Doctors, it has been this way for a while: I’ve tried to spell it out for years, and I’m including a lot of information about it in my book: as much as we’d like to be able to feed a dollar into the marketing machine and get exactly what we want from that machine, knowing that this one crisp marketing investment led to this one fantastic outcome, it doesn’t work that way.
And Google has continued to make this phenomenon even more unpredictable and untrackable.
The Effects of AI Search Overviews
AI Overviews and LLM AI systems like Chat GPT and Perplexity disincentivize people who see your website in their results from taking the extra steps to actually visit your website much less call to convert.
Consequently, you may be experiencing the alligator graphs that my SEO experts, Everett Sizemore and Rand Fishkin have been talking about for a while now. They’re called alligator graphs because the upward trend in impressions (people seeing your site) are potentially going up because you’re showing up in the AI Overview on Google (Hooray!). But at the same time, the graph for Clicks (meaning people saw your site and clicked into it) is going down like the gator’s lower jaw, taking a big bite out of your trackable marketing results (BOO!).
Adapting Your Marketing Strategy
So, what’s a doc to do? You want to be everywhere on Google, but if these AI Overviews aren’t getting clicked on, and my graphs are alligatoring, what should I do?
Zero-click results don’t change the fundamentals of marketing: Your brand needs to be seen again and again before you’re going to get someone to contact your office, and you need that to happen a lot because you’re not going to turn every call into a patient.
What does change is that your tracking needs to be more holistic – you’ll never be able to track dollars to patients with great accuracy. Your production from existing patients is impacted by marketing too, but you’ll never know that if you don’t execute a great marketing campaign with the marketing mix that works, and if you don’t track your marketing investment over time along with numbers for
- Yes, new patients. But also
- Your total production, and
- Your total patients seen during a range of time
Partner With an Expert
Zero-click exposure means that Google respects you, your brand, your website, and your website’s content enough to include it in the answers your prospective patients are asking (as well as people all over the world). It’s a good thing. It’s just the next thing that is changing on the internet. More changes are coming.
Looking to work with a dental marketing company that understands and harnesses the latest developments in SEO and AI technology? Partner with Pro Impressions, and we’ll help your practice with time-tested strategies honed through years of dental marketing experience. Call us today at (970) 672-1212 to schedule a consultation.
