Your 2026 Digital Marketing Plan for Dental Practices

Chris (02:47.018)
So.

Chris (04:50.844)
Webinar, webinar allow live streaming. Webinar.

Chris (05:10.407)
This is great.

Chris (07:36.163)
It’s on.

Chris (11:35.922)
All right, everybody, we are just about ready to get started here. We have some people trickling in, so I just want to make sure that we get everybody joined that wants to. So we’re going to give everybody just another minute or two here, and then we’ll go ahead and get started with the webinar, all right?

Chris (12:22.334)
All right, looks like people are still trickling in, but I know everybody’s busy, so I definitely don’t want to waste their time because we have other people that are late. So here we go. We’re gonna get started. So I appreciate you jumping on the webinar today. Like I said, I know you guys are busy, your schedule’s slammed, or hopefully it’s slammed. And the last thing, know, most dentists want is another meeting about marketing, right? So hopefully this one’s a little different for you though.

As we’re heading into 2026 and the way patients, mean, really the way patients are finding and choosing a dentist is it’s changing faster than we can almost keep up with. Certainly faster than maybe a lot of dental practices can keep up with. We’ve got, then just in the last not too long, AI has been a big influence, Search behavior, content expectations.

It’s really all shifting and we see and forecast that shift to continue as we get into 2026 and beyond. for the practices that really understand these shifts early, especially, are really the ones that are going to dominate markets, in my opinion, for the next three to five years. In fact, I talk to clients about this all the time. I think that the AI influence is going to be just as big, if not bigger, than the impact we had when

the internet first hit. For those of you that are old enough, me unfortunately, when the internet hit, there were a lot of practices out there like, this is a fad, not just practices, but people in general. This is just a fad, it’s gonna go away, this isn’t a real serious business tool. And then you talk about websites and stuff and people are like, I don’t think I need a website, it’s not gonna be that big of a deal.

Well, those that decided then that the internet was not a big deal and decided to just kind of sit back and wait, they felt the pain of that because they were that far behind when that big internet shift really took place. And I think that’s exactly what we’re experiencing now with AI. I think that dental practices that adopt it early and start at least learning about it and maybe even slowly adopting it will be ahead of the game.

Chris (14:39.833)
kind of everybody else catches up to that. So that’s why I’m gonna talk a little bit about it today for sure. I’m gonna talk about a lot of different things when it comes to marketing, but the trends that we’re seeing for 2026 and the positions we’re trying to put our clients in to make sure that they’re successful going into 2026. So my goal today here is pretty simple. I wanna show you exactly what’s working right now, what’s not working anymore and really how to build a more predictable

consistent new patient engine for your practice specifically, without any guessing, without wasting money and without duct taping random marketing pieces together, which is sometimes the easy thing to do when you feel like you’re behind kind of a knee jerk, we need to be on Facebook, we need to be on Google, how do we do that? And quickly put something together and then what we typically see from those types of reactions is.

you know, spending money, not getting a lot of results and then kind of throwing your hands up and saying marketing is not for me or marketing does not work for dental practices. So specifically what I want to talk about is the real role of AI in dental marketing, not the hype part of it, because healthcare, have to be a little careful with AI and how you adapt it and marketing. And I want to talk about whether SEO still matters, search engine optimization. I’m sure all of you have heard about that and the data. I’m going to put some real data behind it that’s going to answer that question for you.

I’m to talk about answer engine optimization. we talked about SEO now, AEO. is how we really get practices recommended by AI tools like chat, GPT, GROC, like that. Gemini. I’m going to make sure that you get out of here understanding how big of an influence that is and how to get your practice ranked there. I want to talk about what make Google ads fail. We talked just a little bit about it. I want to go.

back to that and I want to show you how to fix it if you are experiencing that right now. And I want to talk about the anatomy of your website and what actually converts to get patients to raise their hand and want more information and the websites and tactics behind those websites that do not get those conversions. And really most importantly, I want to talk about the systems your practice needs behind the scenes so you stop losing 50 to 60 % of the leads that do come in for you in your marketing efforts because we can’t forget about that.

Chris (17:00.171)
It’s not always a lead generation problem. Sometimes it’s a systems problem or a people problem. So we’re to talk about that as well. So by the end of today, my plan is to make sure that you’re going to know exactly where your biggest opportunities are for 2026 and what that lowest hanging fruit is for your practice going into the new year. So if you’re ready, let’s get into it. I will say if you have questions, please go ahead and put them in the chat.

I’ll answer some as I’m going on here. I’m kind of going solo today. So it’s just me, but all of your questions will be answered at the end of the webinar as well. And I’ll definitely field a few of them as we’re getting into this as well. We’ve still got people trickling in. It looks like a strong turnout. We’re also on Facebook live. So if you’re on Facebook or have to move around or whatever, we’re senior casting on our business Facebook page, Kickstart Dental.

Let’s get into it here.

All right, so who the hell am I and why should you listen to me? My wife should be watching this one, I think, but that’s a joke, bad joke. But anyway, I’m the CEO and founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing. This is our 17th year in business. Crazy, it’s been a wild ride in helping dentists and orthodontists really bring in the right kind of new patients and put real strategies behind those. I also wrote a book. Before writing the book was cool.

It’s called the ultimate guide to internet marketing for dentists. It’s on Amazon. It’s on anywhere you can buy a book. If you want a copy, just shoot me a chat and I’ll send you a copy for free. I’ve got over 25 years of local marketing experience. That seems really old to me. And to really date me even further, I used to work for AOL, for those of you who remember America Online. I’ve worked for MapQuest, who used to be the Google Maps of the world. And Dax, who was a phone book company, actually helped head up there.

Chris (18:55.677)
internet marketing strategy. So I’ve spoken at various events throughout the country. I’ve worked with hundreds, if not thousands of dentists and orthodontists over the years. We are not just me, but the company is a four time winner of the Upsity Marketing Award for dental marketing, which we’re very proud of. And I have been personally trained, it’s been a while, but trained by Google at their corporate headquarters in Mountain View. Not many people, unless you work for Google.

can say that. So it really did help me back in the day get a leg up and really understand how we can get local businesses connected more on Google and get more new customers and new patients out of that. So that’s a little bit about me. Hopefully you find that as an authority figure. Maybe not, but at least I’ve got a little bit of experience with this stuff. So let’s talk about why 2026 is a turning point. Patient behavior is shifting.

faster than practices can keep up with. Raise your hand or give me a thumbs up in the chat or whatever if you agree with that because it’s absolutely the truth. AI is really changing how some of this is working. We’ll get way more into that in a second. I’ll get in lots of thumbs up here. Websites, ads, SEO, all those strategy that worked three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago are underperforming today. It’s not that you just can’t set it and forget it and expect to get great results out of it.

We’re finding that practices that adapt early, like we talked about earlier, will dominate their markets. They’re the ones who’ll get a leg up on the market and the competition. And by the way, we’re in a situation with AI that we’re finding that AI, I think, is going to be a great equalizer to DSOs, agencies, or I’m sorry, bigger practices with endless pocketbooks in terms of budget. I think AI is going to be a…

real game changer for the smaller practices. And quite frankly, practices that are not going to adapt to this, they are going to fall behind and pretty quickly because we’re moving fast. The rules have changed. know, most dentists are going to play by that old game. And I get that. It’s kind of what you know and what you’re used to. And hey, if it worked for this long, it should work for that long. Right. Well, unfortunately, that’s just not the way this game is going to work. So these are some things that why I believe that 2026 specifically is going to be a big turning point for a lot of practices.

Chris (21:19.024)
So what’s changed in the last 12 months? I did one of these last year. I’ve been doing them year over year. I’ll do one again next year, hopefully. But, you know, patients are searching in different ways. Last time we talked 12 months ago is Google, Google, Google. You know, everything’s Google and that’s still the case. And I’ll show you some data behind that later. But we are starting to see more AI tools take effect. People are using chat, GPT, GROK, Gemini as search engines versus going to Google. So they’re typing in like, who’s the best dentist near me?

or I need an emergency dentist near me, who should I call? Right? And we’re starting to see those creep into new patient leads. We’re getting more ads from Google. And it is pushing more people to AI generated answers as well, because when you do a search now, if you’re paying attention on Google, you get ads at the top, they’re not as well labeled as they used to be in terms of making it clear that it’s an advertisement. And then also you’ve got Gemini up there that’s giving an AI answer.

So before anybody can even get to like a local listing, if you will, a true organic listing on Google, you’ve got to scroll down like a quarter away the page or more. So that’s changing the game a little bit. Authentic video, I did this, I did one of these like 10 years ago to a group of business owners. It wasn’t just Dennis. So we talked about though, how big video is going to be in the year. And video is even now more powerful than it was then. Authentic video though, and I’m going to show you the difference.

in that during this presentation. And consumers people like you and me as a consumer, we just expect instant everything now, Like SMS, we got DoorDash, we got, you know, online booking and reservations, right? So we’ve got to unfortunately adapt to that and make sure that they’re getting what they need because guess what? If you don’t give them what they need, they’re going to get that from somewhere else. So we’ve got to make sure that we get out in front of this.

and tension spans are way shorter. And the sloppy systems, meaning follow-up systems, are gonna get exposed really fast. I’m gonna tell you exactly what I mean by that in our lead flow section of this webinar. So the really bottom line here is 2026 demands clarity, speed, and trust. That’s absolutely the case. Speed is really what I’m gonna emphasize in this as well. So what’s the opportunity for you guys? It’s big. 2020, sweet.

Chris (23:40.624)
2026 is gonna be a good year for dental practices. Patients are checking multiple AI tools first before calling a dentist though. So we’ve got to really make sure that we’ve got a good reputation, not only on Google and Facebook and these places, but also that those tools are flowing into AI so people can quickly see how good of a dentist, air quotes that you are. We talked about the more AI generated answers, authentic video, attention spans, that kind of stuff is all there.

So what I wanna make sure that you walk away with today is a clear picture of what’s changed, why it matters, the exact strategies that we are implementing for our clients that are gonna work in 2026, and what to avoid so you stop wasting money. That’s the biggest thing, right? I would say probably 75 % of the clients that we’re bringing on now have been with another agency prior and they’ve gotten burned. They think they’re wasting a lot of money.

And it makes it harder for us, quite frankly, to make sure that they understand that we’re a little bit different. But I understand that because you don’t want that feeling of just burning thousands of dollars every month and not getting things back for it. So we’re going to talk about how to build that predictable new patient engine. And really the biggest opportunity is going really into the new year. So let’s start this off, I think.

in terms of, you know, how is AI fitting into dental marketing specifically right now? And I think this is probably the top of mind for most people. So let’s start off with it. So this is how most dentists are using AI right now in four major forms. Now, that doesn’t mean on the clinical side, I’m just talking about on the marketing side, but number one in tracking, front desk training, automated new patient follow ups and voice agents. And I’ve got careful here.

in terms of voice agents because we need to be careful with it. And I’ll explain a little bit more about that. I think I’m gonna go back here just a second, sorry. If I can do that, here we go, sorry. Technical difficulties. So I’m gonna talk more about this specifically right now. So with tracking, how dentists are using AI. So.

Chris (25:56.999)
AI gives you the ability now to understand exactly what’s going on if you know how to implement it. So what I mean by that is you’re going to be able to take, for instance, what we do for our clients is that we take a call, say somebody calls in or somebody fills out a form. It comes into your practice. We send that immediately to AI. It’s all HIPAA secure, of course. And AI takes that call, say it’s a five minute call. It listens to the whole call. It understands what went on in the call.

So it gives a quick summary instead of having to listen to the whole call, you can read just a small paragraph of what the call was about, what happened and what the outcome was. And then we can even provide all kinds of details like where it originated from. Was it a Google ad? Was it a Yahoo ad? Was it a Google organic? Did it come from an AI agent or AI bot? Where did that lead originate from? And so it can show you a lot of different things that

you maybe didn’t know before about your practice. And now before even us, had humans do this. We didn’t have humans actually listen to every call that comes in and determine all these things. And it took hours and hours and days and days to do. Now that can be done in seconds by using AI. And the accuracy, quite frankly, is probably better than human. I think we’re at a 90 some percent accuracy rating. And as we train it more, the AI.

the more accurate it gets. So it can be a great tool for you for understanding your marketing. Secondly, with front desk training. This is a biggie. A lot of dentists that we talk to, they know that they tell me that they have good front desk people, or maybe they don’t really know for sure, right? Because they’re in the back doing what they do. They don’t necessarily have a lot of time to listen to all these calls and make sure that they know that the front desk is fully trained and doing a good job for these leads that are coming in.

So AI can really help with that now in the sense that when we record these calls and we send them to AI, not only are they doing the tracking part of it, but we can actually have them identify who answered the call. So if you have more than one person answering, it’ll tell you who it was that answered the phone call. And it will also evaluate the call based on training modules. It will evaluate it and tell on each call what went well on the call.

Chris (28:18.104)
and what maybe the front desk person could have done a little better on the call. So you’re getting instant feedback to these people that are answering the phones and really are the first line of communication with these potential new patients. So then as a business owner, you can look at this and you can come up with trends and say, Randy isn’t doing a good job over and over and over on this. That’s a training opportunity. Or Sally’s doing a great job with this, this and this. We should have Sally talk to Randy and train him on what she’s doing so well, right?

We have to continually be getting better on all aspects of our business. And the front desk is an absolute critical one, especially for marketing. Because if we’re going to spend these thousands of dollars in marketing, we need to leave it to somebody that’s qualified to handle those and doing everything that they possibly can to get those new patients booked. So AI can really help with that. Automated new patient followups. This is really cool. And this is still emerging, all of this stuff.

really still emerging, but automated new patient follow-ups. So one way that we use that is, and if you catch me like at after hours, I’ll tell people that AI is useful, but you can’t just plug in AI to everything and say, hey, I’m done. I don’t have to worry about anything. I’ve got AI handling all my calls, all my this, that. You can’t do this. Cause we’re in an industry with healthcare where people, it’s going to be really important. People still get that human touch. You know, we’re not ordering pizzas here, right?

If I’m ordering a pizza, I don’t care if it’s AI taking the order. But if I’m talking to somebody about my healthcare or my family’s health, I don’t want to talk to an AI bot. I don’t know about you. And that’s not going to change anytime soon. You’re still going to have that personalized care that’s going to be needed and that human voice of empathy, sympathy, you know, just being able to give some feedback live. So that’s not going to go away. But there are things, having said that, that you can do to automate some of these new patient follow ups.

For instance, let’s say somebody calls, they’re calling about implants. First thing anybody asks usually is how much are they, right? Well, you go through that, your front desk goes through that, and then the person says, you know what, I need to check my insurance, I need to talk with my spouse, whatever it might be, I’ll call you back, right? Well, most practices, not all of them, will do two things. They’ll just hope the person calls back, right? Which is kind of hope, what I call hope marketing, that’s not a valid part of marketing, by the way, or they’ll,

Chris (30:42.115)
kind of make a note of it. And then if they have time after hours or the next morning or something, they’ll pick up the call, pick up the phone and call them to try to follow up. That works, but it’s not consistent. It depends on how busy your front desk is. You really need a system in place. It’s consistent and will automatically do this for you. So what we can do is when that caller calls in, once the call is over, the front desk person can just press one on the phone.

and it will automatically send them into a follow-up sequence. It’s ran by AI and it will follow up with that caller the next day is typically what we have it set for. And it will say something like, hey Chris, we spoke yesterday about your implants. I haven’t heard back. I just wanted to make sure you were taken care of or if you had any other questions for us. And the whole point here is just to get them to reengage in conversation. And then once they do send a text message back, your front desk is alerted and then they can engage in the conversation and hopefully get them scheduled.

But then that’s done consistently every day and you don’t have to worry about it. And it’s a text message. not, you know, it doesn’t come across as an obvious AI solution. And then lastly, voice agents, very careful here. We’ve had clients, even though we tried to talk them out of this, as using these voice AI agents as full-time front desk people, meaning taking every call that they have, every consideration, and guys, we’re just not there yet, right?

where AI voice agents are helpful. Let me back up a little bit. Let me explain what a voice AI agent is. It’s an AI bot that we train. Ours particularly is named Taylor. She’s really good. And we train her all about your practice. So we put all kinds of information into her and we tell her your hours, what you offer, insurances. We do like a…

just all kinds of crazy questions that we could come across. We train her to be able to answer. Okay. So it’s like a, it’s like a human conversation you’re having with somebody, but it’s an actually an AI bot. She sounds real. She sounds like an actual human. you know, it’s, it’s sometimes hard to tell and that will continue to get better. so where we have these voice agents plugged in right now and where we’re having success with is as, a replacement for call services or voicemails.

Chris (33:04.61)
So these are for callers that are going, calling you after hours, going to voicemail or going to a call service. Taylor or an AI voice agent can perform much better because she’s more interactive. She knows more about your practice. So instead of sending those calls to voicemail or an answering service, that’s where a voice AI agent is applicable. Just don’t set these things up for every call because it’s, you’re going to lose that human connection and it’s just not going to be great for you or the practice going forward.

This is where we see the most. There’s other ways, of course, that we use AI for practices. We help it with content ideation. We help it with social media posting, some ad writing, never a hundred percent by itself. It’s always human aided. But we can use AI to crunch a lot of data. So think of it this way. We’ve got years of Google ads that we’ve done for dental practices, right? We can take all of those ads and throw them into AI.

and it will spit out new ads based on which ones were the most successful. Those are the types of things that agencies should be able to do for you. And then what the result of that is, is a quicker return on your investment so that we can get results faster with some of our ads and social media posts, things like that. there’s a lot of other ways, but these are really the four main reasons that, or ways people or dental practices are using AI right now.

So does SEO still matter? SEO is the art of showing up on Google organically. So like at the very top here, you’ve got a paid ad. Hopefully you guys can all see this. Down here, you’ve got organic listings and one paid ad. So this middle section is what we call Google Business Places or the Google Maps people call it. This is an absolute goldmine for dental practices. To get listed here in the top three, just by itself could be a very changing in a positive way.

practice changer for your practice. So this is organic and then everything below is organic as well. So SEO is the art or the science or maybe both of getting your website to rank in these organic spots here, just in case you weren’t sure what SEO is. So what I do want to show you here is that a study recently shows that 71 % of clicks come from organic listings and only about 11 % of clicks come from paid ads.

Chris (35:31.613)
All right, so when we’re asking, when we’re trying to answer the question, is SEO still matter? You know, we’re starting to kind of get the story here, right? So 71%, so seven out of 10 people that do a search for a dental practice are gonna click on an organic listing versus a paid ad. That’s a big deal. This is data from our agency. I’ve blurred some individual client stuff out, but this is for all of this year so far. So up until yesterday, essentially.

And this shows us all the calls that we’ve had come in for our clients. 213,000 calls for the year that we’ve brought in for clients, which is cool on its own way. But this is the kind of aggregated data that I’m talking about. So you can see that 71 % of calls are coming from organic sources for our clients. So up here, you can see Google My Business. That’s that local map pack. That’s over almost 100,000 calls represent just that.

Google Ads is second though, and we do very well with Google Ads, but they have their own time and place, and I’ll talk more about that in a second. Google Organic, those are the regular listings that I showed below the maps. And GMB is the same as Google My Business, we just have it separated for some odd reason. So when you add all of these up, it represents 71 % of 213,000 calls. Isn’t that crazy? So yes, SEO still matters, and in a huge way.

Now is SEO changing a little bit? Yep, but you can’t ignore this and just because it’s been around for a while, think SEO is dead. It’s absolutely not. I just showed you absolute 100 % proof that SEO is a big deal for dental practices and it should still be a big deal for your strategy and marketing going forward. So what about AEO and GEO? What the hell is that, right? AEO is called answer engine optimization.

and this is the science of getting you to show up when people do searches like this. So this is ChatGPT, I did this search late last night. Who are the best dentists in Tulsa, Oklahoma? And it spits out Google-like results here. So all around highly rated, now this goes down and talks about more specifics, but these practices are now getting phone calls and visits to their website because these people are using ChatGPT as a search engine, okay?

Chris (37:54.146)
So will this take money and attention away from Google? Yes, and it already has, but so far it’s been pretty small. By far, Google is still a 900 pound gorilla in the room, right? But we are seeing more more new patients coming in from these AI type searches. And it’s something that we need to do and what we’re doing right now to help future proof our clients for. Because I believe, and our strategy believes,

that this is becoming more and more prevalent. More and more people are going to use these. mean, for heaven’s sakes, ChatGPT now has its own browser, web browser. It’s like, you know, use Chrome or Microsoft Edge. Well, ChatGPT now has its own web browser. So this is just going to continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I would expect by this time next year, we’re talking about a much bigger piece of the pie that ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini are really

really providing in local search. So I hope that kind of, I’m just trying to warn you for this. You need to future proof this right now if you’re not already. Okay. Now this is another way that ChatGPT displays local information. This looks familiar, right? Remember that screenshot we did a little while ago on Google where it had the map in the middle and it had listings?

Same thing, just in their own way. So you can see that ChatGPT realizes this and they’re getting this thing built and ready to be an absolute search giant. So it’s prepping itself right now. Now, here’s the reality though, for data that we have, and this is all pretty new, right? But Google search is still, as you can see here, the dominant platform. 10 million plus searches. ChatGPT is only doing 500,000 to a million queries, but it is growing fast.

and then Proplexity and then Bing and then Google Gemini. This is all gonna change so fast. It’s almost not worth publishing at this point because it changes monthly, but you can still see that we’ve got to use Google as our number one source in terms of search right now, but it still means that we’ve got to definitely future proof for the other things. All right, so what did we get out of this? Google’s still the king for direct dental based searches.

Chris (40:12.738)
but these GEO driven platforms are catching up fast. They’re more FAQ style, they’re educational, they do comparisons. And many users even today are bypassing Google for these tools. And it just means that you need to show up in another place, right? It’s like, it’s just another option for people. And the jobs of agencies like ours at Kickstart is to get you to show up where your people are looking for you. So.

The new SEO formula, figure out what the most important keywords are based on your service, service area and search volume. So that means figure out how the hell people are trying to find a dentist. I can tell you right now in almost every market, dentist near me is the number one search on Google for finding a dental practice right now. But we’ve got a whole list of a thousand of them probably, and I’ll be more than happy to send them to you if you’d like. Just shoot me an email, chris at kickstartdental.com and we’ll get that out to you but.

We’ve got to figure that out kind of first. So there are some other tools as well. The Google keyword tool, if you have access to that word stream, SpyFu, you can run Google ads and it will start helping you understand that as well. We’ve got to set up a great website because a website is still critical for you. And we have to set up unique pages targeting the keywords that we want. Pages for each service in each city, especially if you want to rank in neighboring markets, it’s very important. We’ve got to optimize your

website for user experience, site speed, for on-site optimization, off-site optimization. could do my own seminar or webinar just on that. And you’ve got to be able to track results. We can’t just continue to throw money against a wall and hope for the best, because hope is not a strategy, right? So we’ve got to know if it’s working or not. Because if it’s working, great. We’ll continue to do it and continue to invest. If it’s not, we’ve got to transition to something that is going to get results.

obviously track everything you’re doing. So my shameless plug here, I’ll go through quickly, is if you want to schedule a time with me, and I do all of these myself, go to KickstartDental.com. I will get you where you rank now, the keywords you should be going after, a complete analysis of the website. It’s a complete session on your practice, and just to give you a snapshot of where you are and what I think it will take to get you to where you want to be.

Chris (42:33.46)
No, required. You don’t have to pay any money for this. Just go to kickstartdental.com, click the free schedule, or what is it? Discovery call button. It’s all over my website, trust me. And you can set up a time right on my calendar and go through that. So, thought I’d just throw that in there. So, just to kind of sum this up, and again, we could do a complete webinar just on SEO. But here are some things that you’ve really got to think about if you’re doing your own SEO, or maybe you’re with a company right now that’s doing it, but you don’t feel like you’re getting good results.

These are some of the things that we’re doing right now for our clients that are getting results and they are getting traction. Now, I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that if we’re going after 100 keywords for dental practice, we get all 100 of those keywords ranked number one on Google. Just doesn’t work that way. It’s a little more complex than that. We do get a vast majority of our keywords ranked on the first page for clients. The other problem with SEO, there’s good and bad. The good is that it’s a long-term marketing asset.

Meaning once we do get you ranked and ranked up pretty highly, that’s something that should be there for a while. We put a lot of our clients into a maintenance mode, if you will, where we kind of keep their results where they need to be. Because if you quit feeding the beast, it’s gonna go away. So we’ve got to at least keep doing some tasks to make sure that you stay there. But it’s something that you don’t have to spend thousands on every month just to make sure you’re there. But with something like Google Ads,

You’re only as good as your credit card, right? So if you take your credit card away, you lose that visibility immediately. It’s not a long-term marketing asset. So the good about SEO is it is a long-term asset. The bad is it takes some time. It takes a few months to really get these rankings where they need to be. How long, it depends on your competition, how big the market is you’re trying to rank in, things like that. We start seeing some results in month one for very little, and then it kind of ramps up from there.

Usually I tell people within three to six months, you should start seeing a noticeable difference in your rankings. And we prove that through our tools. But it’s a longer strategy. The good part of paid ads is that it’s quick. We can have it up and running within a week or two and start getting traffic in that even Google ads takes a little bit of time to kind of filter in. you will, Google goes, Google ads go through this learning phase. It’s about two to four weeks.

Chris (44:57.207)
of really understanding what it is we’re trying to achieve with those ads, but it’s much quicker still than SEO. So when we do strategies, I like to include both ads and SEO because while we’re waiting for the SEO results to catch up, we can use paid ads to offset that a little bit, get patients in the door, get some revenue coming in while we’re waiting for the SEO stuff to catch up. And then once it does, it’s gonna overtake what you’re doing in terms of paid ads. That’s the plan.

But what you saw here on the screen are some things that we do SEO wise. We’ve got a list of 100 to 200 things that we do for an SEO campaign for this initial setup. And then we’ve got another list that we do ongoing monthly to make sure that our clients are staying where they need to be. So these are a few of those things. All right, let’s do a live example here, somewhat live. I did this screenshot this morning.

I don’t go live in these webinars because something always breaks and it makes me look stupid and I don’t really need help doing that. So I like to just do the screenshots. This is one of our clients, Aurora Family Dentistry. I believe Aurora is the second largest city in Colorado. So it’s a big market. Aurora, Colorado is really big. But you can see Dentist Aurora. This is a local search. I’m in Aurora, Colorado is what it shows here. They are number one in the Google map and they’re number one in regular organic.

So they are doing very well. They’re very happy with us. They get a lot of new patients every month, but it wasn’t overnight. They’ve been with us several years. It didn’t take several years to get them here, but they’ve been with us several years and they’re getting really good results out of this kind of stuff. I just wanted to show you that this stuff’s possible and it’s definitely achievable even in these large markets like Aurora.

This is them in a chat GPT search. This is more recent work that we did for them to make sure that we get them kind of future proofed for this. And look, they’re not number one, but they are number two. So that’s pretty good. We’re still working on that number one, but you know, AI is changing every day and we’re just trying to stay ahead of it. So we’re right in the middle of kind of future proofing a lot of our clients for this type of search. So just to give you an example of what can be done with the chat GPT. Give me a thumbs up if you see this or if you’re kind of grasping exactly

Chris (47:09.951)
you know, what we’re trying to achieve here and what’s going on. I just want to make sure everybody’s with me. Sometimes it’s hard to do these one-sided conversations where I don’t get a lot of verbal feedback. So, cool. All right. Thanks guys. Okay. Here’s another live example. So this is actually, this is pretty cool. This is the reporting tool that we use for our clients. So you kind of get to see an internal view of this, but this is, I believe this is November’s report. I’m not a hundred percent positive on that, but I think it is.

So one of the reports that we provide and people can log into at any time live is essentially a live dashboard of what’s going on. So they see how much money they spent. That’s what you see right here. How many verified leads have come in? So how many new patient leads have come in? The cost per lead is $49. This particular practice closes about 50 % of them. So that’s what we use here as a gauge. So there are about 50 new patients for the month.

which for them is about $500 a patient. Everybody’s a little different, but for them, that’s about what it is. And that’s so that brings in about $20,000 of revenue for November on a just under $5,000 budget. Now this budget includes the fees that go to us and then any ad fees as well. So like they’re doing some paid ads as well too. So you can see about a four to one return just on that month. But then we calculate, okay, well what if say 50 of these patients turn into long-term patients, right?

Let’s say just half of them do, which hopefully it’s higher than that for your practice. But let’s say 25 of them stay with you an average of seven years. See, dental practices just forget about this side of it, the lifetime value of the patient. They just sometimes want to see what’s in it for them right now, right this second. Totally get that, I’m a business owner too. But you’ve also got to look at the longer term value of the client or the patient in this case. So what we’ll say is if that revenue stays the same and they stay with you for an average of seven years, half of them.

you’ll make $88,000 off of that one new patient in the lifetime, or for those 25 patients, sorry. So as you can see, when you take 88 and 20, or just the 88, and you’ve got an investment of $5,000, that’s a pretty good return, right? So just to give you some kind of industry standards, if you can get this number, the cost per verified lead, meaning it’s somebody that’s local in your area, they…

Chris (49:26.058)
wanting a service that you provide and they have the means to pay for it, whether it’s insurance or cash, whatever it means, that’s a verified lead. It’s not just a phone call. You gotta be careful of that too. So if you can get this under 200, 150, somewhere in there, that’s really good. So you can see obviously this client’s knocking it out of the ballpark right now. So these are just some things that you can see that’s really going well and what can be achieved in your practice as well, as long as you put together a really good strategy for the practice.

So we have 17 minutes left. I’m have to speed up because I tend to ramble a little bit. Just ask anybody that knows me. All right, so number one, I wanna talk about Google Ads. There are now two types of Google Ads. A lot of dentists don’t even know about this new kind, and it’s not even that new, it’s a couple years old now. They’re called Google Local Service Ads. So if you’ve done a search for a dentist or for yourself maybe, and you’ve seen other ads that look like this, they typically will have a picture next to them, they’ll have their reviews here.

They’ll say Google screened or Google verified right here. Those are called Google local service ads. And this is why I love them and why I hate them. I hate them because it’s hard to set up. What you have to do to get these set up and we do it. So it’s, you the works on us, but it can be a little bit of a slower process to get them set up is that you’ve got to send in some information to Google. So like your insurance information, your license number, some other information.

And Google takes this and kind of does a mini background check on your practice to make sure you’re legit, your license is valid, your insurance is valid, all that cool stuff. And once that happens though, that’s where you get this Google screened or Google verified button up here. And what this is designed to do is build trust around the practice. Like, whoa, Google’s already verified that these guys are good. So I bet you they’re the best dentists that there are, right? Obviously that’s not true, but perception is reality sometimes, right?

So these are Google local service ads. I hate them because they’re harder to set up for us, but I love them because they’re not pay per click. See regular Google ads, which you can see down here under the sponsored, those are pay per click. So every time somebody clicks that ad, it’s costing you 10, $15, $8, whatever it might be. So it could be some little kid that hijacked his mom’s computer is eight years old and just clicking crap on the, on, you know, on Google and they’re running up people’s bills, right? There’s really no intent there.

Chris (51:48.102)
But with Google local service ads, these are pay per lead. So you only pay when somebody picks up the phone and calls your practice and it’s an actual verified lead. So love it and hate it. We like to do these. They’re a little bit of a pain to set up, but they do get good results and you’re only paying for actual performance versus just people randomly clicking. Hopefully that makes sense. Now next is Google ads. This is what we were just talking about. These are the traditional been around for 20, 30 years.

They show up at the top of the page. This is a little bit of an older screenshot, so it doesn’t show ad next to each one anymore. It just shows it at the top. So as you scroll down, you forget that these are even ads. that’s a pretty new change. So we’ll see how that’s going to work out. But these are regular ads. It’s pay per click. Again, a great way to get started. Both Google LSA ads and Google ads have up and running very quickly and can get results pretty quickly. But remember,

These ads are only getting about 11 % of clicks, right? So give me a thumbs up if you click on paid ads. You probably don’t. I’m probably not gonna see a lot, but a lot of people do. So 10 % when it’s billions or multi hundreds of millions still adds up. So people are still using these ads and it can be a quick win strategy for you. All right, so here’s why I see some of these Google ads fail. This is one of the reasons.

is they set up these general campaigns, emergency campaigns, cosmetic, right? Et cetera, Invisalign, implants, whatever. So each, I guess I should say each campaign, when somebody clicks on an ad, say for general dentistry, they click it and it just goes to the homepage of the website. Or if they click cosmetic dentistry, again, it just goes to the homepage of the website. If they click implants, homepage of the website. That’s a major problem.

because people are impatient. We already talked about that. If I click an implant ad, for instance, and it just goes to your website homepage, what does that mean? That means I’ve got to go find dental implants and find out the information that I need. People aren’t going to do that. They’re going to go to the next person. And then when you click on their implant ad, guess where it’s going to go? To the implant page on their website at least. That’s bottom line recommendation. But what we do is we create a special landing page outside of your website.

Chris (54:10.902)
that only talks about dental implants and it’s built to convert. So we’ve got its own lead form. We’ve got a tracking phone number on it. So it’s all talking about call to action stuff, free consultation, know, what’s included, what we humanize it, the before and after, the real impact statements is really what you want here. So don’t just let people set these things up and go to your homepage. Get specific, get them to the information that they specifically want.

That’s one of the reasons that we see these things fail. There’s a lot of other things. Google Ads is a complex beast. There’s a lot of things that you have to choose from and click on and you have to know how to write ad copy. Don’t rely just on AI for this stuff. You’ve got to really know how to set this stuff up or you can spend a lot of money and not get many results out of it. So just make sure you know what you’re doing or you’re with somebody that really knows what they’re doing. Okay.

So track it, you’ve got to be able to track these things. So again, this is our dashboard, this is the one we have for Google Ads specifically. All of our clients have access to this. So you can see how much money you’ve spent for that month so far, how many leads have come in, what the cost per lead is, you can see ads, impressions, clicks, everything. Not only do you have to be able to look at this stuff, but you have to be able to comprehend it and take action on it, right? So if we’re going into a client and we see this, we’re like, okay, they’re doing pretty good, but uh-oh, wait a minute.

Their cost per leads up 22 % from the previous month. Is this just a trend or is there bigger things going on? So we see this and we look a little bit deeper, but trust me, $42 is still really good. So we have to track this, comprehend it, and then actually take action on the data. You can’t do knee-jerk reactions, because I don’t want to start changing this campaign just because of this, especially if over the last three, four months it’s been really solid. I’ll look it over and make sure that everything, there’s not something technical broken.

but we’re not gonna make a knee jerk reaction just from one month of performance. So hopefully that makes sense. Websites that convert, this is a big game. I’m trying to speed up a little bit here. We got 10 minutes left. So for instance, this is a website that we did for a practice in Miami. She’s a really high end practice. She does awesome work. Really check out her website, Dr. Patty in Miami. And a huge market obviously, tons of competition. But I wanna go over some things that make not just her website, but also.

Chris (56:33.011)
other people’s and what you can do to your website to really make it better. I’ll hit that in a second, but we’ve got to open ourselves up for way people communicate as well. People are impatient. They expect instant everything. So you’ve got to be able to set up your website to give them multiple ways to communicate with you. There are more and more people now that want to be able to text message with you. Okay. It’s just whether you love it or hate it, it’s just the reality. I’ve got the data to prove it and you need to really open yourself up for it. So

We build out systems that allow people to text message with the practice, back and forth with the front desk. It’s pretty easy setup, pretty straightforward. We humanize it to make sure that they realize that it’s humans that they’re speaking with, but you really need to open yourself up for this instant type of communication. Here’s some key ideas that you need to do for your practice. This is part of a checklist that we really go through when we build websites or revamp websites. Conversion drivers, online bookings are great, two-way chat.

phone numbers everywhere, forms are everywhere. Just make it very easy for somebody to do business with you. Authentic images and videos. Don’t put stock photos in your website. The people that know me best know that I absolutely lose my mind over this stuff. In fact, it’s almost gotten to the point where I won’t take on a new client if they insist on using stock imagery. It’s because, it’s not because it’s like I’m some crazy dude, which maybe I am, but I’ve got data. see the data every day of what works and what doesn’t for dental practices.

And stock imagery is one of those things that does not work. So don’t use it. All right, video elements. We talked about this earlier. Video is huge. I’m gonna talk about it more in just a second. A welcome website video from your doctor, from your practice manager, whoever, just quick, 15 seconds shot on an iPhone. I’ll give you the script, just email me. I’ll give it to you, what we use. Videos for your services. Just do a down home explanation, layman’s terms of what you’re doing and what you’re trying to get out of.

A video explaining why somebody should choose you. You’ve probably got 50 competitors in your area. Why should somebody choose you versus them? It’s a valid question and it’s a demanded answer from PayHitch these days. So just do a video. You’ll humanize yourself and come across great. Showcase the online reviews. Get your basics in order on the website. Phone number. You’re thinking, well, duh. You know how many websites I look at every day?

Chris (58:56.22)
dental practice websites and I don’t find a phone number I’ve got to like scroll to the bottom or go to the contact us page No, boy. No, don’t do that Make it easy for them ensure that there’s a web form test customers can fill out Credibility so make sure those reviews the social proof is there Update the calls to action to ensure they’re speaking to your customer Sometimes we do what’s called heat mapping on a website So it shows when people go to your website what they’re most interested in like where they click

or where they hover the most, so you can kind of see where they’re reading as they hover. It’s really cool stuff and we try to change up messaging based on those patterns. Live chat, we talked about that. And offer clients the option to book online. However, be careful with it. Make sure that you’re not getting a bunch of people scheduling but then they don’t show up. You need to do a human follow-up with these people. As soon as they schedule online, give them a call, verify that everything’s good, make sure that they’re gonna be a good patient for you.

and just make sure you guarantee that booking for them. So there’s some key drivers to making sure your website’s gonna convert. But I will ask you this, is lead flow the problem with you? Is it really the problem? Are you not getting enough people to your website and to your asset, digital assets? Because here’s the thing that we find, 50 to 60 % of inbound leads leave unconverted. So you leave your website, never be heard from again. Web forms, when somebody takes the time to fill out a web form,

They fail to convert. Do you know why? It’s what I call speed to lead. People are impatient. We’ve talked about it, right? They want instant everything. So if they feel something out and they’re not followed up with when this says 15 minutes, I’d even drop that to 10 minutes, even though I wrote it, they go cold. You have a less, if you wait 10 to 15 minutes, even your chances of them actually answering the phone and wanting to do business with you drops off. You got to get back to him quickly.

The average customer or patient actually also has to be followed up with five to seven times before actually scheduling the page. Because guess what, or scheduling the appointment, guess what? They don’t want to come see you. It’s not on the top of their list. They’re not really looking forward to coming to the dentist. So it’s very easy for them to put off a voicemail, a phone call, a text message, right? You got to kind of continually stay on them for get them to actually schedule. And everybody now prefers this instant way to communicate.

Chris (01:01:20.172)
When we’re looking at marketing, we want to make sure, yeah, we will get a lot of leads in, but darn it, we got to make sure that the website and your systems will set you up for success. Meaning that you can handle these things. You can interact the right ways, right? And you can follow up appropriately to make sure that they’re getting what they need. Okay. So some takeaways here. We’re getting ready to wrap it up here. What I want you to kind of think to yourself right now, and maybe after you’re done with this, you’re eating your lunch or, you know, doing whatever.

You know, what areas that we’ve talked about today and we’ve just really scratched the surface here, but what areas do you really feel as though you need to focus on? Think about that right now. Write down a couple of notes on a piece of paper. Cause guess what? Even if you just take action on one thing that you learned today, it’s going to make your practice that much better tomorrow and going into 2026. Right? So think about that. What do you think is the easiest for you to implement? What do you think is going to be the best way for you to implement at least some of this stuff for 2026? Right?

I do want to talk about, before we wind up here, authentic video content. Don’t overthink this is what I’m saying. You don’t, now we offer it, we offer to send out a video crew and shoot a very professional video and guess what? They’re awesome. But you don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. Be human first, a dentist second is what I always tell people with video. Use that iPhone. These phones, these cameras, these phones are amazing now. These 4K cameras, the sound is good.

you don’t have to have a professional setup, right? Use real patient stories with permission. Always get their permission and it’s good to get a form from AI or your lawyer or whatever and make sure they sign off to let you use them. What I will say about shooting on your phone, it is more relatable. Even if it shakes around a you can get a little cheap tripod like I have right now. I’m shooting with you for 30 bucks on Amazon. Just get one of those and put your phone on it. It’s real easy to use.

Make sure though, HIPAA stuff, make sure there’s nothing behind you that shows patient information. Okay, I’ve seen that go sideways before. Just make sure of that. Make sure of what you’re videotaping behind you, okay? Show the why, not just the what. that makes sense. Don’t just list what you do. Hi, my name is Dr. Chris and I do dental, no, be human, right? Just give them the bottom line to it, very factual.

Chris (01:03:45.672)
This is what you’re coming for. This is what you get out of it. This is the end result type stuff. Keep it short, 15 to 45 seconds. People don’t have the attention span for real long videos, right? And guess what? You can take those 15 to 45 second videos and then you can put them out onto social media networks like as reels, as shorts. You can use them everywhere. YouTube channel. You really become more the authority figure when you do it that way. And film real moments in the practice, embarrassing moments, fun stuff.

people coming in dressed up for Halloween. You know, be light with things, because you know, I think that will really help you stand out. So just some things we talking about video in 2026 in the next year. These are some of the things that we really try to target and just just make our practices stats stick, stick, stand out. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’m trying to go too fast now. All right, so embrace the imperfections like we talked about, even if you mess up on a video, that’s fine. It makes you look human.

We all are and people buy from people at the end of the day, right? So they’re gonna appreciate that. Add captions though if you can. Use a service like Descript, Riverside’s pretty good. Let’s see the other one out there. There’s a couple out there that you can add captions really easy. I think Canva, can even do it now as well. Captions are just what you’re saying on video will show up at the bottom of the video. If they’re at work or something, they probably don’t have their sound on.

Have a clear call to action. the end, don’t be afraid to ask for somebody to come see you, right? Say, hey, if you need some help with dental implants, give us a call. Here’s a button or here’s a phone number, right? Pretty simple. Okay, so I think probably at the end of this now, we’ve realized that an ad hoc position on marketing isn’t the way to go. You can’t just run some ads or do some social media posts and call it good. You need a complete system to go with this. So.

What we do with our clients is attract, engage, convert, retain, refer. That’s our system. We’ve been tweaking this thing for now 17 years and I continue to tweak it, especially with AI. But these are the main drivers that we wanna get to. Get more of right kind of patients in the door, engage them with making sure the website is good, your image is good, good photos and videos, all the stuff we talked about today, and then make sure they’re converting through that website. Make sure your front desk is getting the training feedback that they want.

Chris (01:06:06.483)
or that they need to make sure that they’re getting as many of these patients scheduled. These new leads are absolute gold mines in 2026. You’ve got to make sure you really see each one as that, and you’re doing everything you can to actually get them into your practice. Track everything. Make sure you understand what’s working, what’s not, so you can quickly shift dollars when you need to. And make sure you get these patients in some sort of a lead funnel. So if they don’t schedule with you at that time, six months they may be ready, right? So stay top of mind to them.

That’s exactly what we do here at Kickstart. We put together a full system, not just an ad hoc, let’s run some social media ads and call it good. It’s a system with an actual outcome in mind that can provide sustainable and predictable growth for dental practices. So a little bit about what we do, but something that you should really think about putting it together, whether it’s through us, somebody else, or if you’re doing it yourself. So again, let’s talk about action items. Come out of this and at least do one thing that you learned about today.

I promise you it will make a dramatic impact in your practice. Just one thing. If you could do more, great, but just take a small thing and put it into action. Once that’s in, come back, re-listen to this and do it again. Do another one, okay? So I will leave you with this. This is how to get ahold of us and if you wanna do that free discovery call, kickstartdental.com.

but I really appreciate you taking the time for an hour today to listen to this. We are gonna have a replay of this. We’ll send it out to everybody that signed up. We’ll put it on our website. We’ll put it on our social media. So if you wanna come back and take a look at it, please do. Or if you do need some help, let us know. Go to this website. It’ll be directly with me and we’d more than happy to help you. So anyway, thanks again and we’ll talk to you on the next webinar. Bye bye.