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Better social media presence may be the key to creating the authority that results in higher case acceptance. By Daniel Warren.
Case acceptance remains one of the big ongoing problems for any dental professional. You diagnose a problem, come up with a treatment plan, then watch as the patients return, not having done anything you asked.
Trying to change patient behaviour is a real challenge. A solution, however, may lie where you least expect it: in Google’s guidelines for website owners.
“The problem is one of authority,” Mark Brown of Engage Content says. “The patient weighs up your authority against what they already believe and decide what to do from there. It’s called ‘confirmation bias’, and if your treatment plan doesn’t match their prior beliefs, it’s hard to convince them to follow it.”
There has been a lot of work in the past 50 years on the whole idea of authority with medical practitioners. The old idea of your authority being taken for granted was replaced a long time ago by a ‘consumerist’ health model—where patients educate themselves about their problems.
“This whole process speeds up when you add the Internet, smart phones and social media,” Brown explains. “It only takes minutes now for a patient to check with their mate’s girlfriend’s cousin if they really need to wear that appliance.
“Those patients aren’t stupid or lazy. They just haven’t done a dental degree, so don’t understand the stuff about oral health that a dentist does. And society has been telling them for years that, just because the dentist has scrubs on, it doesn’t mean they know everything.”
So how do you establish your authority to people who aren’t sitting directly in front of you, and don’t know or understand what type of study you’ve done? Search engines like Google are interested in exactly the same question.
Why Google cares about authority
To understand why search engines care about authority, stretch your mind back to the distant past of the 1990s. Back then, a web search was a real hit-and-miss affair. That’s why the founders behind Google proposed their search engine, which was designed to identify and reward high quality content.
Google’s computers look for signals that the content of your website is authoritative. There are many different signals they look at, including the number of links pointing to your site and where those links are coming from; the number of visits it has had; the length of time it’s been around, and many more.
That approach gave users much better search results, with Google becoming the market-leading search engine in the long run.
“So while you may see your website as a brochure on the Internet, search engines see it as documented proof of your reputation,” Brown says. “When they index your site, they are looking for E.A.T.: a combination of Expertise, Authority and Trust that indicate the information should rank more highly in search results.”
Google cares about what you E.A.T.
In the process of ranking your website, software from the search engines determine how expert, authoritative and trustworthy your site is. If there is something about your site that raises an alarm, such as seemingly dodgy links or spammy software, the computers may refer it to human evaluators.
The problem is one of authority. The patient weighs up your authority against what they already believe and decide what to do from there. It’s called ‘confirmation bias’.
Mark Brown, Engage Content
“When you read over the guidelines for human evaluators, you realise Google wants to see if your website reflects the fact that you are knowledgeable, trustworthy, and authoritative in your field,” says Brown.
“That’s not the same as being a leading academic. It’s just looking for signs that will indicate that you know what you’re talking about, and other people think that. So they are looking for trustworthy links back to your site, among other indicators that people think what you have to say is worthwhile.”
How do you reflect those signs on your site? “Firstly, you have to give people a reason to go there. And just having your address or a couple of bits of static oral health information won’t do it,” he adds.
Search engine crawlers will visit your site regularly. The more frequently those crawlers detect new information on the site, the more they will assume that you are building authority. “You remember the academic catchcry of ‘publish or perish’? The web works exactly the same way,” Brown says.
“The more authoritative you are, the more regularly the crawlers will visit. So it becomes a virtuous cycle. That’s why digital marketing agencies are always encouraging you to have a blog on your website. Without a blog, all you’re doing is updating existing pages. There’s only so often you can do that. And from the point of view of the search engine, if they have already indexed a particular page, they don’t really have a reason to come back and re-index it unless you ask them to, and it has changed substantially.”
Telling people what you know
Of course, just publishing regularly isn’t enough. People have to know you are publishing, and come to your site to read it. Ideally, they will be impressed by what you write, and link to it from their site.
“Big social media sites like Facebook and Instagram aren’t fully indexed by Google, and if someone links to your site from Facebook, the software won’t always be able to follow it. But having a social media presence may help you amplify the fact that you are publishing regularly on your website, and draw more people in to read it,” Brown says.
“And the search engines do track how many people visit your site, and where they visit from, and how long they spend on it. So finding an audience on social media, and telling them about new content on your website, will have an impact on how highly search engines rank you.”
Other ways to draw people to your site involves making intelligent comments on blogs that your patients are reading. Not just leaving a note saying “great article!” but actually adding some information that the blog writer hasn’t added themselves.
“It’s a good idea to make a list of the websites that your patients are reading and subscribe to any newsletters they put out alerting you to new content,” Brown says. “You don’t have to comment on something every day, but commenting regularly will draw you to the attention of the site owner and increase the chances of them promoting your own content.”
The most effective way to give people a reason and an easy way to come and visit your site is through an email newsletter. But of course, you need something to put in that newsletter. Again, this is where a blog on your website becomes valuable. A regularly updated blog means you have something to announce to people—a reason for them to come and visit your site.
Making the case
Do you get those emails from companies promising to tweak your website to get you on the front page of a Google search? It may comfort you to know that Google gets those emails too. They are spam and are promising something no-one can deliver.
But you can increase your presence and authority on the web by using technology to regularly communicate your knowledge with people who are interested in what you have to say. And the more knowledge you share, the greater authority you will have in the eyes of your patients, potential patients, and the search engines they will use to find you.
