Someone left an ancient artifact at my front door last week. It was something called…"Yellow Pages."

Of course the Yellow Pages aren’t quite an artifact yet, but as more and more people let their fingers do the walking online—rather than in a paper book—where your dental office pops up on an Internet search will have far more impact on how new patients find your office.

Based on this, let’s try an experiment. Pretend you are a young professional with a growing family new to the area looking for a dentist. Would you look in the Yellow Pages? No, you’d Google. So open Google on your computer and type in some search words. Most likely you would just enter dentist and the name of your city.

What do you get? A Google search for "dentist Los Angeles" returns 1,870,000 results. Does your name or practice appear anywhere on the first page of your town? How about page two? In the Los Angeles test example only 8 actual dentists appear on the opening page and 9 on page two. Face it if you aren’t one of those 17 dentists the chances of a random searcher finding your Web page are pretty slim. So of more than 5,000 dentists in Los Angeles at any one time, only 17 can expect new patients to find them with Google.

Optimization

Getting to page one of Google has spawned a whole new industry called SEO. It stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO services have been popping up everywhere and in every industry. Many SEO services promise to use secret formulas get you to page one, after which we are assured riches beyond measure will follow.

But remember what you have been told you about things that were too good to be true? In fact, Google is constantly adjusting their techniques to insure that they deliver the best possible search results. Google does not want results that have been manipulated; they want honest results that satisfy the customer.

Let’s go back to the Los Angeles example and SEO. Not everyone will be using dental practice marketing or SEO, but even if just ten percent are, that means in Los Angeles 500 dentists are trying to claw their way onto page one of Google. And despite vendor hype, they are all using very similar techniques. There is no magic, super secret, mystical, hidden only known to this one person technique that will get you to the top of Google.

And even if you do get to the top of page one…how long will you stay there with hundreds of others working to push you off the top?

Who needs SEO?

Does that mean you should ignore SEO? Not really, it is good practice to optimize your site. However, it doesn’t make sense in most cases to spend a lot on an ongoing basis. Getting to page one of Google cannot be guaranteed in any large city. On the other hand there is a lot you can do to improve your relevance to search engines. Rather than secret SEO formulas a more appropriate method to improve search engine visibility is to have a Web page people like and visit. The more traffic you have the more relevant Google and the other search engines will view your site.

In smaller more medium sized cities, there are not as many dentists and not very many dentists are doing SEO. Therefore unlike in Los Angeles it is much easier to get listed on the first page. In a case like that it makes more sense to invest in SEO. In even smaller towns with less than six or seven dentists you will naturally float to the top because there just isn’t the competition. In this case SEO is less important but just as in the biggest cities the quality of your Web site is critical. That is ease of use, how it serves existing patients, and makes first impressions with potential new patients.

Mapping success

Back to our Google test search for "dentist Los Angeles". Notice there is a little map on page one with ten dentists listed. This is called Google Local and it has the potential to attract more patients than the general Google Web search. Savvy Internet searchers are now using the map feature to find businesses, including dentists, who are located in their neighborhood.

Try this: click the Google local map. What shows up? If you want you can double click your neighborhood to zoom in even tighter. Is your office listed over on the left hand side? Are there any links to your Web site? Any user reviews? Anything under the more info tab?

Rather than some secret formula, it is this kind of information that makes your business and Web site attractive to Google. A site that is a local link with detailed information, with a coupon offer that generates additional Web traffic, which generates user reviews, which results in photo viewing or video viewing becomes attractive to the search engines. As a general rule, the listings with the most user reviews and additional information tend to be the ones that show up highest on the Google Local map list.

If you think about it, it is a lot like the traditional methods we have always used to grow a successful practice. That is to provide easy access, honest high quality service delivered in a friendly manner to attract patients who will be motivated to refer friends and family. We call that word of mouth.

Sam Osmond, VP with Demandforce (demandforce.com) calls Google Local "Word of mouth 2.0"

Online assistance

If you want to DIY, you can sign up with a Google account, "claim" the listing and add all kinds of additional information that a patient could use to find your office and choose you as their dentist. You can add photos, videos, user reviews, Web links and keywords.

However, rather than a DIY approach most dentists will be better served by using a service like Demandforce or Sesame Communications (sesamecommunications.com).

Osmond describes what Demand Force does as "communications and reputational marketing." That is, they gather all the additional information about your office, including user reviews and add it to your Google Local information.

Sesame provides a similar service setting up your Google presence plus all the online tools an office needs to communicate starting with a Web site, e-mail reminders, and Web 2.0 interactivity with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

All of this is important and effective however the only way to ensure that your dental office will appear on page one of a Google search is to buy it. It is easy to do, Sesame will help you with that as well, and you only pay if a searcher clicks your listing. That is you pay per click or PPC.

How much?

To be in the top few listings in a megalopolis like Los Angeles it will cost from $10.00 to $12.00 per click.

To be at the top in a search in Boise a thriving city of 200,000 people you will pay from $1.00 to $2.00.

To get at the top of a search for a small town of 20,000 people anywhere USA will cost you pennies.

Douglas Slighting the President of Dental Branding says, "In LA and smaller cities and towns Pay Per Click (PPC) can make sense. You may not be able to get listed on the first page next to the map naturally, but with PPC you can be listed on the first page and you only pay when someone clicks through to your site. We have found that for many dentists (especially in larger cities) PPC can bring a significant return."

However patients find your website, whether from a Google map, a PPC listing or from a friend’s referral it will all be wasted if your website is no good. If it is unattractive, provides limited information, or worse yet, is out of date it is almost worse than not having a website at all. In fact, Google and the other search engines will demote and even drop sites that have not been updated in the last year.

The best way to grow a practice remains good strong personal referrals and word of mouth. On the other hand, the Internet and new digital media provide us with amazing and relatively inexpensive means to market our services that simply did not exist in the past. The Yellow Pages are fast becoming an historical artifact; don’t let that happen to your practice. The future is coming and it will be amazing.