Your front desk picks up the phone. It's a vendor asking who handles purchasing. The next call is a patient who's been with you six years and wants to move her hygiene appointment. You paid full price for both of those clicks.

For years the default advice was that every practice needed a Google search ad strategy. We gave that advice too. Then we started listening more closely to the calls - the high-intent new patient inquiries we expected to hear weren’t coming from paid efforts alone.

Google Ads isn't pointless, and we're not telling anyone to switch it off this afternoon. But it’s not a default line item anymore. There are still practices and still procedures where paid search earns its place, and there's a clear test for whether yours is one of them.

And if it isn't, the answer is never to cut the marketing budget. It's to move that money somewhere that builds the practice you're actually trying to run.

Here's what we get into:

• Why needing Google ads is a starting assumption rather than a conclusion
• What happens to Google's tracking the second a patient picks up the phone
• Two conditions that both have to be true before paid search is worth your money
• The only two ways we'll judge any channel
• What your review count looks like sitting next to the practices around you and how this impacts ad worth
• Why patients now go and check you on ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini after they've clicked your ad, and what has to be on your site for that to go well

#googleads #newpatients #calltracking #budget

Google will put a blue verified badge on your ad, park it above every other result on the page, and only charge you when someone actually reaches out. If you have spent the last few years watching click budgets disappear into people who were never going to book, that sounds like the deal of the decade.

In this episode, Eric and Sara discuss the three places Local Service Ads quietly break down for dental practices: your review profile, your targeting and service settings, and how fast your front desk actually picks up. Then they get to the harder question of whether a tool built for plumbers and tow truck drivers belongs in dentistry at all.

Here's what we get into:

• Why LSAs sit above every regular search ad on the page.
• Why drawing a five-mile circle around your practice is lazy targeting.
• What leaving every service checked actually costs you.
• How Google grades your responsiveness behind the scenes.
• Why Google is not protecting your practice when it drops your rank.
• What is coming as LSAs move into Google Ads, the reports you should download before that happens, and why boring is sexy once everybody on the page has the same blue check mark.

#googleads #newpatients #growth #budget #reviews

Ask ChatGPT for the best dentist in your town and watch what it does. It hedges. It disclaims. It hands back three or four names that everybody already knows. It behaves less like a search engine and more like a hotel concierge who has been burned once and is never risking it again.

This trait explains everything about how AI recommends. These models are built to be risk-averse, and they are especially twitchy about healthcare. So they don't necessarily reward the best clinical dentist. They reward the practice they can be most confident about. The one whose name, address, phone, listings, reviews, and website all agree with each other, and whose name shows up on sites the practice doesn't own.

In this episode, Eric and Sara pull this apart and speak about what actually earns dental practices an AI mention and the handful of things worth doing this quarter.

Here's what they get into:

• Why AI is far more confident giving a safe pick than a good one
• Why cross-referencing your online visibility is no longer optional
• How the zero-click era gets weaponized to convince practice owners their website is now useless
• Why new patient volume is down this year even at practices that are winning in AI results
• Why third-party mentions are important
• Why gaming the system is a bigger risk than it used to be

#ai #seo #growth #newpatients #website #reviews