a mobile phone this this has to be a click the call button. It's got to be on the top of the bar so you can click it at any given time. Phone number should be in the upper right of every page. It should be on the contact page. We try to integrate calls to action throughout landing pages at various points throughout the site. We'll add animation that is so slight it's subconscious. We've spent a lot of time doing user interface testing where we'll increase the speed of the animation and until people notice it, and then we'll back it off until they don't. But they still click on it three percent more than if there's no animation.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I like the minions myself. Do you do minion stuff?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, yeah. Lots of old tricks like that. You've got to have the phone number. I mean, it's just criminal when you have to go on the scavenger hunt for the phone number and it's like buried in like a font six on the very bottom in the footer somewhere. It's like, what are you doing?
Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, they won't, they'll just go to the next website, right?
Jeff Gladnick: Oh yeah. And when you asked this question earlier, like, how much time do you have? We typically think about eight seconds is the max effort to convince someone they haven't made a mistake and they shouldn't hit the back button. But that's exactly what people are doing when they click something from Google. They're like, Did I make a mistake? And if they don't see immediately like, OK, I'm expecting a dentist and expecting a page about veneers, let me go back. OK, I didn't get to go back.
And that is a huge mistake that people make when they're running digital ad campaigns like AdWords. They will waste so much money targeting, you know, they'll say, OK, well, I got a website, you know, Dr. Gladnick.com or something. And so let me create a campaign for veneers and another one for Invisalign, and I'll just send it to Dr. Gladnick.com. So people click the Invisalign page, they go to a general page about some dentist. There's no mention of veneers. And people like this isn't about veneers, back.
Next and then tons of that's the biggest waste that we typically see when dentists will or people who don't have experience with this will write AdWords campaigns. These things have to take you to a page that's very focused on what you do. That's the secret to SEO too. If people are expecting something very specific and they don't get it, they'll just think there a mistake and they'll go back. And Google figured that out on it, adapt the results.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, we're going to talk about Google next, because that's a big part of all this. So my friend Gary Takacs, who everybody in the world knows, and it's the guy who got me into podcasting. I've lectured on the same stage with Gary, I don't know, 15, 20 times. I can't even remember how many times and Gary always has this thing, he says. He says, OK. He asks the audience, so what's the number one search engine in the world? And everybody, of course, raises their hand and in unison they go Google. And he then he says, Well, what's the number two? And they'll go, Yelp, or Citi Search. And then he goes, Who cares? Who cares what the second one is?
So, you know, and I tell you, it's interesting, Jeff, I do this exercise with my clients and I do it as often as I can is I'll get them in my conference room or I'll get them on a virtual call and I'll say, let's pull up your website. I'm going to look at Denver dentist or dentist Denver and these folks are absolutely flabbergasted that they're spending money on SEO, and they're nowhere to be found on page one, two, three or four. Because if you're not on page one in the first two or three or four, you might as well not be on the internet.
So talk about how you work with clients and websites. And yeah, what if you have a guy or a lady who's had a website and they're nowhere near the top? You can't just push a button and get them to the top of Google. Talk about how you work with Google and how you help doctors get to the top of page one.
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah. So and this is our most popular service. I think we work with around close to 300 different practices to do search engine optimization every month. And you're right, you can't press a button and get them to the top of your organic results. You can swipe a credit card and start buying ads, but you're going to have to keep paying every time there's a click. Long term, that's more expensive than SEO, but it is instantaneous.
There's good fits for ads versus SEO. You know, if you're trying to attract people in a high income area, but they're, you know, a little bit further away from your practice. But you know, they'll drive, you know that that wealthy suburb will commute to the city. Google AdWords is fantastic for targeting that very cost effectively, but for in a general area, general searches around your geographic locale, typically the best return on investment. And Gary's right, you know, well, he's ninety two percent, right? That's the market share of Google right now. I wouldn't. A lot of the same principles that apply to Google also apply to Bing or other search engines. You just don't need to. You really need to worry and test with Google, and it'll mostly apply to Bing. So that's good advice.
So what do you do if you want to have your site rank? Well, there's a couple of things that we want. We want the sites to be fast. Google does take page speed into account. We've gone through this process of like caching pages. All of our systems are on this like distributed, scalable Amazon AWS system. So buying like the discount web hosting from GoDaddy for, you know, $3 a month may not be what you want. That may result in a slower site that Google says, Well, there's something faster. We can show people Google likes things that are fast. So they'll reward that.
Having unique content can help too. Having enough content. There are tons of, we talked about this like templated, you know, buy a site in a box type of thing and their content about teeth whitening is exactly the same as ten thousand other websites about teeth whitening. So if somebody is in your market looking for teeth whitening and you have the same content as ten thousand other sites. Why are you the guy out of 10,000 people that Google should pick to talk about teeth whitening and show that to a consumer? There's no reason.
So you've got to write your own content. You've got to have unique media. You have to have enough content. And then there's some tuning that has to be done. A lot of people, when you if we'll look at, we'll look at the metadata on sites and this is the title and the description and the title of that is kind of shared with Google on a per page basis on your site. And that's how Google constructs its search results. That Blue Link at the top is based on the title tag on your website. If you view the source code and look for the title, you should see this little HTML tag in there, and that's where Google is getting that data.
And oftentimes people have the same title for every page on their site. It's just like, you know, website, which is terrible. Or maybe it'll be, you know, the name of their practice, which is fine, but not for every page on the site. We like to have unique titles that describe the page accurately. We'd like to have a description for the page that sent to Google, so we're making it very easy for Google to look at kind of the menu of all the options on your site. And very clearly communicate that to consumers who are trying to figure out, you know, where they can get an answer to the question.
We want to make it very easy for Google to figure out what's on your site. And then, you know, there's lots of there's an art to a little bit of a science to integrating keywords at the right density. You don't want to go to a website and see like Denver Emergency Plumber, you know, is here to solve your emergency Denver plumbing needs if you have a plumbing emergency in Denver, then click here because an emergency pipe burst in Denver. It's like this is written for a computer. You have to write for a human being. But remember that Google is going to read it too.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I also understand and this is my limited knowledge of this subject, is that Google really basically does not like if your website is not friendly for phones and iPads and things like that. So I know that I've read stuff that Google has really penalized people. So how do you make a site that that's friendly not only on a laptop, but also on an iPad and an iPhone and an Android and all that stuff?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, we talked about it a little bit before when I was referencing responsive design. And I think I think it was like a couple of years ago that a majority of searches began to happen on a mobile phone. More now happening with voice search, too. And the key there is you want to hear from your website provider is a mobile responsive site.
If you go to your website and you're forwarded to like m.Dr.Gladnick.com or Dr.Gladnick.com/mobile and it's a completely separate site, you're doing it wrong and Google's not going to like it. It should be the exact same site, exact same content, that's all available on the desktop. You're just seeing it kind of reconfigured for a mobile device. That is how you impress Google with your mobile website.
Art Wiederman, CPA: I've got a three or four more things I want to hit on with you this time. Time flies when you're having fun. So talk about integrating the dental offices, practice management software, dental forms, patient portals. How do we integrate that into the website?
Jeff Gladnick: We've built integrations with all the popular platforms, so if you use Yappy or, you know, Lighthouse, Solution Reach revenue well, we've done those integrations so many times that we just built an integration. So we just get the ID. And then when whenever that company changes their integration because, you know, they upgrade their software, it's just we just upgrade everybody at once.
So we've tried to make this sort of hands off approach to the integrations for our clients so they don't have to call their service provider and have call us and give us a new code that just wastes everybody's time and money. But forms are very useful, especially online forums to have on, you know, form section of your website or your new patient section. Online booking has become a lot more popular. We integrate with like seven or eight different online booking engines.
Patient Portals are very easy, you know, you just have to have a website or link somewhere so people can click in. It depends on what the mix of, you know, third party stuff that practices want to integrate are. One thing to keep in mind. And I see this especially with chat providers, you know, they will sell a dentist and say, Hey, this chat software is going to lead to like 20 new patients a month for you. And what they really mean is, you know, 17 of the new patients you had that we're going to call or email the office would prefer to use chat, and that's true.
You know, or maybe I'm over inflating that, but there are a percentage of people that would just prefer to use chat, but they didn't come up with those new patients. They just, you know, facilitated it the way that your phone did. But you know, you could swap out them for a different chat provider or even take it away. And maybe you wouldn't get 20, maybe get 19. But what you typically will see is a complete because they're a little bit greedy in their approach to wanting to claim those patients so they can justify their costs. They will disconnect the reporting that comes from marketing that that we might be doing that, you know, you might be doing a third party might be doing.
You have to make sure that things called UTM codes are passed in to online booking engines or chat or anything else that the patient might use to convert to that the prospect might use to convert to a patient. If they're not doing that, then the company is kind of overexaggerating their contribution to your new patients. What do we see from our end? You know, we had this Google AdWords campaign that was performing very well that is getting this number of calls and we don't really mind if they call or email or, you know, online book or go through chat. We want them. We just want the number to be as high as possible.
But then all of a sudden, this new plug in's installed and something drops off, and we don't have any insight into where the ad campaign is going. And that could be negative for your marketing company because what they need is they need the ability to tell if the ad converted into a chat and into a patient. And if that disconnection is happening from that company, that's a problem and you're losing transparency.
So as you incorporate all these third party services, if they're involved with you know, getting new patients or converting a new patient or scheduling them, make sure that your marketing company is at least aware of what you're doing, so they can make sure that your reporting isn't going to have this huge disconnect and a loss of transparency.
Art Wiederman, CPA: So another thing is, you know, this information is just incredible. Amazing. There's so much to know which is going to lead to my probably my last question when I get to it. But how can you track if your website, you know, you go out, you do a great job, you do all these things, you create this website. How do we know if it's attracting people or are there tracking mechanisms that you put in that the doctors can use to see if this is really working?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, there's lots of different analytic software, a lot of which is free that you can incorporate into your website. Google Analytics is probably the most popular one. I mean, it'll tell you how many people are coming from search engines. It'll give you a little bit of data about what they're looking for. Google likes to restrict that for privacy reasons, but it'll tell you where people are, what pages they're looking at, how much time they're spending on those pages, where they come in, where they leave. You know, we often think people just go to the homepage and then click on a service, read the about page. Maybe look at it before and after case, and then they'll be compelled to schedule.
People come in through all sorts of different vectors. They'll search for something specific and land on an FAQ and then go to the service page. So they'll show you the path that people are taking through your website, and that can be very useful if you're trying to figure out why you're not getting enough patients or why they're not converting. So that's one that I would look at. We use a very expensive piece of software called SEMrush to track SEO performance because a lot of insight into what competitors are doing.
So if you're working with a marketing agency like us or someone a company that does marketing, they may have some additional software that you can get access to the reporting for. That may be very interesting to you. Those are the ones that we really use. If you're just a dentist at home and you want to see how you're doing for SEO, you can use incognito mode on your browser or private browsing mode and then just do some spot checking for searches. If you're logged in as yourself, it'll and you've been to your website a bunch of times, it'll show you that disproportionately.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Okay. How do you integrate a website with social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Do you do that?
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah, we built direct integrations into Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is kind of useless, but Facebook is useful. So if you add, you know, new before and after case, we have a little button after you post the content says, do you want to also post this is to your Facebook page. So it just makes it easy to syndicate the content.
I know there's lots of tools, and our mutual friend Rita Zamora has a great product called Connect 90 that allow you to schedule content over, you know, calendar so you can have all these different promotions that you know you may not have necessarily been generated from your website. Start to appear on all your social media profiles, Instagram, Twitter, you know, Facebook, that sort of stuff. I think that kind of those type of scheduling tools are very useful if you're going to do that.
As far as, like the basics. Just have a link to your website somewhere in the upper right corner, maybe in the footer. So people are aware if they use the social tools and they want to follow you or see a little bit more of your content, they can click through. Let them have a little bit of insight into how fun you are in the practice. You know, if you celebrated people's birthdays, anniversaries, if you're doing anything for Halloween, will typically see dentists dress up as something funny. Show a little bit of your character on your social media.
Art Wiederman, CPA: And then the last thing I want to touch on, and I can talk to you for hours about this, you you have given us such great information in the last hour or so. Let's talk about, I'm sure, your favorite topic, stock websites and why they're not really good. And maybe some of the biggest mistakes that you're seeing dentist make if they're trying to do it themselves or other websites that you've seen, I'm sure you've seen a lot of bad, bad websites. And then, you can buy a stock website for $500. You can also get a crown for $300 if you go to certain places. You know you get what you pay for. So talk about why a stock website is just not a good thing because I know it isn't.
Jeff Gladnick: Yeah. So you know, if you're a dentist, you know that your practice is different than other dentists. And what a stock website is telling consumers is my practice is exactly the same. I remember we came across it was a small mountain town in Colorado, and it was like a traveling salesman just kind of went through and sold everybody the exact same website. It was the same design, the same content. They just replaced Dr. Smith with Dr. Jones with Dr. Sampson. And it's like, and I can just imagine patients in that market like, OK, well, this guy was referred. Let me go the next one. Hey, this looks familiar. Then I go the third one. Wait a second. This is just all exactly the same. And when you're trying to sell a service that's very much, you know, about, well, what's your unique value proposition.
You know you got to think about your unique value proposition to people, and that's usually a blend of, you know, your technology, your materials, your education, your philosophy. You know, we do have dentists that you know, wouldn't recommend fluoride treatments. We know other dentists say those guys are crazy. You know, people that want to take the mercury amalgams out of your mouth and people who are still putting them in.
There's a difference in philosophy there. You know, we're agnostic. We're not dentists. We didn't go to dental school. We don't know what the right answer is. There are other dentists that have a lot of high technology and a lot of people who are, you know, more focused on the experience and the comfort people who want a salt of the Earth dental experience, people who often you a spa like experience, you know, other people are much more focused on like, you know, post-COVID, especially like you get in, you get out, you come in through the fire exits, you don't see anybody, you know, wear a mask, don't wear a mask. You know, there's a lot of differentiation that you can explain to people. And if you have a stock website, you're not even trying.
So I'd rather have you have a stock website than no website, but you got to think of it as like a temporary crown. What is your upgrade path going to be? And, you know, how are you going to move on from this once you're once you're ready and sometimes people are on very tight budgets and, you know, affordability is a problem. Just know, am I going to have to throw this thing out completely? Or did I at least pay for a website and then I can just pay you to rewrite the content and then I can pay you to redo the graphic design, and we can just incrementally improve this without having to throw the whole damn thing out and start over.
I'd rather have you on an upgrade path, which is what we try to do with clients who tell us I have no money. Just give me something. I was like, Okay, great. We'll give you the most cost efficient thing at the very beginning of the upgrade path. But that's what we see. As far as mistakes that are concerned, you know, with stock or without. I would say people that purely pick form over function, that is a balancing act and you need the right balance. But sometimes people have these very elaborate, very heavy, you know, animations that just don't perform well on Google. They take up so much weight that it takes so long for people to for the site to load and Google doesn't reward it. And you talked about how many seconds we have to get people's attention. They've already lost it. They're going back as these silly animations are loading all over the place. That happens a lot less than it used to, but it used to be a big problem.
One thing we also touched on, you know, ignoring technical requirements or mobile compatibility there. At one point, Google, Bing and Yahoo all got together, and this is when Bing and Yahoo were bigger considerations, and they created this system called Schema.org. And so you can tell every search engine that you have what type of website you are, you know, are you a, you know, dog sitter? Are you a dry cleaner? Are you a restaurant? Are you a Chinese restaurant or are you a dental practice? And there are specific specifications that you have to embed in the code of your website. There's and there's like, you know, hundred different technical little things like this. And a lot of times, you know, if you if you've never built a dental website before, you're just completely ignorant of these. We were the first time we did it. These are things you learn, you know, at the first 100, 200, five hundred thousand web downloads that you built. I got another little trick.
You know, you should always refer to it as teeth whitening because that gets 20 times the search volume of tooth bleaching. It gets eight times the search volume of tooth whitening, just tooth and teeth eight times lots of little mistakes like that that get made in the copy.
Also, make sure you can make changes. A lot of times people will publish a website and they'll touch it for five years until there's just sick of looking at it. You got to burn the thing down and start completely over. You should be updating your website at least once a month with some little bit of contact. You know, a new before and after case, a testimonial review, maybe an FAQ here and there. And we typically are working with clients and coaching them to do that is the goal. To try to get them to do something like that. It doesn't have to be dentists. It could be the office manager or the front desk. But not being able to make changes is, you know, is guaranteeing that you're going to have to pay a web developer who you don't need to do. You know, you don't need someone with technical expertise to make changes to your site, but you're going to be forced to if you pick the wrong system. So make sure that they can demonstrate to you how to do it.
And don't set yourself for these excessive future costs where this website is going to be guaranteed to go out of style in five years. The design will, you know, there's no way around it. Consumer tastes and preferences change, but make sure you have some sort of flexible system so you don't have to pay for this all over every five years.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Well, as far as I'm concerned, folks, you just got a master's degree level course in what a dental website is supposed to look like. This is one of the better interviews that I've done on our podcast. I mean, you hit everything. Folks, if you listen to this once or twice, you know, again, I'm going to let Jeff give out his information one more time. Whether you use Jeff or not, this is going to give you a lot of really good things that you need to be looking at. In order to get a good dental website, so. Jeff, go ahead one more time as we wrap this up and please stay with me as I take us out of the podcast. Give out your contact information, please, as how do people get a hold you, your email, your website and your phone number?
Jeff Gladnick: Sure. Go to GreatDentalWebsites.com and our phone number is seven two zero three nine nine seven zero seven one. If you want to email me directly, it's Jeff@GreatDentalWebsites.com.
Art Wiederman, CPA: Jeff Gladnick, founder and CEO of Great Dental Websites, thank you so much for taking your valuable time and sharing with our audience. I know for a fact that websites in a dental practice of my clients have made a difference in getting the phone to ring. And that's what we want. We want the phone to ring. What happens after the phone rings, that's another conversation and go back to the 130 140 podcasts I've done and we've got conversations about that.
But Jeff's job is to get the phone to ring, and that's what his websites will do. Jeff, thank you so much for your time and your expertise and what you've done to help the dental profession.
Jeff Gladnick: Thanks again Art. A pleasure to have you on. A pleasure for having me on.
Art Wiederman, CPA: That's all right. It doesn't matter at this point. Anyway, folks, as we go out, just a reminder, take a look at our partner Decisions in Dentistry www.DecisionsinDentistry.com. Look at their great clinical content and their 140 continuing education courses. Go to our partners at the Academy of Dental CPAs www.ADCPA.org.
And again, if you want to get a hold of me to talk about tax planning, financial planning, who's going to win the World Series? Who's going to win the Super Bowl, who's going to win the Masters? I'll talk about just about anything, especially if it has to do with sports. My phone number is six five seven two seven nine three two four three and my email is awiedeman@EideBailly.com.
Well, folks, that will do it for this edition of the Art of Dental Finance and Management with Art Wiederman, CPA. Please tell your friends about our podcast. We are so honored and humbled at the thousands of people every week who download the podcast and listen to it. You go on to Eide Bailly's website and all the podcasts are there. We've done about 140 of them. I think maybe 130. I can't even keep track anymore. And, you know, give us a call. We can help you and listen to the good information.
The podcast that we've done over the last three years literally have become a library of dental, financial management and dental business management. I'm really proud of all the great people and the ones I've done on my own. We've got some great ones coming up. We're going to be talking about the new tax law. We're going to be giving you the updated information on the HHS Provider Relief Fund and what you have to do on that and everything you can do to help grow and build your practice. So with that, this is Art Wiederman for the Art of Dental Finance and Management with Art Wiederman, CPA, and we'll see you next time.