AI in Dentistry: How AI Is Redefining Dental Marketing with Adrian Lefler of My Social Practice

In this episode of The Dental Boardroom, host Drew Phillips sits down with Adrian Lefler, Co-Founder and CEO of My Social Practice. Adrian has been helping dental practices master digital marketing since 2009—long before “dental TikTok” became a thing.

They explore how generative AI and automation are fundamentally transforming the marketing landscape for dentists—from content creation and SEO to real-time patient engagement. Adrian shares how tools like Google’s Gemini and large language models are driving the cost of content nearly to zero, reshaping how practices get found online and build trust with patients.

Whether you’re wondering how AI-generated web agents like Annie can fill your schedule overnight or how to future-proof your website against AI overviews, this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

 Key Points

• AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini are making content creation (blogs, videos, images) faster and nearly cost-free.
• Google’s new AI Overviews (AIO) are replacing traditional search result clicks with direct answers, disrupting SEO strategies.
• Tools like Annie, an AI-powered scheduling agent, enable 24/7 patient communication and appointment booking.
• Website storytelling and content must evolve to remain competitive against AI-generated search summaries.
• Ranking in local search (Google Maps/business pack) is now influenced by how well your content integrates with AI tools.
• Paid ads and traditional SEO still matter, but only as part of a comprehensive AI-informed marketing strategy.
• Dental practices must use AI to improve team efficiency while continuing to build authentic, trust-driven content.

Transcript:

Drew Phillips: [00:00:00] Welcome back to another episode of The Dental Boardroom podcast into the next installment of our AI and Dentistry series. I'm your host, drew Phillips, and today we're spotlighting a marketing partner that's been turning social media clicks into new patient smiles since way before dental TikTok was a thing.

My social practice, the Utah based firm helping practices be found and chosen since 2009. My guest is a co-founder and CEO. Adrian Loeffler, a 14 year veteran at the intersection of dentistry, storytelling, and digital strategy whose content wins with both algorithms and actual human beings. If you've heard the buzz about Annie, the AI powered web agent that schedules patients while your front desk sleeps or caught their recent webinar on how large language models are rewriting dental, SEO playbooks, that's Adrian's team pushing the envelope forward.

In today's conversation, we will unpack how generative AI is reshaping marketing from hyper personalized video scripts to realtime chat that feels genuinely helpful and [00:01:00] what that means for growth, team efficiency and patient trust. Let's step into the boardroom with Adrian Loeffler of my social practice.

Welcome Adrian.

Adrian Lefler: Dude, that is like the best intro freaking ever, man. Can I just rent you for a little while to intro me everywhere else? That was amazing. Heck yeah, we, the believe all of it was incorrect, but it sounded great.

Drew Phillips: Um, well, cool man. Great. Thank you. I appreciate it, man. Yeah, of course, of course.

And welcome man. We're, we're glad to have you. So, you know, there's a lot of different ways in which we can kind of approach this topic and the theme of today's podcast. You know, I, I felt, you know, talking with Adrian offline that it'd be good to kind of. Start with that high level overview of just where the marketing, the business of marketing is today and the those traditional channels.

And then start to kind of pick apart each of those different channels that AI is, and automation is impacting and influencing both today and increasingly so in the future. And. You know, at the top of the list, you know, we have a, we have a website, we have videography and, and, and pictures and, [00:02:00] and that sort of story based telling that's gonna go on, on the aesthetics of that website and that website design.

You're gonna have SEO right? Which is organic search. You're gonna have paid ads, you're gonna have the local business pack that you're gonna be trying to, to rank on as well. Within a general search you have, uh, online scheduling, patient engagement, right? All of these different verticals that were.

Pulling to pulling together in order to create that comprehensive outcome, which is patient growth and patient satisfaction for our dental practice partners that we work with. And so, Adrian, kind of the first question using that, those, those sort of important channels that we have today, kind of help our listeners, uh, get an idea of how AI and automation is, is gonna be impacting those different areas, uh, both today and, and moving forward in the future.

Adrian Lefler: That's a big question, man. Big question. Big topic information. The cost of information is. Essentially going to zero with ai, meaning what that means is that where you used to have to pay for [00:03:00] copywriting or really any kind of information, it can all be access accessible at virtually zero costs through large language models.

Large language models being things like chat, GBT, Gemini, perplexity. Philanthropic has a product called clo. These are all called large language models. It's the AI guts, it's the guts of the AI algorithms and so forth. Because those agents have the ability to create so much con, they have accessible the access, pretty much all content, and they understand language.

They can create content. So where, you know, a marketing company who's hired to write. Blog articles to help you rank for, you know, certain keywords in Google search. You know, you might have to pay them a couple hundred dollars an article, right? Because it takes two or three hours to write the article, link it, publish it, get it, you know, dialed in, all that kinda stuff.

[00:04:00] Now it can take 20 minutes, right? So the cost of content creation, and that's not just copywriting, that's imagery, that's video, that's everything is going to zero and hmm. That is fundamentally changing the way that marketing is being done and will be done in the future. So one of the biggest, uh, impacts in all of those strategies that you mentioned, social reputation management, SEO, website development, that kind of stuff.

One of the inflection points, uh, that's going to make the biggest impact on how dentists attract new patients is going to be, I'll say two. We'll talk about two things unless you. Ask me another question. We hang on. We spin off into the universe somewhere, but it's gonna be an SEO and an AI automation. Ai AI automation in relationship to patient communication.

Okay. So if we can tackle those two topics, and if you want me to jump in [00:05:00] anything else, you let me know, but we can talk about those if that's appropriate. Yeah,

Drew Phillips: yeah, those are great. Those are two good ones.

Adrian Lefler: So if anybody's been on Google recently, in the last maybe couple months, you'll notice that when you do a search at the top of the search engine are what are called AI overviews, or they, the acronym is a IO.

Those results that are at the top of the page are generated from Google's Gemini, which is our, this Google's large language model. It's their, it's their, their version of Chad, GPT. And what is happening, if you've read any of the articles you've looked at, some of the statistics is that people are getting their answers more direct and more clear from the AI overview than clicking on a link and going to a website to read about what you know to read about what it is.

So if I search who's the best dentist in Florida or uh, Miami, Florida, typical in the past. [00:06:00] SEO search engine optimization, a, a, a strategy to help a dental practice rank higher in Google search to be found. Uh, what you would do is you'd hire a marketing company, or you'd have a marketing manager at your office, and you would create content that would be tagged.

We call this metadata. It's a tagging system. You, like, you, you make a video or an article or a website or whatever it might be, and you tag it with a phrase. A key word that's relatable to a highly searched key word. So if I search, if a typical, a great key word, if you're a dentist in Miami, Florida, it would be best dentist in Miami, Florida.

So if I search that, that's probably a highly searched term by patients who are looking for a new dentist, right? So you would want a website. That is tagged with that phrase. So it's a, it's a merging of a query by a patient with tagged content. Okay. [00:07:00] So that's how SEO has been done. So if you didn't, if you weren't creating any content, you had a very difficult time ranking in the, in the search engine, because Google doesn't recognize any new content and you don't, you don't go up in the.

Up in the ranking. So when you'd hire a marketing company, their job was to make sure that your website is tagged appropriately. They're what? They're, they're probably writing blog articles. They're creating videos or images or whatever it might be, and they're tagging this content with different keywords so that your, your content ranks high in the search engine.

Okay? That's how SEO has been done for the last 25 years. Okay? Now what's happening is Google, Gemini. Is being placed at the top of the search engine and it's giving results and it's, it's answering the query directly. So the difference here is this is usually you'd search best dentist in Miami, Florida, and you look at the ads or at the top, and then you'd see the Google [00:08:00] Maps section and you see a bunch of organic links, links to websites, and it would require the consumer, the patient to click on something, click on the ad.

Look at the Google Map section. Maybe click to the website from there, or possibly call from there. That happens a lot. Or go down and look through the titles of all the organic rankings and click on a little of 'em and go to the website to get the answer right. That's not happening anymore. Google Gemini basically looks at the query and it accesses all of the information online, and it's not just delivering links, it's delivering the answer.

The AI algorithm in Gemini has the ability to understand your query so well that it can just give you the answer so you don't have to go to a website anymore to get an answer. Okay. And what's the statistics are getting? I mean, this is only even out for a couple months, maybe two or three months. [00:09:00] Uh, actually I've probably been testing it for longer than that, but it's only been around for a few months.

And the statistics are showing that the, that the, that the user, the patient is getting their answer mo more likely in the Gemini response than clicking on a link. So this what this means. These are called zero click responses, meaning the consumer doesn't have to click on anything, they just get the answer right?

So if I ask a question about a dental implant or whatever it might be, I don't have to go to a website. From a a dental website to learn about what a dental implant is. Gemini gives it to me. Okay, so what this means is that there's going to be less clicks on the organic results and the paid ads significant.

There's gonna be a significant difference in the clicks on those links as there has been in the past. Okay. Now to give you an [00:10:00] idea of the magnitude of this, this may not sound like a big deal, but the, the, the A section, so usually when you do a search in Google, uh, before the AI overviews, you'd see ads, a, it, you know, have, uh, say, uh, promoted or ads or what, or AD or something sponsored and say, sponsor.

That section, that, that section, that sponsored section, which you pay for, it's a Google Ads product. You have to pay for those. Those are, it's called Pay Per Click or Paying Per Click, or Google AdWords or whatever that the, the amount of revenue generated from that section in search is close to two. It's a $2 trillion business.

I mean, it's massive. That's how Google's become a multi-billion dollar company, is because they charge for those ads at the top of the search engine. So now what's happening is they're putting this [00:11:00] AI overview above their ads, which makes you think, why the hell would Google do that? Why would Google risk.

Billions of dollars in potential ad revenue to put the AI overviews above their ads, which is what's happening right now. Now this, the user interface may change, the search result may change. They're gonna probably play with it a lot. But right now the ad, the AI overviews at the top, ads are below. Then the Google map and then organic links.

Okay, so my question, not to put you on the spot, oh,

Drew Phillips: please do, but I'm

Adrian Lefler: gonna put you on the spot, drew. Why the hell would Google do that? Risk the ad revenue

Drew Phillips: because it's a bigger risk not to, to ignore their competitive, their competitors in that large language model. Space Chat T, you already mentioned a few others, Gronk, et cetera, right?

And so they're trying to get that market share so that they can be creative later with how they re monetize that system

Adrian Lefler: dead on. Okay. And by the way, I didn't prompt you, everybody listening. I didn't tell him the answer [00:12:00] before this. I really asked Julie put him on the spot. So the issue is this. Is that, uh, to, to more contextually like, describe what you've just said.

Consumers want speed. They want answers immediately, right? Even the, the time it takes to click to a link and then read something, they don't wanna do that. So if they can get their answer immediately, they're gonna use that as their new search model. And what's happening right now is search is shifting from traditional search to AI search.

So people are using chat, GPT, and perplexity and GR and Google, Gemini, and all these other things as their search engine. It's gonna be the new way that we get information and it's, it's not gonna change. It's this is, this is the direction, this is where it's going. I, I've even noticed it in my own, you know, searches and queries.

I, I probably get [00:13:00] 90% of all of my searches. I probably get the answer in the Google Gemini, the AI overview, and I don't have to click on anything. It's a better response. Right.

Drew Phillips: For general questions. Abso I would have to agree with that. Absolutely. I'm curious to what, hear what your thoughts are though in terms of like service providers, because I, I still feel like there's this element where Chacha Boutique could give me a list or, or, you know, Gemini's summary could gimme a list of providers that meet that specific, that specific requirement that I'm looking for.

But then I'm still gonna potentially wanna look at who they are and, and get familiar with them, which may still lead to clicks.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah. No, that's true. So, so I think you're, you're, you're leading the conversation here. This is where I was gonna go next. So good, good call. So, if you look at the AI overview, what it is, is it's a curated response from Google Gemini.

So it's accessing all the information on the internet, and it's creating, it's creating its own response. But if you look through the actual responses, there's little links. Reference or references is probably how you would [00:14:00] call it. It's showing you where it's referencing information from. And on the right hand side, there's, right now there's three, uh, reference links where you can then click through to a website.

Okay? So there is some sense of the old kind of model, the old SEO model or search model where you put a query in and you're gonna get a link. The difference is, is that you're getting. Probably 90, 95% of the time you're getting what you asked for in the AI overview. And then the question becomes, is the person going to then reference, look at the reference link in the response, and then click on that response on the right hand side, right?

That, that's basically the way that this, the UI is set up, the user interface, so there's still links there. It's just the, the answer is there with a reference to get more information rather than having to click on a link to get the answer. So they call this zero zero clicks, or [00:15:00] zero clicks, or, I think that's what they call it in, in marketing.

So. The question then becomes this, how do you get you your dental practice to be one of the references in the AI overview? That's the new SEO, and they're calling it GEO generative engine optimization. So SEO, as we've known it, search engine optimization, is shifting to GEO generative engine optimization.

Drew Phillips: It's the first time I've heard that term, but I love it. Great. Thank you.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah, the, uh, it's at least that's what they're calling it right now. It's probably gonna stick. Okay. It's a good one. Yeah. So you got A-I-O-A-A-I overviews, which is the. At the top of the page is what it's called. And then you've got GEO, which is the strategy by which you can try and get your website to rank as a reference in the a IO.

[00:16:00] That's the key. And the reason why you wanna do that is the, the statistics or extremely strong, you lose if you have to scroll. If you require a, a consumer to scroll down the page, you lose half of 'em at the bottom of the page. Meaning everybody wants the response. This action is too difficult for people.

You know what I mean? Or click, right? They just want the answer immediately. So the further you're down on the page, the less likely a consumer's gonna find your information. So you've gotta figure out a way to get your practice, your website, or blog articles or whatever it might be in the AI overview for the search phrases that people are searching for.

So let me talk about one other thing that kind of is in tandem with this. There's also a significant shift from the types of search phrases that people have that they're, that they're using [00:17:00] because we've got AI integrated into almost every software system, and they're gonna continue to be integrated.

And these systems understand language. People are not typing in their queries anymore. They're not searching best dentist in Miami, Florida. They're searching, Hey chat, GBT, who's the best dentist in Miami, Florida that accepts Medicaid and is near the mall? That's the query. Because they're saying it.

They're not typing it. So the queries are getting longer and more specific. So that shift to voice search is significant, and in the younger populations it's even greater than in the older populations. But people are gonna get to a point where we're probably not even gonna have keyboards. I would imagine that's probably happen in the next 10 to 15 years.

We wanna use keyboards. I mean, if we do, it'll be just rarely. We're just gonna speak to our computers. Right? We'll speak to our watch. We'll speak to our cell phone. That's the way it's gonna [00:18:00] work. Right. So, so what you have to figure out, going back to my other point of like how to get into the AI overviews, is you have to take into consideration voice search and the types of search phrases that are being used now.

Okay. So here's how you do, here's, here's, here's a couple strategies of how to do this. Yeah, definitely. Okay. I've got a ton of blog articles about this on our, on our website, on my social practice. So if you go to the blog and you'll see, I dunno, I got 15 articles on, on just this. I've also got an EI actually just just published an ebook last week on GEO.

Oh, nice. And I'll send it to you if you want. Yeah, please do. Include it in the show notes. Yeah. That's an ebook that talks all about this. It digs in deep and walks through it. So if anybody's like super bored on a Saturday night and you wanna, like, you got nothing else to do, you can read this ebook and learn all about GEO anyway

Drew Phillips: as a practice owner, I don't think it's a, it's a, it's a wishlist item.

It's a must do. You gotta stay ahead of this one, I think personally.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah. It, it, it's, uh. You need to at least know [00:19:00] enough about it, that when you decide to do something, so lemme back up. A dentist needs to understand at least kind of what's happening. I don't think that, uh, to, to, to learn this stuff and implement the strategies is like starting another company.

It's, it's, there's a ton of work to it and it, and it's changing so fast that it's really hard to stay on top. So if a dentist is looking to generate new patients, and SEO is a primary strategy, you should know about this transition that we're right in the middle of it. Like this is gonna be transitioning for the next year or two as as consumers start using voice search more and more and more, and the AI overviews are being implemented in more ways and so forth.

You have to understand this so that when you talk to a marketing company or if you've hired somebody that's doing SEO four, you maybe on your team. You need to be able to understand what's going on, or you're gonna be doing old tactics that aren't probably gonna be very efficient. Okay? [00:20:00] So anyway, with that, here's a couple things.

One is your website has to be wicked fast, okay? Now, this isn't necessarily a GEO thing that kinda Luke talked about, but Google's algorithm prioritizes. Being able to provide content as quick as possible. So if somebody clicks on new website Link and your website takes a fraction of a second longer than other websites, you are kind of marked down in terms of the, uh, your, your SEO or your GEO optimization.

Okay? So you need to use Google Page Speed Insights. If you just search Google Page Speed Insights, there's a free tool. Online, you can drop your URL in there and it'll tell you how fast your website loads on mobile and as a desktop, and you wanna be above 90%. Okay? If it's below 90%, you need to talk to your website company and say, fix it.[00:21:00]

And if they don't know what they're doing, call me. Okay. So that's one thing, and that's just kind of outside of this whole conversation we're talking about, but it's fundamentally, it's a a priority. Okay. So speed. The ma, the way that your content loads and how quick it loads, it's, it's important. Okay. So

Drew Phillips: speed's been important, right?

Even, even from SEO before GEO was right. But I'm curious, do you feel it's more important now and it sounds like you do, and then how does you know videography, which is a slower load time on a homepage, how does that impact Right. Because for so long you know that that story that you know, that the video gives you outweighed the speed elements.

That you lost in the organic search rankings of, of old, but I'm curious to see where you think that optimal place is now.

Adrian Lefler: Well, I think video is the best kind of content to use on a website. So I would say in order to improve the quality and the user experience of your website and to kind of promote [00:22:00] your brand and who you are and to deliver an emotion, I think it's very important to have video content on your website.

But if you, there are ways to shrink the file. I am not like, I got teams that do this, but I don't do it myself. But you can basically minimize the size of the file so that it loads quicker. There's a lot of little techniques that you can do, so I don't think that there if, if it's done well, if you've got a great video and you want to use in your website, it's not gonna damage the speed as long as the video.

File is being o optimized in, in a way in which it loads quicker and there's a whole bunch of little things that you can do, tweaks you can do. So I don't think that's really necessarily a problem. You shouldn't, you should not, not use video for speed concerns. Okay, so video, do compression and like the strategy around video compression's.

The word, yeah. Got it. Compression is the word. So. Compress. If you've compressed your video content [00:23:00] well enough, you're still gonna get great speeds.

Drew Phillips: Beautiful. That's very helpful.

Adrian Lefler: Um, okay, so, so here's a couple strategies. Okay? One is the speed, okay? Two, you have to have a blog. You gotta have a blog blogging.

Nobody reads your blog. I'll be honest with you. Nobody reads zen logs unless they're super bored and they got nothing else to do. But nobody reads a blog, but Google reads it and they use it as a resource in the AI overviews. So you have to have a blog, and you need to be publishing content to the blog.

It cannot be copied content, it has to be authoritative, and it has to be custom. Okay? And in the blog. You always want to add an FAQ section to the bottom of your blog. So let's say you read an article about minimally invasive, uh, techniques in dentistry or something like that, right at the bottom of the article, you wanna have five, three to five questions, and the questions that you create there need to [00:24:00] be voice search questions you need to ask yourself, what would a patient ask?

Not typing, but what would the voice query be if they were looking for an answer that this blog post answers. Okay, so if, and, and, and you can use AI to help you do this, right? To help you write the questions even, right? But basically what you're doing is you're trying to optimize, you're number one, you're writing a blog post, okay?

You're publishing it to your website, which is just awesome for SEO, right? But if you add the FAQs, it's easy for you to put a long tail question in a question that somebody might be searching, using a voice search, and then you can answer that question. Simple technique. But it, it's an, it's an optimization technique that the, that Google Gemini will use as a reference in their AI [00:25:00] overview.

So your blog posts may get sucked into that AI overview and be a reference link. Does that make sense?

Drew Phillips: Yeah, no, it makes complete sense. And I don't wanna get completely on its side tangent here, but it's 'cause it's part of a larger question that I did wanna ask you. But you know, Google has always been somewhat protective over the different.

Combination of elements that they wanna see in order to rank someone higher in the tr in the older traditional search process. Right. And I'm just, I'm curious with these large language models starting to take over that market share of search, what type of data points are being shared more freely? Or maybe less in a more, more restrictive way so that people like yourself and others out there can continue to refine their strategy around ranking in these different, you know, plat on these different platforms.

Um, at least in a comparative way to the traditional search process. When we had Google playing, holding all the cards, right,

Adrian Lefler: I went on a river trip. Last week, which is why I've got this super golden tan right here. Heck yeah. But I [00:26:00] picked up a cold and I'm just getting over it. So, excuse me. So Google protects their algorithm extremely well, and they're changing it all the time in, in as typical SEO, the industry.

This is the game marketing company tries to figure out the algorithm so they can game the system. They figure it out through all sorts of testing and whatnot. And once they figure it out, Google realizes they've been figured out. Right. And they change the reality. It's never, process, never ends. That's what's happening.

Yeah. And it never ends. So if you, if you try the, the, the safe play. Okay. And this is not gonna be the answer you want because I, I, I, I don't think, I mean, I, there are some little strategies that you could do that are kind of tricky and you might be able to. Game the system a little bit, but inevitably, the long-term value or your long-term benefit of your SEO, if you stick to a few [00:27:00] rules, you're you're going to win.

Okay? It doesn't happen immediately, but it happens over time. Okay? So a couple of the things that that can answer your question. Are you, one, you have to have a blog. Okay? You have to be, oh, look at that. I got a thumbs up. Heck yeah. Does it do the balloons too? Sometimes when I do this, it'll do balloons.

Drew Phillips: That's, that's funny. That's the first time I've ever seen that, so I don't even know that. It just, it's, it's has its own background. Ai it just loved what you just said right there.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah. All right. So, cool. We got a thumbs up. It probably won't do it again, so you have to have a blog. Okay, so, well, let me back up.

Speed. I just gave you that one. That's, that's a, that's inevitable. You have to focus on that. Two, you need to have a blog and you need to be writing. As much content as you possibly can. I, I would say a minimum of two to four articles a month. Nobody has time to do that, so you might have to hire somebody.

Okay. But two to four articles a month [00:28:00] seems to me, I've been doing this for 15 years, seems to me to be a good cadence for most practices. Okay? Those have to be customized, they have to be linked properly. I have articles on my website all about how to link, okay. And linking is a strategy in and of itself.

There's links inside the article, and then you should have the FAQs. Okay? If you publish two to four blog articles a month and you do that for a year or two, you're gonna be outranking almost everybody around you. Okay? That and that's it. This is not something that games the system. This is something that Google wants.

They ask for it, they look for it. It's never changed. As long as you're publishing more content, you're gonna, you're gonna be doing well. Okay? So. Speed and blogging. The other thing I'll mention is that, um, you need to figure out a way to get links, inbound links into your website. So one of the, one of the [00:29:00] primary ways that Google will value a particular website over another website isn't just by the content on the site.

It's, it's looking at how many other companies are referencing that company, and those companies need to not be like spam sites. So here's an example. Let's say that you're an endodontist, okay? And you have 20 or 30 dental practices that refer patients to you. If you had an article. On all of, uh, different articles.

Not the same article, but different articles on all of those GP sites, talking about the relationship that you have with that company and a link that comes back to your site. So you write a blog article, you send it to your referring dentist to publish on their website, and there's a link in there to your website.

That's golden. That's like one of the best links you can get. [00:30:00] Okay. It's industry specific. It's local, it's real. Google recognizes the, the, the, it's coming from a site that's valuable. So, and this is a tough thing to do. Inbound linking, creating inbound links, meaning a link coming into you, into your site is one of the toughest things to do in SEO.

Uh, and, and it's gonna always be valuable in GEO as well. Okay? So you gotta figure out a way to do that and there are lots of strategies on how to do it, but the best way to do it is to find local businesses and companies that you have a relationship with, obviously, other dental practices or referring practices, or, great.

Your state association is a great link to get from the a DA. Anything dental specific to get a link from is super, super valuable. This is, uh, one of the reasons why most dental practices get links from directories like health grades, WebMD, those kind of things, is [00:31:00] because those are, uh, valuable sites and, uh, they're, they're not spammy, right?

They're not a junk site, just, you know, created by somebody somewhere to try and generate a link. These are, these are valuable websites and they're specific to the industry healthcare. At least, or dentistry potentially. Um, so links from those types of sources are extremely valuable. If you have more inbound links from reli, reliable sources, you're gonna outperform almost everybody.

So there's three things. Speed blogging. Inbound links, those will never go away. At least they're not looking into the future. Even with this AI change to search, they're, these are strategies that, that Google's always gonna be referencing. It'll be a big part of their algorithm. So no sneaky silver bullet there, but like three strategies that, that you should definitely be doing [00:32:00] if you wanna outright people

Drew Phillips: backlinking.

Right. As you were referencing the inbound links kind of getting on other people's sites that. To your point, I think, you know, it takes a lot of time, it's a lot of manual effort to get connected with those companies, prepare the articles in a way that is conducive to their user base in line with their branding, all to kind of get, get a link back to you.

But to, you know, I've seen the authoritative score of websites. Quadruple very quickly by, by having a, a heightened focus on that backlink campaign. Um, so yeah, you're

Adrian Lefler: you're talking about a domain authority, right? Domain

Drew Phillips: authority, yep.

Adrian Lefler: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. It's the authority that Google, it's a scoring system that Google gives your website and they give you some authority score.

If your authority score is higher or lower, it's, it plays a huge part in whether they would end up using you in the AI overview reference. Uh, links, so.

Drew Phillips: Totally. And then are there any strategies with, you know, 'cause we're talking about creating a lot of [00:33:00] content and maybe even with the backlink process itself, but are there ways that we can use ai.

To, you know, create, you know, massive amounts of articles kind of on the front end and then load them into sort of a drip system like Captivate or, or whatever, so that we can kind of do a lot of this work in chunks, but also not be viewed by the search engine sort of bots or crawlers as a AI generated content so that we still get, you know, a fairly good score or, or outcome from that exercise.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah. And so, you know, this is the, this is kind of the new frontier of, of how to create copywriting, how, how to create good SEO or GEO copywriting, which is how much AI can you use to still get some kind of like value on the backend in terms of your domain authority and so forth. Now, Google does look at AI content and it has a system that can spot it.

Okay. And I, I would imagine that they can spot it better than you think. Nobody really knows, but [00:34:00] they do take that into consideration. Now they've, they've come out with some articles, um, like quite a few articles actually the last couple years talking about this. Right. Um, because what's happening is people are just spinning off hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of articles that are created by AI and publishing them, but the content isn't super valuable.

Right. So it's just. AI fodder, you know, and it's just like dental fodder. And the, the question has to be, if you create more content, can you still create quality in that content? Can you still keep some quality to it? So, some ideas on this, um, one is you should definitely be using some type of an uh, uh, uh, AI copywriting tool.

So Anthropics got a product called Claude, C-L-A-U-D-E. And it's kind of being kind of tagged as a, as a great, uh, conversational ai. It [00:35:00] writes really well. It, it, it's, it's got kind of a, an influence. They've tweaked their algorithm, so it writes really, really well. Um, so you should use something like that.

But what you don't want to do is you don't want to just say, Hey, Claude, write me an article about dental implants and the benefits. It'll spit out an article for you and it'll sound great, and then just take that and copy and paste it to your website. You don't wanna do that. What you wanna do is you wanna, you wanna give it as much information as you can in the beginning in order to formulate the article.

And some of the ideas would be to do things like this. You could do an interview with your dentist, okay? You could interview the dentist and record the conversation in Google Gemini, in like Google Meet, if you use Google Meet or Zoom or anyway, and get the transcript. Okay. You take that transcript and maybe you ask the doctor five or six questions about, and maybe this is about dental implants, let's say, okay, you ask the question, you know, why do you, uh, why did you decide to start [00:36:00] offering dental implants?

Are there any dental implants you don't, you like to refer out? Um, do you just restore implants or blah, blah, blah, whatever my questions might be. Tell me a story about a patient without revealing the patient's name, what that was, a success story, whatever. Okay, so you get some. You get some actual words right from a human being.

You take the transcript of that, then you dump that in to say, Claude, and you say, I just did an interview with Dr. So-and-so from this practice. I want you to use this and I want you to write me an article about dental implants, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what what Claude will do is then suck in quotes from the interview that you did with your doctor.

This makes it really, uh, authoritative, transparent, and valuable because it's not something in ai, you've done a step, right? You did the step of the interview, you got some real words, some actual conversation. You get some real information, not just fodder, and then you [00:37:00] can get Claude to write you an article that's sick.

It would be great, right? Then after that, you have to link it properly. You gotta add your FAQs and then you publish it, so, so you can use AI to help speed up one of the steps. Okay. And if you're talking about a dental practice, who's writing content themselves, they haven't hired a dental marketing company, right?

They're just, they've got a dental assistant that likes to write or whatever, or they've got somebody on their team that likes to write and is willing to do this. The hardest part of writing a blog article is just like getting started, like, what's the name of the article? Where do I like? Getting that stuff onto the page initially requires creativity.

It requires. Focused time. And focused time is not like something that anybody's got in a dental practice. 'cause there's like million things going on if at want off at once. So if you just did a, if you just put the model like, Hey, I'm gonna interview my doctor once a week for five minutes. I'm gonna [00:38:00] ask him these 10 questions about this idea and this these 10 questions and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then I'm gonna drop that into Claude and then I'm gonna link it and then I'm gonna publish it. You got a great system. Right.

Drew Phillips: I'm gonna for a moment, so practice CFO, you know, we meet with our clients virtually and we have phone calls and so everything's already captured digitally. And so we've tried to find that that system and solution that takes that high value content that we're delivering to our partners and then package it in a way, in the same, in the similar manner that you're referencing here, which is to create that sort of.

Section content to be able to release to the site. And I think from the dental practice, you know, uh, practice owner's perspective, you know, how, what areas of their day that they're already doing normally are they capturing similar digital content that could be used in that manner without having to sit down on a separate occasion and create that content, you know, outside of their normal workflow.

And I don't know what the HIPAA rules are in terms of, 'cause now you have all these AI tools that are recording. [00:39:00] The interaction with the patient, right? And there's valuable content talking about the treatment, the implants, what they have to look for, you know, forward to in terms of pain management, whatever, that could then be funneled into content creation.

I don't necessarily know if there's HIPAA rules against that, but that to me would be an interesting play for them to turn an AI tool that they're likely gonna use either today or in the future as it evolves. And then move that into, you know, future content generation as, as one less step in that, in that puzzle.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah. No, I think your, your questions are valid. It, it's, it's, putting something in, putting a process in place is always, uh, and keeping it in place and staying consistent is one of the toughest things for dental practice. Any kind of marketing tactic is people get excited about it, it's something they wanna do, and they'll get it done for a month and then something changes.

Somebody leaves the office. The person you trained is, takes another job somewhere or whatever it might be, and all of a sudden the process is messed up. So a

Drew Phillips: hundred percent couldn't agree with that comment more.

Adrian Lefler: Yeah, [00:40:00] it's tough. So, I mean, not to promote myself and my company too much, but this is why you hire a dental marketing company because this is not, that's what they're built for.

You're, you're probably gonna be able to get better content at a cheaper cost. Even though you might only be paying your dental assistant 20 bucks an hour, the amount of time that that dental assistant spends to write an article is probably gonna cost you more in labor costs than it would be to just hire somebody to do it for you.

Drew Phillips: Oh, a hundred percent. But the, to your point earlier though, the, the biggest challenge for my clients at least, has always been getting. Professionals like yourself, the content they need to be able to, to write great articles or whatever. Now I know that you can write articles without influence from the, the practice owners, but kind of extrapolating that into a system where the amount of content that they're pushing out and the quality of that content allows them to be on these GEO rankings, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then for video, you know, historically, correct me if I'm wrong 'cause I'm definitely not a [00:41:00] marketing person, but um. When I would publish a video to my own website for that, for that, for that matter. You know, we always would have to include the summary or the transcription to that video in order for the Google crawlers to be able to read and use that information to help us rank.

But I'm curious, with the AI tools, is that still necessary and or, and maybe why A lot of people are saying video. Is, you know, a big part of that next evolution because you don't have to transcribe it, you don't have to summarize that the AI can already hear, digest, or ingest, and then know everything content-wise that that video was trying to accomplish and rank you accordingly.

Adrian Lefler: So, so if you were to do this, say this video that we're doing right now, this, this webinar, if you published this one of two ways. You just take the recording and you publish the recording, you drop it as a blog post and you don't have a transcript or anything there. Okay. That versus you drop the video in and the transcript below.

Okay. That's, that's what you're describing. Is it okay to just put the video up without a transcript? [00:42:00] Does Google still prioritize copy over video or not? I don't know the answer to that question yet. I think that, I think that Google, well, I, I, I don't, I am not confident. At this point that Google is ignoring copy and prioritizing the words in a video.

Okay? So, um, and it also depends on how you publish the video. So for example, if you. If you take this video and you publish it to your YouTube channel, and then you share the link or the embed code from the YouTube channel in your blog post, it's now referencing your YouTube channel. It depends on what your YouTube, how your YouTube channel is.

Then the value of your YouTube, YouTube channel and the other content that you might have on your YouTube channel that would help influence the algorithm, right? So the way that we're doing it is we always, if we do a video, we always include the copy right now. We're not pulling copy off and just publishing videos just to make sure totally.

That we're covering our bases. [00:43:00] So, but that's a really good question

Drew Phillips: and I guess we'll see as, as we transition over these next few years, it may be that you don't need to, but you're That's a good point though. It's defensive at a minimum to do so. Still.

Adrian Lefler: I did mention we're, we've gone for about 45 minutes here, I think, or maybe a little longer, but I did wanna mention the other, the other sub subject, and we don't need to take much time on it.

But, uh, at the beginning I was talking about SEO and then AI automation and patient communication. Do you, can I just touch on that for a second? Yeah, please do. Yeah, absolutely. Because this is like super, super cutting edge and trending. So I'll give you a little story about how we got into AI back in 2019 ish.

We were trying to figure, so we're hired to do SEO website development, social media and ads and all this kinda stuff, right? So we're driving all this traffic eyeballs basically to a website. People go to the website and they bounce off. Okay? They don't make a call, they don't schedule. So how we're thinking, how can we improve the conversion of all this traffic that's going to this website in into more scheduled appointments?

I mean, [00:44:00] that's what we're hired for, right? We can't just tell the doctor, Hey, you got a lot of traffic. The doctor doesn't care. He wants to see butts and chairs and revenue, right? So we gotta get these into scheduled appointments. And there's two main issues. One is. Patients that land on the website and don't interact in any way, they don't make a phone call.

They don't schedule, they don't fill out the contact form, nothing. Okay? So what? Why are they landing? Why are they bouncing off? And the other issue is phone calls. They go to the website, they get the phone number, they call it 5:02 PM and it goes to voicemail because they've all left the office. Okay? And those calls come in all the time.

They'll even call during work hours and they're slammed and they can't pick up the call. And it rolls over to voicemail and voicemail right now. 80% of people do not leave voicemail messages. Okay? And statistically, it's about a third, somewhere around there of all calls that come in, dental practice are missed.

Now, that is unacceptable. It's the [00:45:00] industry standard, but it's absolutely unacceptable for a practice that is concerned about growing. You can't miss a third of your phone calls. If it's a new patient, they sure as hell aren't gonna call back. Now if it is, it is an active patient, they may call back several times because they have a relationship with you.

But if you're trying to get new patients, you, you gotta pick up the phone, right? So, so this is what happened. We thought, okay, let's solve one of the problems. Let's put web chat, let the website. We knew that about two thirds of people preferred web chat over making phone calls. And so we thought, oh, let's add web chat.

So we built a web chat product. If it was a simple little box that would pop up, you could chat a question, it would ping the office and somebody at the office would respond. Okay, sweet. We thought we could increase conversions by like maybe one to 2%, which would be awesome. You drive a 500, 500 people to the site and you get 1% conversions.

That's five more scheduled appointments. Right. Awesome. [00:46:00] We did it, we put it on a whole bunch of websites. Every single practice called us back and said, take this damn thing off our website. We can't handle all the chats. So we're like, oh, we didn't, we didn't see that problem coming. I, it's, maybe it's because we're stupid, but dental practices do not have the time to answer chat.

It's too intrusive. If they're talking to a patient, a chat comes through, they're not gonna stop talking to the patient and answer the chat. But chat requires an immediate on demand responses like it, like if you offer it, you have to deliver that. So the only other option after that was, well, Dewey. Do we kill the project or do we create our own live chat management thing where we hire a bunch of people that are sitting in their basement answering chats all day long on behalf of practices?

And we thought that was a stupid idea, so we didn't do it. So we dumped the project. So in November of 2022, when chat GPT came out, I was like, oh my gosh. Holy cow. If we could train chat GPT to be a [00:47:00] front office person and give it all the information about the practice so that it speaks in the voice of the practice, it could handle the entire conversation.

It would not require anybody from the team to respond, ever. It just handles the conversation. So we built it and it performed flawlessly. And so then what we did is we connected to the patient management system. So now it can schedule. So we launched this web chat product called Annie and uh, it was awesome.

So we solved that problem and we get much higher conversions with, uh, with dental practices that have a, an AI chat. And this is not, uh, the, the AI that people, you know, sometimes people say, Hey, I've got an AI chat. And you look at it and it says. How can I help you today choose A, B, C, or D? That's not what I'm talking about.

It's database. Yeah, Uhhuh. Yeah. It's not a database chat. It's not a tree. A chat like a triage. Right. It's not, that's not what [00:48:00] I'm talking about. I'm talking about talking dynamic conversation. GBP, like a natural conversation. Okay, so, so we launched it, it was awesome, and then we thought, okay, if we could just put a voice on this, we could tie it to the phone system and run all calls that get missed, whether it's during work hours or after hours to an agent.

Who picks up and has a conversation, schedules appointments and dah, dah, dah, dah da. So that's what we launched and the results are freaking unbelievable. Like, I, like I, I predict voicemail will be gone in two years, like nobody's gonna use it anymore. There's no reason to send anybody to voicemail when you can have an AI agent pick up and handle the conversation.

So, and I believe that all, or you don't want it.

Drew Phillips: You want action to be ta I said more importantly, the practices shouldn't want voicemail. They should want something that's creating action. Yeah. And, and change right there on the spot.

Adrian Lefler: Absolutely. So that's what this Annie AI product is. It's, it's basically an AI [00:49:00] agent.

We built it on chat, GPT, and it does web chat and phone. Okay. But the actionable items that it can do are expanding as we're developing the product. So it can. It can forward calls. So if it's on a call with somebody and they're like, I need to talk to the doctor, and the doctor's willing to let the AI agent have its phone, it'll transfer the call to the doctor's phone.

Right. If the agent, if you want the agent to reschedule appointments or cancel appointments, it can do that. It can schedule appointments, it can drop links in chat, it can drop PDFs, it can drop patient forms. We can put links into billing, you know, so if somebody's chatting and they wanna pay their bill, we can drop a link in so they can pay their bill.

So it's like the opportunity of these AI agents to then start taking on routine tasks that just a human being doesn't have to do. Like an AI agent can do it, and you can do it efficiently. It can do it with that flawlessly and not make mistakes. It's always polite. Doesn't [00:50:00] ask for a raise, it's never gonna quit.

Right. You know, it's like a huge support system to the front office. Now the front office can run more seamlessly handing off tasks that are routine automated tasks. Right. So it's just. I just, it's just, it's an unbelievable, like, we're super, super excited for it. Like when anybody calls us and they're like, I wanna get your social media product, or I want you to build me a website or do ads for me.

I'm just like, okay, great. We'll do it, but we need to add Annie, because you are gonna call me, or I'm gonna call you in a month and you wanna know how many patients you got and your marketing campaign, you know, from whatever we're doing. And if Annie's on there, we're gonna have more than than we if we didn't.

Period. So it just. Incredibly improves the conversion rate of all marketing campaigns. So my recommendation is for anybody that's listening, if you haven't looked at any [00:51:00] of the AI phone assistance, or they call 'em AI receptionists or whatever you need to look at 'em. There's a, it's a, it's a, it's a.

Rapidly developing industry. There's a lot of players in there. Obviously I like Annie because, uh, it's dental specific and you know, I have a vested interest. But, um, it, it's something that you're, you're gonna find will work really, really well in your practice, and you'll just, you'll grow. It'll just flat out grow.

I've got a couple questions

Drew Phillips: for you, if you don't mind, on Annie. Yeah, go ahead. Um, so, you know, last probably three or four, maybe five years online scheduling has gotten better and better. You know, the old, the more the old format, right? Where the human being has to click through, take action. Pick the date, the time hit submit, and then the forms and the automated messaging about save the dates and whatever.

That all happens automatically behind the scenes. You could set up an automated text with missed phone calls and the person can get a link to schedule. So those things have kind of been around, but you're taking it to a point where now humans can actually interact and [00:52:00] hopefully get to that resolution maybe faster.

But I'm, I guess what I'm curious of is when, you know, when I've looked at an online scheduling tool, it's only ever as successful as. The amount of seats that that office is willing to create, whether they have to be creative to do it, or they have to shuffle things around within their schedule to make it acco to be, to accommodate the people that want to take action.

So I'm curious with, with, uh, with Annie, you know, what type of programming and what type of logic is that tool using to say, Hey, this patient that's calling today that wants to come in 9:00 AM tomorrow is an ideal spot that the office is willing and able to facilitate.

Adrian Lefler: So what happens is you, you have this, any software communicate seamlessly with the practice management system.

And we've got, this is just what's, what's what called an api. It's called an API integration. Just a, just a. Software tool, lets two softwares speak to each other. So you've got your patient management system. Let's say you've got Dentrix, right, and then you've got Annie. [00:53:00] And Annie needs to be able to see the open slots in the patient management system and then be able to provide those to the patient based on the type of patient and the type of appointment.

So what happens is when you set Annie up, we have the doctor or office manager who we're working with pull up their schedule. We identify all the operatories, all the slots where certain types of appointments should be scheduled. So emergency appointments should be scheduled in this operatory on these dates at this time, and we block those.

We indicate those sections. Okay. We're kind of like following. The way that they set their schedule up. Okay, you want an adult prophy, a child prophy, how long should those appointments be? What operatories, what times available? So on and so forth. So what happens is when the AI agent has the conversation, and, uh, it'll just know if it's an emergency appointment, the patient's like, I have swelling in my mouth, or I just broke my tooth, or I have an emergency.

It'll know it's an emergency appointment and it'll, it'll [00:54:00] offer the emergency slots. To the patient. Okay. And we'll set parameters on how much time, et cetera. Okay? So we've set ours up where it's kind of unlimited. You can set up as many different types of appointments as you want. You can work with as many doctors as you want, as many operatories, there's no limit on that.

We just build it custom to the way that the practice typically schedules, and the agent will, after the conversation's going, or in the middle of the conversation, the patient says, I wanna schedule an appointment. It just grabs the next three openings. Says, well, I have an appointment on Thursday at two, one at Friday at 9:00 AM and then we have open hours on Saturday.

We have an appointment available at 10. Well, any of those work, if they say no, it just picks the next three, right? So, um, or the patient can say, no, you know what? I need to get something on next the following Tuesday, and it'll just look at Tuesday. It just uses the conversation to find it. But if, but if it hasn't been prompted by.[00:55:00]

The patient saying, I need to come in on this day at this time, or I need to come in tomorrow. This is an emergency. It just provides the next three open slots based on the type of appointment that the patient wants to make.

Drew Phillips: Got it. So that's kind of like following a block scheduling setup when the office uses that, and then I'm assuming that.

You could also just say, Hey, operatory three all day long's wide open. And they'll just look if there's 60 consecutive minutes or not to, to allow that booking. Yeah,

Adrian Lefler: exactly.

Drew Phillips: Cool.

Adrian Lefler: The other, the other one last thing that we just launched is the agent can now do outbound dialing. So, um, rather than just taking inbound calls, we have the agent, and this is specifically for scheduling hygiene.

So this is, this is just an idea of like where this stuff is going. Okay. So nobody in a dental practice wants to be the person that's asked to call all the unscheduled hygiene patients and try and schedule 'em. It's like it's a pain in the ass. Nobody wants to do it. Okay? So what you can do is, because we've got [00:56:00] this connection between Annie and the patient management system, we can create a protocol that says, look at all the active patients in the database.

Tell me. Create a list of patients who do not have a future hygiene appointment and haven't been in, in, say, six months. Or you can set whatever parameter you want. Okay. It'll create a bucket of those patients, and then you can create a protocol. Say, I want you to call these patients once a week, one time, only three times, whatever you want it to be, or send a text or whatever.

You can create a parameter and it just calls and schedules, hygiene appointments, and, hmm. As I've talked to dental consultants in the industry to try and get some sta statistics on, uh, conversion rate on outbound dialing for hygiene, it's, it's usually between five to 10%, meaning if you call a hundred patients, you're getting about five to 10 appointments scheduled, and our concern was that the AI agent wouldn't be able to do as well.

And it's right in the same, it's between five and 10%, so you can [00:57:00] offload all of your outbound dialing. For, for hygiene to an AI agent, you can just take it right off your team's plate and your front desk will be like, thank you for doing that, because I don't wanna make those phone calls. So, and more stuff's being developed, I mean, we're working on right now, it's not yet here yet, but we're working on, uh, calling unscheduled, uh, or, uh, as calling patients to have an accepted treatment.

The A IH agent can look at the treatment plan, can get the information, make a follow-up call, and say, Hey, we saw you for a crown last year. We weren't able to get you scheduled, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So these are tools. It's like, it's like a phone, you know? It's like a, it's like the new phone.

Hundred percent right? You just, you're gonna have to use this stuff because it's gonna make you so proficient that if you're resistant to leveraging ai, you're gonna be at a disadvantage in the industry. Your costs are gonna be higher, you're not gonna be able to, to keep up

Drew Phillips: more tools than the [00:58:00] arsenal, the better.

Adrian Lefler: Yep.

Drew Phillips: Well, Adrian is, is, are there any other things that, or any last comments or, or thoughts that you wanted to share with, with the listeners? And if, if not, that's okay, but I would love for you to drop, you know, where people can find you, learn more about you guys, and just some of your, your, your best places of contact.

Adrian Lefler: Well, you can just go to, if you, if you wanna just go to our website, my social practice.com. We've got tons of information on there. I would recommend that you go to our blog and look at all the AI articles. I'll send you a set of links to some resources, the ebook I mentioned. Um, some, some videos of like AI and action, some stuff like that.

Um, some information on GEO. So if you wanna put those in the links as resources for people who are interested, that absolute in learning more, I'll, I'll send those over to you. But other than that, you can reach out, you can sit, shoot me an email if you want my email's, Adrian, A-D-R-I-A n@mysocialpractice.com.

I'm happy to jump on a call with anybody who has more questions. So

Drew Phillips: thanks again, Adrian. Great to have you on the show.

Adrian Lefler: It was a [00:59:00] pleasure.

Drew Phillips: Until next time.