practice marketing
WHY GOOGLE’S
PIGEON UPDATE
IS RUFFLING FEATHERS
(and how you can fight back!)
by Marc Fowler
A “pigeon” has recently ruffled some feathers in the world of
online dental marketing.
Google recently changed the formula they use to rank websites
in local searches for services like restaurants, auto repair shops
and of course, dental practices. The code name for this update,
given by SEO experts in absence of an official Google name, was
“Pigeon”. Google’s goal for this update was to provide more
“useful, relevant and accurate local search results”. Fair enough,
right? That sounds like a goal that can benefit everyone –
Google, your dental practice and your potential patients looking
for the best dental option near them. After the update was
released and began taking effect on local search results, here is
what we saw happening when a potential patient searched for a
local dentist:
Location is key. The location of the searcher was given higher
priority in determining which results were being served to her.
So for example, if a woman was searching for a family dentist
on her smart phone while she was in line at the grocery store,
the results that Google would give her would tend to be closer
to her location at the time of the search. Location seemed to
show preference in desktop searches, too. This update particularly benefited the patient searching near their home or in their
14 NORTH TEXAS DENTISTRY | www.northtexasdentistry.com
community, as it would only bring up hyper-local dentists that
were conveniently located near their home. But, if you are looking to pull patients from neighboring suburbs or nearby cities,
it has become much more difficult.
Directories are preferred. When a potential patient searched
for a local dentist, instead of the dentist’s website showing up
at the top of the Google search page, it often served directory
listings for dentists from sites like Angie’s List, Yelp and
CitySearch in the organic listings.
This new change has dramatically affected how many dental
practices appear in Google search results and consequently has
had an impact on many practice’s new patient flow. But, as long
as your potential patient is geographically near your practice at
the time of the search and you have accurate and complete listings in the major directories, you’re good, right? Technically,
yes – but it isn’t without its problems for a practice trying to
gain new patients online. Here are some of the problems we’re
seeing now:
Don’t waste your website. The probability of your actual
website being listed in a local search (as opposed to your directory listings) is slimmer than it used to be. Matt McGee from
SearchingEngineLand.com put it best when he said, “The higher