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Howard:
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It's a huge honor today to be podcast interviewing Lance McCollough. Wasn’t there a famous movie star McCullough? Was that the kid in Home Alone or something?
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Lance:
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I don’t know. People often get me confused with the McCulloch Chainsaws, but it's a different spelling.
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Howard:
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Right? Was that the McCollough in the Home Alone?
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Lance:
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McCalley. I think you're thinking Colin McCalley, or something like that.
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Howard:
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Oh, he was an adorable kid in those movies. Lance McCollough developed the first turnkey website solution for the professional marketplace at the beginning of the dot-com era and has helped thousands of professionals with internet marketing. Growing his accounting firm in the 90s, Lance caught the internet way while trying to market his practice online. What followed were 2 wildly successful internet ventures, Execusite, acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2001, and ProSites recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of America's fastest growing companies, and the Deloitte Technology Fast 500.
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Most importantly to Lance, however, is the admiration of over 14,000 happy clients and over 100 cheerful employees. I wanted to get you on the podcast because I wanted to ask you, or tell you, congratulations for winning the Townie Choice Award.
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Lance:
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Yeah. We're really excited about that. When you get recognized 4 years in a row for financial strength on the Inc. 5000, and then you get in on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500, higher on the list than Google that year, that's great. The Townie Choice Award, that's the best Howard. I’m not telling you this to make you feel good. We really appreciate it because it's voted on by your readers.
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Your readers are more than readers. They’re participants. It’s a testament to like, "Hey, ProSites, they're doing great. They're delivering the results." Anyways. We celebrated throughout the office being voted number 1 website design and internet marketing firm, so it's a big honor.
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Howard:
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Market share information means a lot less in the B2C world, like when they're voting on which movie is better. I remember one year E.T. beat Gandhi. It's like, okay, that's market share. More and more people are into E.T. than Mahatma Gandhi. When your market share is among dentists, and they all have 8 years of college, and they all know math and physics and chemistry, that's a hard group to fool.
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You can get 1,000 dentists to buy something, but you're not going to get 2,000. That's what I tell. You could get lunch any product in dentistry and find 1,000 idiots to buy it, but you're not going to get 2,000 of them, 10,000. You're not going to get 150,000. When some people say, "Well, Townie Choice Awards is just market share information," yeah. Market share amongst doctors.
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When I look through those Townie Choice Award winners, my homies are smart. They call it right. The bottom line is a dentist wants to do a root canal on me. I want to pull a wisdom tooth. I didn't go to school 8 years to do online marketing and websites, and all that stuff. How do you get dentists to switch from root canal, filling, crown mode, to what do I need to know about online marking? Because I definitely want new patients.
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I can't put out a fire unless one walks in my front door. My fantasy is the toothache. I want to see some guy walking through my front door holding his face and been up all night. That's what I live for. I want to fix that. I wasn't born to do internet marketing to find these deals. What do we need to know?
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Lance:
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My experience, the way I got started on this, was my background is I'm a CPA. Like many of your readers, the doctors that are out there, I had my own business. I still do, but back in those days I was just getting my start. I had my own accounting firm. Same situation. Dentistry, accounting, same thing.
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Accountants want clients, and doctors want patients. It’s the same thing. We’re trying to get more business. Nobody was really helping us to do that. I wasn't a website expert at the time, so I put together a solution made it easy for accountants, at the time, to find new clients.
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When I built that company up, we eventually got acquired by what was similar to like a Henry Schein in the accounting world. It was a company called CCH Incorporated. I knew that I wanted to continue this quest, if you will, because I really enjoy what I'm doing. It's much more exciting than accounting.
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I looked at what market could use the most help. When I looked at the dental industry, everybody was still doing websites the old-fashioned way. If you wanted to make a change to your website, you had to call in or fill out a form and fax it into your webmaster. Having already built a turnkey website solution, at the time, it was the first website editor in the professional marketplace. They had GeoCities for the public masses, but it was garbage.
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I said, "Wow. Nobody in the dental industry has a website editor," and so I took my years of knowledge on my prior company, and built the proverbial better mousetrap. When we launched, it was in May of 2005. It was at the Discus Dental Extravaganza in Vegas. Literally, there was about 30 exhibitors there and 7 were website providers. They had never seen anything like us. We were swarmed.
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For the first time, we gave doctors, or their staff if they wanted, but we gave them the control over their website. They now had the keys. They weren't held hostage by a website developer, so we were like a disruptor. We did for the dental website industry what Uber did for the taxis.
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The key is, getting back to your original comment, is that doctors, they're doing implants, they’re doing teeth whitening, they're doing bridges, and things like that. They don't have time to learn about meta tags, and title tags, and H1 tags, and avaScript, HTML5. All that stuff is a mystery for most of them. They come to a company like us and they just say, "Hey, look, I need help. I know that I want to attract patients online, I want to continue to grow my practice," and the smart ones don't look at it just as trying to grow their practice and get new patients.
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Super important, of course, but don't forget about your current patients. You want to educate them. When I'm lecturing around the country, what I’ll tell doctors is, I say, "Your website showcases what you can provide, the services and treatments that you can provide your patients." The fact of the matter is, this is estimate, but I'm guessing probably 90% of patients don’t know all that their doctor can do for them. They may categorize them.
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We use the term drill and fill. They may think, "Well, I just go in for cleanings and I hope I don't have any cavities," but when they start looking on your website and they see things about gum disease and signs and symptoms, they might say, “Wow. I didn't know that if I had some 'pink in the sink,' blood, or if my gums are bleeding, that could be a sign of an underlying problem," so having that content on your website is really going to help the doctors. They come to us and they want to grow their practice. They also want to educate their current patients.
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Their website, it's like the visual representation of their practice. If you say, "Lance, what's website 101?" It better look good. That's the number 1 thing, it's got to look good. Though our parents taught us not to judge a book by its cover, guess what? Everybody, everyday, judges a book by its cover. The website’s got to look good, it's got to have patient-focused content.
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Content is also important for SEO. We can always talk about that, as well. Content is critical for the patients because they’re going to the website, they're going there to find out about dentistry, things that they're thinking about that they need. Then, of course, you have to have the normal things like your hours, contact information, and stuff like that so that they can get in touch with you.
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Howard:
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When I got out of school, it was the birth of the desktop PC and the big names of the day were Intel, and Microsoft, and Dell, and all that stuff. Now we keep reading that, now, Google won’t even index your website unless it's a mobile website or something, because now the market is, over half has gone to a smartphone, which didn't exist when I got out of dental school. What are your thoughts about a website on how it looks on your iPhone versus at work, or at home, on your big desktop?
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Lance:
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Sure. When I'm lecturing, another thing that I mention to the doctors is that having a mobile site is not your desktop site loading on a mobile phone. That's not going to work. You have to have it optimized, for lack of a better word. The text has to be readable.
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Howard:
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That's the problem with searching on your iPhone, because half the sites you go to, whether it’s a restaurant or whatever, that the text is too small, so that's what it is. When you see a restaurant and you pull it up on an iPhone, and you can’t read it unless you’re taking your thumbs and pulling it apart.
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Lance:
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Pinch and zoom.
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Howard:
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Pinch and zoom. That’s what they’re doing. That's a desktop website that just keeps loading on their iPhone?
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Lance:
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Yeah. That's a desktop website loading in an iPhone. It's not just iPhone. It could be android, it could be a tablet, and stuff like that. You want to have the text be readable. Not just readable in the font size, you have to have good color contrast.
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If you think about it, where are people using their mobile phones a lot? They're using it outside, and so they're out in the sun, they got the sun beating down on their phone. We've all experienced that where it's hard to see stuff, and so you want to make sure that you have a good color contrast in the text, you want to make sure you have thumb-friendly buttons. The navigation, critical on a mobile site.
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I always like to say that on the internet, people have the attention span of a fly. It's worse than that with a mobile site. If your site is not easy to navigate, and if it doesn't load fast, quick loading time's another key feature of a mobile site, they will hit that back arrow just as fast as can be, and they'll leave your site.
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Howard:
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You're www.prosites.com. P-r-o-s-i-t-e-s.
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Lance:
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Yes.
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Howard:
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This goes to your intention. What do you exactly charge, and what do you exactly do? You build a website from scratch? Do you make a website for PC and mobile? Tell us what you charge and what exactly you do.
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Lance:
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The pricing can depend on the needs of the doctor because we'll tailor things to their exact needs, but we can do both adaptive mobile sites and responsive mobile sites. There's pros and cons to each of them, but typically, when someone wants a custom mobile site, if they want us to create a mobile site that's not separate in the sense of the content, but separate in the sense of the look to their desktop site, that'll run about 695.
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Howard:
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$695?
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Lance:
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Yeah. It's a one-time fee.
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Howard:
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Okay. For the adaptive site?
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Lance:
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Yes. For responsive, it's now free. If someone's with ProSites and they pick one of our responsive styles, or if we create a responsive custom site for them, then it automatically adjusts itself to fit whatever device they're using. Whether it's the desktop, iPad, iPhone, Andriod, tablet, whatever.
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Howard:
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What is your average client? What does the average client call you? Do they want all this from scratch? Are they calling you up and saying, "I don't have a website, desktop or mobile," or are they calling you up because they have one and they don't think it's working? Whether that's not SEO or doesn't like the looks of it, and tie that into why you think you won the Townie Choice Award.
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How did you please my homies? My, God. They're a tough crowd to please.
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Lance:
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Yeah. They're a vocal bunch, too.
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Howard:
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You think?
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Lance:
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It could be a positive or a negative, right?
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Howard:
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Oh, my God. Someone last night posted the most beautiful implant case I've ever seen in my life, and sure enough, they're just nitpicking and drilling down. Little of this, little of that. I just want to log on and say, "Really? Really?" I bet the lady walked out of there and cried, and had a heart attack, and danced all the way home, but my homies are like, "I would've done this," or, "I would've done that." They're a hard group to please.
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Lance:
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It's changed a little. When we launched, the majority of doctors did not have a website, so it was a new thing for them. I would say that, in my estimation, it seemed like dentistry was probably a few years behind some of the other industries, like the accounting industry and the law industry, with regards to internet marketing. I don't know why that is. We hope to change that.
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In the beginning, it was like they didn't have a website. 75% of them didn't have a website. Today, I would say, easily, 45+ percent of the doctors who come to us are coming from another provider. They already have a website and it's just not working for them.
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There's a host of reasons of why it's not working for them. They don't have proper SEO, it's not mobile-friendly, and then they don't know if it's working. Look, some of the illness needs to be on the doctor and the practice to try and track where patients are coming from. I don't know that all of them do a great job of asking that question. The smart ones do, but not all of them do.
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You get a lot of doctors that don't think that their website's working. When we look at it, we'll do an analysis of it, and, usually, you can clearly see the problems. For example: When I search for Phoenix dentists and I'm looking, and I'm trying to find your site, I found your site, but one of the things that was missing of your site, and this is probably part of the reason why you might be on page 5, you don't have what's called the Sitemap's protocol. This is very important for your doctors out there.
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Howard:
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Is this for my dental office? Todaysdental.com?
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Lance:
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Todaysdental.com. Yeah. You get a 404 error, Howard. You've got to come to ProSites, man, I'll hook you up.
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Howard:
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Actually, we've been talking about this a long time.
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Lance:
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Let me explain what this is.
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Howard:
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Will you e-mail me this analysis at Howard@dentaltown.com?
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Lance:
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Absolutely. Just so your doctors know what I'm talking about, it's really easy to find out if you have it. If you go to your website, in your case, it's todaysdental.com, all you have to do is put forward slash after your domain name, and then type sitemap.xml. What you should see is a page, I don't know if you can see this, but it looks like this. Basically, it's not meant for human consumption, it's meant for the search engines. What it is is it's a bunch of XML code that spoon-feeds the search engines every page that's on your website.
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In the old days, what would happen is the robots, the spiders, the crawlers, whatever you want to call them, they would just scour the internet, and they would pop into a website and maybe follow a link, and then they leave. That's still going on today, but back in 2005, Google introduced this concept called the Sitemap's protocol. What it is is it's a listing in search engine form. What they want to see, exactly what they want to see, these are all the pages of my site so that they can index it properly, and that helps you get found. All the search engines adopted it. Yahoo, Microsoft Bing, everybody.
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It's a standard that's been out there for years, and it's amazing. I won't say who did your website.
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Howard:
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You can say it.
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Lance:
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No.
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Howard:
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You don't want to?
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Lance:
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No. I won't say it.
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Howard:
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It's Dentistry Uncensored.
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Lance:
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No. I meant, who did your todaysdental.com website?
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Howard:
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No. I'm saying my podcast is Dentistry Uncensored. It's Carestream. No, not Carestream. That's my CBCT.
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Lance:
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Sesame?
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Howard:
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Sesame Communications.
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Lance:
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Look, I understand why they didn't update your site, and this goes back to the beginning of dental websites. A lot of the players, the established players in the industry, they did websites, like I said earlier, the old-fashioned way. What ProSites introduced to the market was the first content management system for dental websites. What that means is, and I don't want to get too technical or wonky on you, but our websites are data-based driven. That gives us a great power.
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What we can do is when new technologies, changes in search engine algorithms, the iPhone for example, blocking flash, when any of that stuff comes out, we're able to, at the code level, fix things and then push it out to our doctors, and they didn't even know there was a problem. The Sitemap's protocol came out, like I said, back in 2005. When I saw that, I said, "Hey, team. This is going to be very important. In fact, this is actually going to help our doctors get their sites indexed. We got to fix this."
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We did it, we pushed it out, and I think, obviously, it's taken years for some of the other providers out there to go back and update all their old client websites because they got to do it one by one. It's a manual process.
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Howard:
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I want to ask you a question. I hear dentists say all the time, on Dental Town, is, "That would be important if you're like Howard and lived in Phoenix where there's 3800 dentists, but I'm in a small town. I'm in Parsons, Kansas, so SEO is not important in rural. That's only important in urban. In towns over 100,000." Is that true or false?
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Lance:
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I think that's false, and there's a couple reasons why. The people in that small town, are they searching for stuff on the internet? Yes.
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Howard:
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Yes.
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Lance:
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Are they looking for things locally? Yes. We already know this. 98% of people who use their phones are looking for local businesses, and local products, and stuff like that. It absolutely matters. It's false to say that they don't need it. The other thing, too, is when you do a Google search, let's say you have somebody in Podonk city, or whatever.
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Howard:
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We'll say some Podonk, Temecula, California.
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Lance:
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I normally say Frognuts, Alabama, but I don't know.
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Howard:
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Where is Temecula? Where are you at here? Where is Temecula?
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Lance:
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Temecula is in Riverside County.
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Howard:
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Oh, okay.
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Lance:
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We are just north of San Diego. We're in-between Orange County and San Diego.
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Howard:
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It's by Riverside?
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Lance:
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It's wine country out here. We're surrounded by vineyards.
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Howard:
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Right on.
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Lance:
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What was my trail of thought here? I lost it.
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Howard:
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A great interviewer like me will interrupt you so many times, you won't even know why you're here today.
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Lance:
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That's okay. I remember what it was. Real quick, this is very important. When you go and do a search, for example, if you typed in "small city dentist" and hit enter, whatever that city was, dentist, I hit enter, how many results does Google give you?
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Howard:
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40 million.
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Lance:
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Exactly. Guess what? There's not 40 million dentists in the entire world. Why is that? I love Google, believe me, but it's not as smart as people think that it is. If it was really truly smart, it'd say, "Well, here's the one guy, or the gal," because they're the only dentist in this town. They don't know, and so they're going off of a lot of things. The words on pages, keywords, tags.
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They got hundreds of pieces to their algorithm that they try and keep secret. Yeah, it does matter. You can still be the only doctor in town, but if you're not found, you're not found.
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Howard:
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When I tell you this, you're not going to believe me, but I just got to tell you, it's true. There's 4 types of dentists. There's the older ones in the greatest generation, there's baby boomers like me, generation X is one of those. A lot of young millennials say, "Well, I don't need a website SEO because I do everything I need on Facebook." Is it a substitute for a website?
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Lance:
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No.
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Howard:
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I also want to add that when you leave the United States, like when you go to Albania, and Montenegro, and a lot of other countries, I'd say half the dentists outside of the United States only use Facebook for their dental practice page. Is that a substitute, or not really? Why do I have to have a Facebook page and a website?
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Lance:
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It's not a substitute for, gosh, numerous reasons. For one, when you think of, where do people go to look for things? The 800 pound gorilla is Google, right? Some people go to Bing, some people still go to Yahoo, but they go to Google. They do go to Facebook as well, but overwhelmingly, people go to Google.
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When they search on Google, they focus more on websites and they focus a lot on local search. They used to call it the 7 Pack, now it's called the Snack Pack. You'll notice when you do a search for local businesses, they'll show a few listings, and they'll have the map listings, and they'll have how many reviews, and 5-star reviews they had, and stuff like that. That's all part of Google Plus, or Google Local, or Google My Business. They keep changing the darn name, but the point is that's what's showing actually above the number 1 organic listing on Google.
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Before, if you were number 1 on Google, you'd be throwing a party. Technically, today, you could be number 1 in the organic, or the free listings of Google, and yet you could still be below the fold on the page because they list the map listings first, and that's not Facebook, that's Google Maps, or Google My Business. Another thing doctors want to do is they want to claim their local listing.
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Howard:
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Did I do that?
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Lance:
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Did you do it?
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Howard:
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Yeah.
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Lance:
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I don't know. I'd have to Google it and check.
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Howard:
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Will you do all that to mine? Because my podcast's are free. I feed my family at Today's Dental.
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Lance:
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Dentistry?
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Howard:
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Yeah. This is my crazy hobby.
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Lance:
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You know what? When I pulled up your site, well, I was looking for it, and when I pulled it up and I saw that you didn't have the Sitemap's protocol, I thought, "Man, I got to talk to Howard." I'm going to Google you. I'm going to look for you on the local listings, see if it's been claimed, if it's been optimized. There's a whole a process that you have to go through. We do that for our clients.
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Howard:
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Now, do I need to do this for the Dental Town site, too? Because the thing about Dental Town, so many people always say, "Man, I can't believe you've got 210,000 dentists on Dental Town."
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Lance:
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See? Look at that. Look at that, Howard. That's bad. You know what that is? That's a 404 error. That says "Page could not be found." I went to Dental Town as well, and I looked for the Sitemap's protocol, and it was missing. This is not a knock on you, by any means, this drives home the point that doctors, they don't have time to know all this stuff. I don't profess to be an oral surgeon, but their webmaster should be.
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It's very helpful if you can have that Sitemap's protocol on your website. For example: You think of all the pages that you have on your site. You hear people use the phrase, "I'm going to search the internet." No, you're not searching the internet. What you're doing is you're searching Google's snapshot of only what they've indexed.
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The internet's probably 10 to 100 times bigger than what Google has in their index, and that's why you get different results when you search on Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, and Google, because it's only what they've indexed. If that's the case, don't you want them to index every page of your site? Don't you want a bigger net, if you will, to catch more, the analogy fish, but patience? Absolutely.
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Howard:
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That's so ironic that you're an accountant because I became a dentist because I didn't have enough personality to become an accountant, and I decided I was going to be funny since hot was not an option. Hey, I want you to give my homies some homework right now. My fans are driving to work right now, they got an hour commute, I want you to give them specific things. You're showing me, for me, my 401k error.
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I want you to go through, give them some things so that when they get to work, they can take their smartphone, they can take their desktop, and you can give them a checklist of just things to check so they just know if this is something they need to worry about, or if they're all good in that area, and then go back to taking a course on root canals.
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Lance:
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I can actually do one better, because there's way too many things. I'll touch on a couple of them here. If they go to prosites.com/mypo, as in Marketing your Practice Online. Prosites.com/mypo. They can download PowerPoint's of my 100 slide decks of my lectures that I do.
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Howard:
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Dude, why don't you make an online CE course? You've been a Townie since 2005. You've been a Townie for a decade and a year. Why don't you make a course out of that?
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Lance:
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I love that. We should talk about that. Your team can help me develop a course for your site, and we can help improve your website.
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Howard:
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What you can do with the PowerPoint, you can upload that right into the online CE, then call on the phone and do a voice-over, and go through your PowerPoint, and just do your lecture like that. The one reason I'd want you to do that is because, you know how some of your friends always read the book and some of your friends always see the movie?
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Lance:
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Sure.
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Howard:
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The people who do online CE aren't, necessarily, the ones doing all the podcasts. You're talking to the, what I call, multitaskers now. The ones that are only doing this because they don't want to listen to the radio on the way to work. The online CE people are the evening people on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that are taking online CE course on Dental Town, and we've had over a half million views on our 350 courses. If you got a PowerPoint presentation, I think everyone, after they've been a Townie for 11 years, should put up at least 1 course.
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Lance:
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Sure. I have pretty big packs. I cover a lot of ground in my lectures.
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Howard:
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Okay. You're saying if they want to know if their website's working, go to prosites.com/mypo, which stands for Marketing your Practice Online?
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Lance:
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Yeah.
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Howard:
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You got 100 PowerPoint's where you could read through that.
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Lance:
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I probably have about a dozen PowerPoint's, but they have 100 pages. They have 100 slides in the deck. I put them in a PDF so that they can download it. It'd be way too big for them to e-mail to anybody. I'll speak to some of the low-hanging fruit things that your doctors can do to see if they have problems.
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We already touched on the Sitemap's protocol. Do that. Bring up your website, put /sitemap.xml after your domain name.
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Howard:
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Say it slower. Your website, forward slash?
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Lance:
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Yeah. Whatever your website address is, like after the .com, put /sitemap., a period, XML.
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Howard:
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XML. What's XML stand for? That's the code, right?
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Lance:
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Extensible Markup Language. It's like a code. It's a technical term, but the point is they'll see a bunch of, what might look to them, just like a mess of random code. It's not meant for the public to see. They won't see it because it's not a button on your website, but the search engine's go there first. You're spoon-feeding them all the info, and then, like us, what we do is we actually submit that to the search engines.
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We don't wait for the search engine spiders, or robots, to happenstance come across your website. We're going to make sure they see it immediately. The other things that you can do is look at your title tags. Here's what a title tag is. If you look at your website, or you look at any page in a browser, normally up at the top it'll have some wording on the browser bar. Not in the page, but on the browser client itself.
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When you go to bookmark a page and save it in your favorites, that title tag is what the description is when they save it. You want to look at your title tags, and time and time again, when we get new doctors coming to us, we'll look at their website. Why is it not working? Well, their title tag for their homepage was "home." It was the word home. The title tag's very important for SEO.
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Remember back when we were in school and we handed in a report to our teacher? We had that title of the report, told you what that page is about. What that report is about. This is the same thing with websites. If it just says "home", well, maybe that's great if someone was searching for home on the internet, but if they're looking for, let's say, a Temecula dentist, maybe you're title on your homepage should be Temecula Dentist.
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Howard:
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How are my title tags?
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Lance:
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I have to look at that. I didn't analyze the site, I was just looking to see why it was showing up on page 5, and so I looked at a couple things.
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Howard:
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If you're on a dentist website and you right-click an image to save to your desktop, sometimes the image will say "X15." It's just a bunch of jumble mumble, but sometimes it'll say "Lance McCollough, Root Canal Number 13." I'm sitting there thinking, "Does that patient know that that picture's being saved?"
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Lance:
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I'm glad you brought that up.
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Howard:
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The saving of a patient's name on your website, does that help your SEO? If I put a picture on my Today's Dental website, and I call the picture Howard Farran, DDS in Phoenix Arizona, all with two key, would that help my SEO too, or not really?
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Lance:
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Yeah. Pictures and videos absolutely do help you for SEO, because Google has what? An image search. People go there. Hundreds of millions of people look at that every day. What you were talking about was the file name. The worst thing that you can do is put the patient's name in the file name.
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Howard:
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Dude, I see it all the time.
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Lance:
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Yeah. Because then you're going to be violating HIPAA. That could get you in hot water. The next worst thing you can do is just, any photo that you upload, you use the default file name from your camera, which would be like DCX4038, which means nothing. What we do when we're uploading, we upload photos for your doctors for free, when we do that, we'll try and give it a descriptive name. We'll name the file.
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If it was a dental implant, we would put "photo of dental implant." Google likes that. They don't want you to keyword stuff, so you can't get crazy. You can't put "Newport Beach dental implants, implantsforpatients.jpg." That would be a little over the top.
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Howard:
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I think it's so hilarious. I have a friend of mine, he's an orthodontist, and he put up these pictures and he sent me a link. He said, "Look. Check out this case up on my website." He's got the patient's eyes blocked out with a bar, but if you right-click the photo, there's the patient's name.
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Lance:
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Yeah. What you should do is always get a release. We have a simple release form that we give doctors, because we have a smile gallery, which is very important. People do love to see before and after photos. That's a real draw for people on the web. Get a release from the patient, and you really don't need to show their whole face.
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Some do, that's fine, but you could just show their mouth. I still wouldn't. Even if you had a release, I wouldn't used the patient's name because the internet public doesn't need to know their name, they just need to know that, hey, this is your work. This is a patient that you did work. Look at the before, look at the after, isn't that great?
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Howard:
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I think you said something at the very beginning of this, and I never hear anyone talking about it. Everybody thinks of their website to attract a new patient, but you opened up with your website needs to focus on existing patients coming back.
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Lance:
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Oh, yeah.
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Howard:
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No one talks about that.
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Lance:
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They're both important. They're 2 sides of the coin, because how much more business production can you have if you had content on your website for your current patients? Again, they might see things that you're doing and not know that. "Wow. I didn't know that you did that." It's very important.
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The other thing, too, is think about having conversion mechanisms that can help them with referring to you. A lot of people, they don't think of their website, per say, as a referral tool. I certainly do. This is, again, something I lecture about. I tell doctors, I say, "Look. You're loved by your patient." Most patients.
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Most doctors, they have patients that hug them. You all have that. Nobody hugs their attorney, but something about dentists, patients really like. You're a likable bunch, but they're not going to remember your phone number. They're just not, unless it's 1-800-great-dentist, or something like that. It's going to be very hard for them to remember that.
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If Sally's out to lunch with Barbara and she's saying, "I just got a dental implant," or, "Oh, my gosh. Your teeth look so good." "Oh, I got them whitened," or, "I've been using Invisalign with my doctor." "What's his number, or what's her number? I'll give her a call."
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It's like, "Oh, I don't know, but call me and then I'll give it to you." Guess what? You just lost an opportunity for a referral, but if they know that it's todaysdental.com, because you put that on your business cards, you put that on your voice mail, and stuff like that, they can remember a domain name, if it's simple. Again, if you get too long of a domain name, then you're probably out of luck. That's why we always tell doctors, "Try and keep it short and sweet."
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Some doctors will say, "Well, can I use my name?" Yeah. For example, we have a client, wonderful girl, [Dr. Zeraxade 00:38:33]. Try and spell that. I know how to spell it, but not a lot of people know how to spell it. She said, "What should I do?" I say, "Well, what do your patients call you?" She said, "Well, they call me Dr. Z." I go, "Well, there you go."
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Maybe you just go with something like Smiles by Dr. Z, or doctorz.com. Keep it simple, and then they can remember it. That's the kind of thing that you want to do. I know that some people get a little too caught up in, "Well, don't I want to have keywords in my domain name?" I don't know how much it really helps. Some people swear by it, I don't think so.
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I can give you a number 1 example. If you do a Google search for books, Barnes & Noble comes up number 4 on the list, and they own books.com. I would focus on your brand in your domain name, and keeping it short and sweet so it passes the radio test. Easy to remember, and not worried about getting NewportBeachcosmeticdentistry.com.
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I don't know. That may be someone's website out there. I don't know them, I'm just saying that's a mouthful. Keep it short and sweet.
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Howard:
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A shout out to Barnes & Noble. They picked up my book in 119 stores. Uncomplicate Business: How to Manage People, Time, and Money.
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Lance:
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Yeah. I saw that, and I was very, very impressed that you had a recommendation there, a testimonial by Harvey MacKay, who's one of my all-time business heroes.
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Howard:
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Oh, yeah. He lectured at my MBA classes out at Arizona State University. He had lunch with my sister, Shelly's husband Gary last week. He's still a phenomenal tennis player, a phenomenal athlete. He's just a class act guy from A to Z. One of the coolest guys ever.
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Lance:
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We're friends on LinkedIn. We're connected on LinkedIn. I like him. I've met him a couple times. I got a couple autographs of his books. I quote Swim with the Sharks at least once a month in my life. It's my favorite book of all time. Gosh, back in the day, before CRM, Customer Relationship Management, actually became a big thing, this is back in the day of ACT! and GoldMine, I don't know if you remember those contact systems.
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Howard:
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Sure.
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Lance:
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He had his own called Sharkware. It didn't last. I don't know. Maybe the company that was managing it for him, but I will tell you, to this day, I still look back, and I think, "Man, that was the best contact management system ever," because what they had in it was the MacKay 66.
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I don't want to get off on a tangent here for your listeners, but I'll tell you, all of you listening, if you have not read the book Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, and Howard's book, you've got to get them both.
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Howard:
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What's so genius about him, as he's so eloquently taught us in MBA school, is that he sold the ultimate commodity. It was white envelops. How do you differentiate yourself when everybody sells a white envelop? He had the McKay 66, that every time a salesman called him something, okay, you're calling Lance McCollough. The first time you meet him, try to grab where that he graduated from. University of Southern California.
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Try to get his wife's name, kid's name, and after you keep calling this that, by the time you got all 66 personal relation, build a relationship, not build a tooth, and as soon as you got that whole list filled out, he was probably buying envelops from you.
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Lance:
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Yeah. I also speak to my own team, and one of the things I've tried to instill in them is that they're not buying a ProSites website from ProSites, they're buying a website from you. Our internet marketing consultants, advisors, they develop a relationship with the people that they're talking to, and they really try and understand, what does the doctor need? Listening to the pain points, they write that stuff down, and then they try and formulate a plan to help them do better. I'll tell you, we get a lot of people. I'm not on the phone as much as I used to be in the old days.
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Today, I have about 140 employees. Back in the old days, when I had 5, 10, I answered the phone a lot. Again, one of the things that I did was I instilled in my staff, listen to what the doctor's saying, try and give them information, try and educate them, because it matters. Time and time again, I'd have people say, "Lance, I've talked to several people, and you're the only guy that I can trust. I feel like you're really telling me the truth." That's because I also told them, maybe, what we couldn't do, or what we don't think is a good idea.
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We don't cut corners. Even when we're doing SEO, we're not doing the black-hat techniques. We're not putting white text on a white background, or 6-point font. We're not doing link farms. We always have to have that integrity, and that shows the customer that you care, and then they trust you.
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We don't even have contracts. We don't have contracts with any of our website clients. They can fire us at any time, and we've been doing this for a long time. That's just the trust in delivering. If we're really delivering, we're taking good care of them, then they'll stay with us. A lot of these concepts, I've learned from Harvey. Wonderful gentleman.
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Howard:
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I thought that was interesting how you said you don't cut corners. Wendy's founder, Dave Thomas, the reason he went with a square patty, so everyone knows that he didn't cut any corners. That's why he did that.
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Lance:
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Is that right? I didn't know that.
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Howard:
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He said, "We're going with the a square pattern," because when you cut the circle, you lose some beef, and he just cut it in a square, and he said, "We're giving them the whole square, because at Wendy's, we don't cut any corners."
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Lance:
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Yeah. My wife and my 3 girls, for whatever reason, I like Wendy's, they will not go to Wendy's. The square patty freaks them out for some reason. I don't know why.
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Howard:
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140 employees. What percent of your business is just dentists or dental?
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Lance:
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We have 2 divisions in our company. We have ProSites. I'd say about 95 of our employees are on the ProSites side, which is medical and dental, dental being our primary market. Then we have another company, a sister company, called CPA Site Solutions in Vermont, and that focuses on the accounting marketplace. They do the same great service for accountants that ProSites does for dentists.
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Howard:
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Which is your original profession? Accountants?
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Lance:
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Yeah. Funny story there. I started the accounting industry. The website, not the accounting industry, but the websites for accountants, that industry. I was the first. CPASS, or, as we call, it CPA Site Solutions, came after us, and then a whole host of other ones. Here we are today, and I'm now CEO of that company that used to be my competitor.
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Howard:
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You bought them?
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Lance:
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We're owned by a large, well-respected, private equity firm called the Riverside Company. They acquired both CPA Site Solutions and ProSites. I'm running both and having a great time.
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Howard:
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You're an amazing man. Let's get back. I don't got you much longer. It's 46 minutes, and I only got you for 14 minutes. Anymore advice? I'd just like to get her done. Any more advice, if you're driving to work and you're driving with your spouse, or you walk into your office, pull up your smartphone. Any more things that could be more red flags?
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What I don't want them to do is brush it under the cover, if this is hurting them on their SEO, their new patients. Any other things come to mind? Maybe I'll ask one of the other questions. When dentists are calling you, and you're talking, what are their pain points? When dentists are calling you, what's keeping them up at night?
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Lance:
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The number 1 thing is they're not getting any new patients.
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Howard:
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New patients is a big deal?
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Lance:
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Yeah. Look, they're business people. That is the at the top of the food chain, for their website anyways, is they want new patients.
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Howard:
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They need new patients because they didn't do the McKay 66 and keep all their existing patients?
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Lance:
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Right.
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Howard:
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There's so many of their existing patients are gone now.
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Lance:
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Yeah. They're going to have some attrition, too, right?
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Howard:
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Yeah.
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Lance:
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Good news for that. What happens is they don't feel that they're website is working for them. What we have on our end, we have what's called ProSites ROI. This is unique. We can actually prove that their website and the marketing that we're doing for them is working. Whether it's their website and patients filling out the appointment request form, or the smile analysis page that we have, which is a great lead-capturing tool. We have dental videos, and they should have dental videos, as well.
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With us, we don't just have a dental video player. Our dental video player always ends each video with a contact form, and they can also e-mail that video link to a friend. You've got to have those conversion features. That's important. Getting back to the results part of this, which is really important to us, it's proving measurable practice growth.
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ProSites ROI can track phone calls, people coming to your website filling out forms. If you're doing Google AdWords, or PPC is what it's called, we can track all of that all the way down to production. It actually interfaces, connects with your practice management system, all the biggies, and you can now see, "Well, hey, I'm spending this much money on Google AdWords, and low and behold, I've spent a few thousand dollars over the last year. I've done $65,000 in production," guess what? Keep doing Google AdWords.
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If you were running a print ad, for example, or say you were doing a direct-mail campaign, which many doctors do. I get them in the mail all the time. Okay. Is that phone number a tracking phone number? It should be. In our case, and when we do stuff for doctors, we'll use the tracking phone number.
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Again, because our system, through artificial intelligence, can listen to the caller, it will keep track of their address, their phone number, their e-mail, and so when they ultimately come into the office, fill out the new patient form, and get into the practice management system, ProSites ROI triangulates all that information and says, "Ah. You're that person who called 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago," and now it'll track all the way to show you, the doctor, how much production you've done from that campaign, or that marketing channel. It's pretty amazing.
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If you wanted to know what I think the big thing is, that's going to be huge in 2016, and going forward, it's proving measurable practice growth. That's our mission statement. Watch for other people to start using that term, Howard, because everybody in the website industry, many of them say the same thing. A lot of them can't deliver on their promises, but they all say the same thing.
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"Oh, we got great websites. Oh, we're going to get you on the top of Google." Prove it. We're proving it. Everything that we're going to be doing, and this is something that I've talked about with my entire team, all the new things that we're going to be coming out with, over the course of the year, we want those things to generate measurable practice growth, new patients.
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I have a metric. I don't know if I should say this, it's AIC. You've heard of PPC and CPC, I have AIC. It's Ass in Chair. That's the ultimate metric for a doctor. Are we delivering people to come and sit in your chair? That's what it's all about, and we can prove it.
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Howard:
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That is awesome. That is just amazing. You opened up another can of worms, so you've got to go back.
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Lance:
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Uh-oh.
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Howard:
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You said Google AdWords. I firmly believe 95% of dentists have never bought a Google AdWord. Do you agree? Disagree? What percentage of dentists do you think have personally bought a Google AdWord for their website? Do you do this for your clients?
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Lance:
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We do. Absolutely. We do a PPC campaign management, setting it up, all that stuff.
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Howard:
|
What's PPC?
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Lance:
|
Paper Click. Google AdWords, the term for it is Paper Click. Back in the day, when we first started, especially in my lectures, I was telling doctors, I was almost pleading with doctors, I said, "You have to do Google AdWords. You have to do PPC," because, at the time, it costs you $.05 per click. For those who don't know what PPC is, I'll give you the briefest overview.
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Basically, at the top of Google, the top 3 listings, and on the right-hand side, there's a bunch of little ads. They're about an inch tall by half an inch, or a couple inches if they're on the top, wide. Those are advertisements. Those P people, those advertisers, those businesses do not pay Google until someone clicks that link. Back in the day, you could have been in New York, and you could've had New York Dentist come up and put you at the top of Google, and it would've cost you only $.05 a click when someone clicked on that ad.
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Today, you're looking, if you wanted to come up and have a click for New York Dentist, it'd probably cost you 15 to 20 bucks, maybe more, depending on the time of day. Anyways. Long story short, PPC's very important. It's something doctors should very much consider because SEO, which is awesome, you've got to do it, it lasts a long time. PPC, once you stop paying Google, it goes away, but the benefit of PPC is you can start a PPC campaign today, and your ads can be running on the top of Google today. You specifically tailor your ads to the high-value services that you're offering.
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Say, for example, you're doing an Invisalign, or you're doing dental implants, try to come up for dental implants in New York. That's going to be hard. We can do it, but it takes a lot of work with SEO. With PPC, if you're willing to bid enough, you can have your ad come up for dental implants New York, and when someone clicks that, that's when you incur a fee from Google. The beauty of it is that it takes them to the exact page on your website that talks about dental implants.
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Then on our websites, we're going to have some conversion feature, whether it's a video or a form, something, some call to action. PPC's very important. You're right. I don't know if it's 95% aren't using it. I'd say, probably, if I had to guess, 20+ percent of doctors are using PPC, but it's still an opportunity for some.
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The thing is it's dangerous when doctors do it themselves. I'm not saying this as a sales pitch. The thing is there's so much to know about PPC. What keywords to use, what ad text to use, what ad groups. Where do you want to send them to?
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You don't want to have all of your AdWords campaigns drop them off on the homepage, because if they, in the example, are looking for dental implants, you take them to the homepage and it just says, "Thank you for visiting our website." Again, I said earlier, people have the attention span of a fly online. If they're searching for dental implants, they click your ad, you want to take them to your dental implants page. I'll see doctors dropping them off on their homepage.
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I will do a search for something. Sometimes I'll search for dental implants in the city because I'm trying to find something for a doctor, I'll see an ad for a plastic surgeon for breast implants. Someone can accidentally click that. That doctor's going to pay 20 bucks for a click. What that doctor failed to do, and dentists do it as well on the inverse, they don't use negative keywords.
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If you're a dentist and you want to show up for dental implants, or implants, implants New York city, you want to use negative breast as a keyword because you don't want to show up for breast implants. I see stuff like that all the time. I'll see a search, I'm in Tememcula, I'll see a doctor advertising from Nebraska. It's like, "Dude, you didn't use Geo-targeting." You have to change the settings so it only shows the people within your geographical area that have any chance of coming into your practice.
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I'd sum it up like this, Howard, on PPC, most doctors aren't doing it. Very powerful, you should definitely hire a professional. If you do it yourself and you don't know what you're doing, you will incur a lot of click fees, and you'll probably be wasting your money. It's good to get an expert on that, for sure.
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Howard:
|
With 2 million dentists around the world and only 210,000 dentists on Dental Town, I'd like to pick your brain on how we could do that for Dental Town, too.
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Lance:
|
Absolutely. It's a beautiful thing, PPC. SEO, obviously, they go hand in hand. They do different things, but it's very important.
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Howard:
|
I want to specifically talk about this. A lot of our podcast people are younger kids, and they're trying to budget their continuing education. You're saying the internet. What are the hot buzz words? They're thinking, "Should I learn how to play [simplan 00:57:24]? Should I learn how to do Invisalign? Should I be a sleep medicine doctor?"
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What are the hot buzz words that, maybe, some kid listening to this and keep thinking? Is there anything you see getting clicked more than others?
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Lance:
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Yeah. Look, obviously it's the things that people either want to do because it impacts the look, or it's some sort of a vanity thing. Invisalign, obviously very popular, but you can't use Invisalign in your terms in PPC, for example. You could still have an Invisalign page on your site. Think about the high-value services, think about the things that are high-value, that patients normally wouldn't think that you can do.
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For example, I'm a living example of this, sleep apnea. I have sleep apnea. I don't want to use a CPAP machine, and my doctor sells devices. He hooked me up with a Herbst appliance, and my wife is very thankful because it also eliminated snoring. Remember what I said earlier about most patients don't know what you can do for them?
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I can assure you, for any doctor that's out there that, you're general practice, that can also fit people, or get people set up with the sleep apnea appliance. If I was a betting man, Howard, I'd say 95% of their patients didn't know that they even did that.
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Howard:
|
Yeah. I had a patient, just 2 weeks ago, that came in, a new patient, turns out she's going to my buddy from 4 miles up the street, because she wanted implants. I'm like, "Dude, he's placed 3 implants for every one I've placed. Every time I have an implant question, I call him. You need to go back to my buddy." I told him, I said, "How has this lady been going to you for 10 years and had no idea you do implants?"
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Lance:
|
Right. That's the thing. This gets back to, it's not just about attracting new patients, it's about educating your current patients on the things that you can do for them. It's really important. The thing on content, too, Howard, and this impacts SEO, I'll see a lot of sites, typically the people coming to us from one of our competitors, they will have a site that maybe has one page, and the worst thing you can have is no page of procedures. The second worst thing that they do is they just have bullets.
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We do crowns, porcelain veneers, teeth whitening, cleanings. It's just a bulleted list. That's not going to show up in the search engines for any of those terms because the keyword density on that, Google's going to say, "What's that page about?" It's not about any specific thing.
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What we do, we have a separate page for every procedure, every treatment item. It's hundreds of pages, but it's important because that page is going to be keyword rich, and focused on a particular topic. Then you don't want to just have a small paragraph of "veneers are little coverings that make your teeth look great." Fantastic, but that's not quite enough for Google. Quit honestly, it's not enough for the patients.
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What we do, we take a certain approach to our content. We say, "What are porcelain veneers? Reasons for porcelain veneers, and then what's involved in getting porcelain veneers?" It's the perfect balance of content that, A, spoon-feeds the search engines, those keyword terms that are going to help that page show up, but then also, equally important, is once the patient, or the prospective patient, gets to the page, they want to know. Maybe they heard that they need to get an implant and they're worried.
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What is an implant? What is a veneer? Telling them what it is, what's involved, reasons for it, is very good. The other thing you don't want to do is make it 20 pages long. Then they're going to get lost. One of the things that's in my notes, that your listeners will be able to see, I talk a lot about layout and how you're content's formatted, and stuff like that.
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It's good to use white space, bullet points, H1 tags. Basically, bold headers and things like that. You want to make it easy for people to skim and scan your website, and easy for them to find what they're looking for. All that's in my notes. There's so much that doctors can do.
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Here comes the shameless plug, or just come to ProSites, and then we take care of all that for you. That's the easiest thing.
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Howard:
|
What's your contact information? How does someone call you, e-mail you? Just go to Prosites.com?
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Lance:
|
Yeah. Prosites.com. They can go to our website, or they can call our toll-free number, which is 888-932-3644.
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Howard:
|
One more time.
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Lance:
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888-932-3644.
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Howard:
|
Hey, seriously, thanks for being a Townie for 11 years.
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Lance:
|
I have to look at my business card, Howard, because I don't call my number often. Let me make sure.
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Howard:
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What I thinks funny is that every time a dentist gives you their business card, they have a fax number on there. I'm like, "Why don't you just write 'I'm an old guy?'" Does anybody use the fax number anymore?
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Lance:
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We'll put our fax number on there because we hand it out for reasons. They'll fax in patient forms for us to put on their website and stuff like that. The more egregious than having a fax number only, or whatever, on your business card is they don't have their domain name. #facepalm. Use your domain name on everything. On your voice mail, after hours, put it on your business card.
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If you do any direct mail campaigns, don't just do the phone number, put the domain name, the web address on there. It's really important. Put it on your social media pages. Again, I have a whole section about claiming your local listings, and I will look into that for you because you mentioned that. When you claim your local listings, you get to put your contact info on there.
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Guess what? You get to put a link to your website. That's an incoming link to your site. That helps you on SEO, as well.
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Howard:
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You know how you can always tell when a dentist e-mails you that they're over 60?
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Lance:
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How's that?
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Howard:
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It's an AOL.com e-mail.
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Lance:
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AOL. Tooth fix. I joke, and I don't know who this person is, but toothfixer@aol.com. That's another thing I mentioned in my lectures to doctors, is that get everybody in your office, and yourself included, ditch the toothfixer@aol e-mail address, or doctor5822@earthlink.net. You need to have it Howard@todaysdental.com. That should be your e-mail address, and then that's going to make it easy for patients to remember. It increases your brand, too.
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You are the brand. Unlike a lot of businesses out there, the doctor is the brand. You got to emphasize that.
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Howard:
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They'll even mess that up. It'll be like, instead of Howard@todaysdental.com, they'll put HFarran@todaysdental.com. Just uncomplicate it. Just make it simple. I like that Dr. Z story you started. She had this long, complicated name.
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I had a good friend like that, too. Sena Seria from Case Western, and he was telling me that no one could remember his name. I said, "What's everybody call you in your office?" He goes, "Steve." I just go, "Go with Dr. Steve."
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Lance:
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Yeah. If you can get it, right?
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Howard:
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Yeah. Why try to teach everybody?
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Lance:
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That's the thing. A lot of domain names are taken, but you're absolutely right. We get creative on that. We help them. Some doctors, if they don't have a good domain name, or they don't have one at all, because again, some of them aren't online yet, we help them pick the right domain name and get it pointed to the ProSites site.
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Howard:
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I hope you build us an online course. I hope you e-mail hogo@dentaltown.com and cchoward@dentaltown.com. It sounds like you've already done all the work. If you don't want to wait for him to put up a course, go to Prosites.com/mypo for Market your Practice Online. Seriously, Lance, congratulations for winning the Townie Choice Award. Congratulations for starting 2 companies and getting them bobbed by Adventure Capital, and here's to help a guy.
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Lance:
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Howard, I enjoyed talking with you. Again, thank you, Townies. We love you guys. Thank you for voting us number 1.
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