Supercharge Your Online Reputation

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management and training.

00:12
Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Dr. Len Tau. He’s a dentist, speaker, KOL, that stands for Key Opinion Leader Influencer, and a podcaster. And our topic is Supercharge Your Online Reputation. Welcome, Dr. Len. Thanks for having me, Alex. I appreciate it. Well, I love to start this out, that I got the chance, and you were so gracious to have myself and our COO.

00:40
a 10 year supercharge event in South Florida, supercharge your practice. It was a awesome event, some great speakers and vendors and we had a party on a boat and you were so welcoming and fun, you and your wife. And so thank you so much. Great event and great people. So I appreciate that. Well, thank you for coming and thank you for at least mentioning it. It’s become a passion project of mine. um it’s where you’re entering year four. It’s amazing.

01:09
We’re three years in already, gonna have four years, same hotel. The hotel is beautiful, I’m sure you- Beautiful hotel, oh my goodness. And speakers are gonna be announced, they’re all basically selected and we’re looking forward to an even bigger and better Supercharge event. It’s funny, you mentioned Supercharge, it’s called Supercharge or dental practice, but because people like you had Supercharge your practice, we’re actually, I think, gonna keep it permanently as a Supercharge. So it’s Supercharge 2025, Supercharge 2026. So we’re gonna rebrand slightly.

01:38
Just because so many people, when I was seeing posts about it, very few people said supercharge your dental practice, supercharge your dental office. So it’s supercharge. That’s where we’re hitting with supercharge. Simple, simple. Simple, correct. I love it. I love it. The sound of a good CEO is simplifying. So one of your passions is online reputation. And so we’re going with the title supercharge, your online reputation. And it’s interesting. So my dad,

02:07
is a retired dentist. still has a website that’s super optimized. So I’m just going to start this out here and it’s, ranking, still ranking on the top of looks, look up South Florida cosmetic dentist. You’ll find my dad and he works as a traveling dentist. Uh, and you’re in South Florida lens. So if you know it, I actually, one of your attendees that was there actually has my dad still work as practice as like a, uh, a mercenary. So other dentists that are looking for a mercenary doc, that’s really good.

02:37
My dad was just bragging to me at lunch at how great his bonding work is. And still at nearly a little over 80, he’s phenomenal and he loves it. And so, and he was saying to me like, why am I not getting as many phone calls from my website? And, and I’m like, you’re ranking great. And it occurred to me that he has no online local presence because he doesn’t have an office. He goes to other people’s offices and nowadays.

03:05
as you know, people are looking locally where you are and what’s your reviews. They rarely are going to search or that’s secondary for your website. Am I right? 100 % correct. It’s not only about how well you rank. It’s how well you look online, how well Google says you look. So you’re only as good as Google says you are in my opinion. But it’s very much a local search now. And for years,

03:33
dentist, I don’t want to say ignored the local search, but now it’s become even more, so more important just because the large language model proliferation with chat GPT and perplexity and all these other sites, you have to make sure you are focused on local search or else you’re going to be left in the dust and nobody can find you. it makes sense. mean, even before chat GPT came out, um, I, I want to see the reviews. I want to see what other people are saying.

04:01
And yes, you can have a beautiful website, but that tells me nothing. And having your, I mean, the pictures are great, right? You can see that, but how do I know? But when you see reviews, it’s everything is about reviews. I want to buy something on Amazon. It’s reviews. And so to be competitive, you have to be seen locally and they got to be good reviews. You got to respond to reviews. I mean, that’s where you’re the expert at. So.

04:27
So it’s critical. obviously if you want to compete and you want, and I gave you an example, you can have the SEO gravy, pay-per-click gravy, great website. But if you’re not able to be seen or verified locally with great reviews, it’s going to be very difficult to grow your practice. So I think that’s kind of the premise. So what do you do about it? What does a dentist do? What do they have to know? Well, I think first they have to recognize that

04:56
not every uh website company is going to handle local search. It’s a big uh disconnect in the industry. A practice that has a lot of reviews is not necessarily going to rank either. So there are a lot of missing pieces that need to be filled in here. um Dennis has to be willing to accept feedback about their procedures. They have to be asking for reviews. There are many ways to obviously get them. There’s some less

05:24
how should I say, uh legal ways. So you wanna be careful how you do it. You wanna practice the best practices out there. But if you can become a practice that has visibility and credibility online and you team that with your great website, really good, obviously cases of yours, and then doing some paid search, whether it’s on Google or any of the uh social media channels, that combination of action will significantly increase

05:51
the way you’re perceived and thus, if done properly, the number of new patients that you’re getting. I think overall, anytime anybody markets, the goal is to get patients. That’s what the goal is when you market your practices. You want to make more money. So you need to have a multi-factorial way to generate these patients. But remember, the key is if you market your practice and you don’t have reviews, your marketing is not going to be as effective if you start adding reviews to the mix.

06:20
So when I see practices that are a year old and spending two, three, $4,000 a month on marketing and they have 18 reviews, that to me is the wrong way to do things. the reviews are there to support the foundation and create the foundation that you’re going to build on top of it. But if you don’t have reviews, stop wasting your money because the marketing you’re doing isn’t going to be very effective. The return on investments is not going to be very good. So you have to really get this great foundation.

06:49
and then continue moving through the process of getting reviews consistently because one of the biggest ranking factors is not only the number of reviews you have, but also the velocity of the reviews that you’re getting. So how often are the reviews coming in? So practices that have a lot of reviews and then stop, they’re gonna be hurting the rankings. So this is something that Google has said over and over again that they want this steady flow of reviews because we become this reputation society. You mentioned it. Okay. When you go to a restaurant, you may go to Yelp. When you go to the movies,

07:18
You want to be able to rot in tomatoes to look at the reviews. When you go to Amazon, you don’t buy a one-star product, you buy a five-star product. That’s what we become right now. Okay? And not everyone is going to write a review for you, but I guarantee you when people are even referred to you, like word of mouth, they’re going to look you up online. So all of these things are now very much interconnected in this marketing space. But if you don’t have that great foundation, everything else is going to fail. You’re not going to drive over a bridge that’s swaying.

07:45
And that’s where your reviews really build is a great foundation that you can build on top of and be very successful out there. Yeah. It sounds like a zero sum game who can get the most reviews and the best reviews. And you, have to, it like you have to keep going because the algorithm is going to want you to keep going. And they, and they also have to be organic, uh, because again, they’ll catch you if you’re kind of stuffing reviews or, or fake stuff. So what, okay. So

08:13
I like what you said is you want to build, this is really good, you want to build your marketing around your reviews. That’s really good. that’s why I call it reputation marketing. And it’s like, and I suppose that’s an offshoot of this as well as getting video testimonials and supporting and other ways of leveraging testimonials and referrals and it’s social proof. 100 % on who’s same moniker. All social proof.

08:41
Yeah. I want to make one change. a lot of the common terminology is reputation management. I want to change that to reputation marketing. Okay. You mentioned video testimonials. I like to change that name to video trust, demonials, trust, those videos, those video testimonials create trust with your patients. And when they see the video testimonials, they’ve gotten that trust and they become a patient. So I’ve changed that terminology to video trust, demonials, because I think they really have you have you been hanging out with Paul Goodman? No, I have not actually. know Paul very well.

09:11
Cause he, he loves to dentist thing and you know, you guys are creating words that maybe one day we’ll be in the dictionary. Uh, so shout out to him. So he’s a, think he’s one of your, your speakers or sponsors over there at Nachos. And he was a speaker at my event. Yeah. Yeah. And we have him. We’re, we’re part of Nachos is a good guy. So, okay. Trust the monials. I like that. I like that trust the monials and reputation marketing.

09:40
All right, so on the practice, are, what am I doing to supercharge my online reputation? So the first and foremost thing that I think that I want practices to really focus on is, is, or start with is creating what we call a reputation culture in the practice. So you have to really alert the team, how important reviews are for the growth of the practice. You have to accept it for yourself. And then you have to basically say, okay,

10:10
Patients are going to come into the office. We’re going to treat them. We’re going to put on our best behavior. And then we’re going to go ask them in some way, shape or form to go online and grade us. And that grade is in a form of an online review. And if we put our best foot forward, we treat them really well, we give them a wow experience, we do great dentistry, and our customer service is on par, that should result in a positive review. But you can’t please everyone. You can’t. It’s impossible.

10:40
Okay. If we pleased everybody would know, no patient would ever leave the practice. Okay. So if, if you accept that and you are willing to accept the criticism that may come, okay. And doesn’t have to be in the form of a negative online review. It could be just some feedback back to the practice. If you accept all of those things, that’s the first step into really hope helping your practice grow online. Okay. So that’s the reputation culture that I want to break. I want each practice to kind of.

11:10
come up with. Once that happens, you will start getting better reviews, hopefully, and more reviews. And that is one piece of the puzzle to ranking locally. So generating reviews and increasing the consistency or what we call the velocity of reviews, that’s one part of the puzzle. Once that’s done, you have to use some sort of listing management product out there.

11:38
Obviously, I run the dental division for BirdEye. I very rarely pitch BirdEye when I talk, but BirdEye is one of the companies that helps get this reputation online started. Whether you’re a brand new practice, it’s essential. Whether you bought a practice from somebody, it’s essential to do. Whether you moved the practice, there’s all different scenarios that you need. You can be in business for 30 years and nobody’s ever once made everything consistent online and that’s going to hurt you in the rankings.

12:06
which is why those practices have a thousand reviews. was literally talking to, I was talking to a MedSpot today. She was in Colorado and she has 1,280 reviews and she’s invisible online. She has quadruple anybody else. You can’t find her. And it’s because she had just moved her practice a couple of weeks ago and the data online is so inconsistent and Google doesn’t trust the business when they see that. So getting reviews or dominating your area on reviews is not necessarily going to get you ranked higher.

12:36
It’s adding this other aspect, which over the years has become kind of a lost art. again, people think that they, I have 2000 reviews, I’m number one. I’m like, it’s not. And one of the things I always like to say to people is you can’t search on your own phone to say I’m number one. That’s not realistic. You have to go to a computer incognito or private browsing mode so Google doesn’t know who you are and then do a search that isn’t, you

13:05
necessarily related or your name, you can’t do your name, you’re going to come up first anyway. So a dentist in my town do that search from a computer that you’re in incognito mode and truly see how you rank because it very rarely is equivalent to what you see if you search for yourself on your phone. But it’s a combination of reviews and this listings that really help with ranking. And then once you achieve that ranking, maintaining it, that’s what’s going to really help you bring more new paces into the practice. That’s really good. That’s really good.

13:36
Okay. So I’m setting up a culture. think, you know, it comes, it occurs to me often. And I think this is really the, when it comes to reviews, and I think a lot of dentists, and you’re not going to be surprised when I ask you this. I like, how do I ask for them? How do I get them without sounding cheesy? Very common concern I get is, I don’t know, do you want to sound cheesy? You don’t want to sound like you’re begging for it. You don’t want to.

14:05
make it seem like it’s, it’s, you want to make it normal part of conversation. So one of the things that I’ve changed over the years, and I kind of say, I brought this to the industry was changing the word review to feedback. asking for review sounds like you’re begging for it. Okay. When you ask for feedback about your experience and it changes the discussion. And that’s how I wanted everybody to discuss it where you’re asking for feedback, rather than a review.

14:35
And then it becomes a much more comfortable conversation for anybody in the office, from the doctor to the front desk. It’s just natural to say, Hey, we would love to get some feedback about your experience changes the discussion you have with them. There’s another check Mark gold star for you, Dr. Len. like that asking for feedback. And that starts the process that if it’s good, then it can lead to an online review. So what’s the mechanism? So BirdEye and other software.

15:02
will automatically send this out. I assume it works for your practice management software. There’s follow-up or text, and then if it’s a bad review, they don’t send it there. A lot of them do those things. So there’s an automated aspect to it. You still recommend the in-person asking for feedback, hey, I’d love to get your feedback. And then if so, their response, what do you do then? So let me clarify. So there are…

15:30
A uh few, would say three well-known reputation products on the market. why do I say a few well-known, three well-known ones? Because it’s Podium, Swell and BirdEye. Those are the three companies that are very much ingrained in the dental industry from a review perspective, reputation perspective. I want to be clear. There are many companies that will ask for reviews from your patients, but those are not reputation companies. Those are communication software, very different mechanism of doing it.

15:58
Okay. Now where BirdEye differs and again, I just mentioned two other companies where BirdEye differs is that we have a green and red button and the red button takes the feedback back to the practice. doesn’t go online. Okay. That’s a unique feature to our software. So it’s not a gate. People are going to say, well, that’s a gate. It’s not a gate. A gate is when you do thumbs up or thumbs down, or would you recommend us? Yes or no. And anybody who says no gets taken to one way. When they say yes, it gets taken to a review. That’s a gate.

16:27
We have one page where we ask this question until it’s not a gate because they can definitely leave a bad review. It doesn’t happen, but they can leave a bad review if they so want to. um So it’s automated, which means it’s sent directly from the practice management software. The only thing that the practice should be aware of, in my opinion, is if the patient had a bad experience or they’re a pain in the butt, they get turned off. You don’t send a message to those patients. That’s good idea. That’s a good idea. Be mindful who you’re sending the stuff to. And then

16:55
Again, back to the feedback would the hygienist or assistant or doctor say, I love to get your feedback. How was your experience? And so what’s the verbiage? then they say, Oh, I had a great job. Hey, you’re going to get a text or email from us. We’d love your feedback at health. So, so give me some ideas. Yeah. This is exactly what I run through it. Everybody every day. So, um, when the patient walks up to the front, what’s the first question that you should be asked? Give me your money. No, of course not. How was your visit? How was your visit today?

17:24
That’s the first question you want to ask them. And as long as they have something positive to say, you say, thank you so much. love hearing that. And the verbiage I like to use is, um just so you know, you may be receiving, and I say may because sometimes it’s on timing and they may not get it. You may be receiving a message via text or email that’s going to ask you for some feedback about your experience. It’s very easy to do. And we look forward to reading what you have to say. Okay. Now,

17:51
One further step that works really well, automation works great, but it’s the people who work on the manual stuff, the asking part of it, that even get better results. The next step should be every single morning, even if it isn’t true, every single morning we have a huddle where we celebrate our five-star reviews. We would love to celebrate yours. So now they know they’re going to get a request, they’re hopefully going to write the review, and then you’re going to celebrate it with your team the next morning. That motivates patients to do it.

18:22
Okay. And there’s one extra step you can add into this and that’s incentivizing the team because you cannot incentivize the patient. So one of the no-nos is incentivizing, whether it’s a raffle, a gift, anything of value cannot be done. If you get caught and someone reports you, which will happen, you will lose your reviews. And it’s happened many, many times to people. So stay away from incentivization, but you can incentivize the patient. I mean, the team member.

18:49
So what I like to do if you want to take it to the next level is get the team excited about doing it. If you read reviews for any dental practice, pick any office randomly and look at the reviews, they’re either going to say the doctor himself, Dr. So-and-so, or the team with no mention of individual people. So if a team member can have that discussion with the patient and say, oh, by the way, if you mentioned my name, I would really appreciate it. And then that patient mentions the name of the team member.

19:18
in the review, which is still far and few between when you see it, that’s how the team member gets incentivized. now the team’s on board as well. And if they get their name mentioned in the review, you can give them something of value. could be a monetary gift, be towards a goal of something. But when you put that particular system in place that I just mentioned to you, paired with an automated software, that gives amazing results from the review perspective. That’s really good. Wow.

19:47
We’re almost at the end of the podcast. Uh, well, and you give in so much information. Like, I don’t know if I want to ask you any more questions. Like what you just talked about, like I could, for our listeners, like focus on that, unpack that and just, you know, keep going, uh, and, and, get that into solve your office. Okay. So let me ask you a few things. So have two last questions for you. One is going to be for those that want to.

20:17
Learn more about you about supercharge, your practice, dental practice, whatever you want to call it. And supercharge itself. Uh, if one of them about, that, about you, what you do a bird eye, uh, where you’re speaking your podcast, where can they find you? I mean, we’ll put, we’ll put it in the, the show notes for those who are listening to audio, where do they go? get more. Place to go is dr lentow.com. D R L E N T I U.com. Everything that we just talked about podcast supercharge.

20:46
Um, BirdEye is all on that page. That’s kind of my home base for everything. Um, I have a link on the very upper right that is, has my favorites. So I work with about my 40 or 45 different companies that I refer to. They’re listed there as well. I call them Len’s favorites, kind of like Oprah’s favorites. They’re on there. If they want specifically to know about Supercharge, your dental practice, they can go to superchargeyourdentalpractice.com. That’s specifically designed for the event. It’s next year, September, September 25th and 26th, um, in Fort Lauderdale.

21:16
I will let you know that we are adding another day to it. So that’s something new. So we’re going to do one full day on Friday the 25th, and then we’re going to do two half days on the 26th and 27th. So it’s a Friday, Saturday and Sunday event, partially because the hotel is so nice. People didn’t get a chance to enjoy the hotel while there. So we’re giving them the chance now by doing it over a longer period of time. So that’s a change we’re making for 2026. So if they want information, then go check that out. But most of the stuff is found on my website.

21:44
Dr. Tau.com and they or they can reach out to me directly I’ll give you my email on my cell phone and they can reach out to me. So my email is Dr. Len Tau. Excuse me Len at Dr. Len Tau.com so Len at Dr. Len Tau.com and my email my phone number. Sorry is 215-292-2100 those are Very many ways they can reach out to me. I’m all over social media. I’m all over Facebook and Instagram

22:12
If someone wants to find me believe me, they’ll be able to find me unless they’re in incognito mode Just kidding, but you have the wrong area code. It should be 954 305 or 754. So unfortunately, you’re not originally from South Florida You came in later so Len it last question. Is there anything else? At the very end someone or if you can summon all in one one thing somebody could do tomorrow Activity they can do tomorrow

22:42
What would it be when it comes to honor reputation remarks? think the most important thing that someone can do right away and it is a couple of different things to add to the rankings as well is take a look. So if you do a Google search for your own business, you’re going to, so you search for your actual office name and your Google business page comes up. It’s going to say right below the reviews is going to say, hopefully it says dentist in your town or dentist in your County. Okay.

23:11
As general dentists here, you want to make sure dentist is your primary category. You don’t want it to say dental clinic unless you’re in Canada, because in clinic in the US has negative connotations. You don’t want it to say dental hygiene. You don’t want to say cosmetic dentist unless you only do cosmetic dentistry. So your primary category is another big ranking factor that is very commonly ignored. So do your own investigation there and then you can have up to nine secondary categories.

23:40
and very few practices take advantage of that. So any category, a category can be anything you do. So if you do a liners, you can add orthodontist. If you do teeth whitening, you can ask teeth whitening services. If you enjoy doing dentures, you could put denture care center. If you place implants or restore implant, dental implant provider. All of these categories help with ranking, but they’re very ignored. And if you have no secondary categories, that’s gonna hurt you. So with primary and secondary categories are a lost art.

24:09
and are becoming more more important. The primary category is one of the biggest ranking factors and many times it’s not correct. And if it isn’t correct, you won’t rank. So I wanted to make sure people understood that that’s another factor we didn’t talk about. Well, Dr. Lin, thank you again for joining us and remember listeners to follow us on Apple podcast, Spotify and YouTube. And you get the episodes as they’re released. And I joke at the end of the podcast is go to your friend and find their subscribe button as well as yours and click that subscribe, click that follow and

24:39
Dr. Len, you’re gonna go to every one of those thousand exhibitors you have, grab their phone, have them follow your podcast, my podcast, all of our good stuff. That’s important to do. I don’t think Google will be upset. I guess it’d be a different IP address, doesn’t matter. But anyways, thanks again. And until next time, go out there and be an All-Star.

25:03
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at AllStarDentalAcademy.com.