North Texas Dentistry Convention Issue 2014 | Page 38

practice marketing

Big Change
Why Google’s Latest Update Could Mean
for Online Dental Marketing
by Jill Talman

If there is one thing we know about Google,
it’s that they are always trying to improve
the search experience of its users. Well,
they’ve done it again. Their latest attempt
at returning the best answers to its user’s
search queries is called the Hummingbird
update and it started affecting Google
search results a few months ago. That’s the
other thing about Google; they can be
pretty secretive about what they do.

Google hasn’t made such a huge change to
their search algorithm (i.e., the technical
term for how Google sorts through and
chooses web pages to answer the questions
people ask it), since the “Caffeine” update
in 2010. Before that, it hadn’t been updated
so dramatically since 2001. In a nutshell,
Wired.com says that Hummingbird will
“put less emphasis on matching keywords
and more emphasis on understanding
what a user is most likely hoping to obtain
in their search results.” Our online marketing team thinks this update will be
pretty important for dentists who want to
gain more patients searching online for

dentistry services. For example, Google will
probably return generic listings of a website’s homepage less and less. Instead, we
think users will now begin seeing these
types of listings on the first few pages of
their Google searches:

n Direct answers and comparison articles
(i.e., blog articles)

n Hyper-specific answers to more complex search queries

n High-quality (and we mean high quality) content

This new Google update has the capability
of affecting dental online marketing in a
big way. Let’s break down the two most
important changes a little bit:
Conversational Search

More and more, Google users are typing in
conversational-style questions when they
are looking for answers. For example, if a
potential patient is doing some research on
choosing dentures or dental implants for a
teeth replacement solution, they most

38 NORTH TEXAS DENTISTRY | www.northtexasdentistry.com

likely will type it in as a question, like
“What is the difference between dental
implants and dentures?” as opposed to the
more simple search “dental implants and
dentures.” In the past, a search like the one
above would yield results that contained a
few of the keywords and would probably
bring up home pages that were optimized
with the keywords: dental implants and
dentures.

With the improved Hummingbird algorithm, Google says that it will focus on
every single word in the search query to
provide users with more finely-tuned
results. And as Wired.com said, it will also
place importance on the meaning behind
the words in the search. So for the above
question, “What is the difference between
dental implants and dentures?” a Google
search will now pull up results that specifically compare the two procedures. From
now on, Google will aim to bring the
searcher (and your potential patient)
exactly what they are searching for. In our
example question above, a simple webpage