Wayne Baumgarten

Excellent Job With All Aspects…

Cook Profitability does an excellent job with all aspects of our internet advertising. They redesigned our websites to give them a more modern look and feel. They also did the SEO so we get found on Google searches. They have optimized our Google ads so we get a good return on investment in procuring new patients. They even run our new patient call center that books new patients appointments. Overall they do a great job for us!

Manager, Renewed Vitality Dallas

Hormone Replacement Therapy Clinic Dallas TX

Google Sends a Warning – Go Mobile or Go Down

Google Warns Website Owners

Google is systematically working its way through the hundreds of millions of websites on the internet and evaluating their performance on mobile phones.

When the performance is poor – they are sending out a warning. The key line in the warning is this:

These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

Texas Dental Website Testing Shows 61% Are Mobile Phone Visitors

Using a group of 67,805 internet visits to Texas dental offices, an astonishing 60% of all visitors came from mobile phones.

Mobile Phone Visitors:	41,254	61%
Desktop Computer Visitors	17,345	25.5%
>Tablet Visitors	9,206	13.5%
Total Visits	67,805

Find Out if Your Website Is At Risk

The software that Google uses to evaluate websites is publically available.

It is part of the Google Developer Tools, but open to anyone. Click on this link to use the tool – it is called Google PageSpeed Insights.

Once you are there you need to look at the bottom of the report. The tool is primarily for testing the speed that your website loads but it also tests how your website responds to a mobile phone acessing it. This test, which is at the bottom of the report will show a warning if your website is not properly configured for mobile.

The warning looks like this:

This page may not pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If you see this warning, then your website is in danger of getting demoted in 61% of all searches. True to it’s sphinx-like reputation, Google has not exactly stated how much this penalty will affect your website. However pundits are saying that Google is going to put mobile optimized websites at the front of the results for any mobile phone users.

Take the test. Know your risk.

This is what your website test should look like:

100 / 100 User Experience

Congratulations! No issues found.

Google Pigeon Smacks Down the Little Guy In Local Rankings

Google Pigeon released about 1 week ago now, so we have to assume that the Google engineers have settled down any initial bugs and what we are seeing now is more or less what we are getting. The update has sparked a storm of comment across the biggest SEO sites in the world- with MOZ describing it as the month that Google shook the SERPs.

Many people commented on their particular areas of interest, noting huge shifts in local search results in industries all the way from real estate and hotels to ice-cream. The fact is that Pigeon is another huge shift for SEO consultants – one of a series that has hit this summer.

Google Pigeon Showing Fewer Local Results

One of the most noted effects of Google pigeon was smaller map packs. Instead of getting 7 results of businesses close to you- suddenly we are now getting only 3 or none. In the So-Lo-Mo world (Social-Local-Mobile) the google local results are a mainstay, so dropping these results way down makes little sense. But while that has been getting most of the attention, I am seeing another, much more damaging change.

The Google Pigeon Poops

I follow a particular tight niche and I can’t comment on the world-wide effect of the Google pigeon update. What I can say is that in my niche, the small business owner got a real slap down.

I do SEO work mostly with dentists, and mostly in Central Texas. In San Antonio, Google really smacked down the local dentist with the pigeon update.

In the past, if you were in zip code 78148 and you searched the work “dentist” or “dental” with no other modifier, the map pack would show you a list of dentists that were in your immediate geographical area. The geolocation was very tight and would center on your zip code. This was also true even if you searched for “san antonio dentist”. What Google would show you was appropriate matches in as close as possible to your location.

What I am seeing is a massive broadening of the geographical search area to encompass a much larger “local” area. I did not see it in all my searches, but I saw it in a great many of them. I tested this in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. What this means is that no matter where you are in any of these huge metro areas, you see the same 8 or 10 top dental offices. Because the “local” area is so wide, google is picking up the ” most important results” – the offices that are perhaps a 40 minute drive from where I am, but they have great SEO. And lets face it, for a great many local choices, distance is the key – not how well they SEO’ed their site. The super-wide “local” results that I am seeing make them pretty much worthless.

Google Pigeon Hands Local Results to the Big Chains

Another really unpleasant side effect of these large geographical bite is that a chain might have two or three offices in a large city. What then happens is that you might search “dentist” and google maps shows you half of a city as the “local results”. Because the BigBoy Chain has three locations in the area and because they have an overall excellent SEO ranking ALL THREE of their locations show up in the map pack.

This is the antithesis of “local” results. This is Google pushing you to the people who are paying them the big advertising fees. This is squeezing down the small guy. This is the complete opposite of the stated Google objective which is to bring more accurate and more usable local search results.

While the “pigeon” moniker came from SearchEngineLand, not Google, I think it’s time for Google to create a “Scarecrow” update and get rid of all the recent changes. They had a great alogarithm, it worked well. Now they have a real mess.

Please Google, don’t go all Bing on us.

By San Antonio SEO Consultant Wayne Baumgarten

Dental Marketing – How Much Should You Spend?

Different dental practices have different marketing needs. But often a practice will allocate a flat sum to its dental marketing – a monthly budget. This budget is most often set by the dentist himself based on what he feels he can afford and what he feels is “a lot” or “enough”.

Why A Flat Budget May Not Be Right for Your Dental Marketing

Why Use Percentage of the Gross towards Your Dental Marketing? The best answer to this is marketing momentum. If your marketing is working well and your dental practice has a good month that means marketing gets more money. That money can then cause another even stronger month and marketing gets a little bit more again. What this does is allow you to fan the fire. Good marketing results in more good marketing and you get steady expansion. Steady expansion is good because you can also steadily hire and train new staff and grow in a controlled fashion. Using a percentage of the gross means that on lean months, when you have to cut back you can. But all this requires that you set your marketing up in such a way that you are not locked into a fixed budget.

Don’t Get Locked In. Companies that offer marketing services normally do so on flat monthly rates. They also normally insist on longer term contracts. Thus when you set up your marketing you are normally locked into set amounts for your marketing and flexibility is not an option. This is a “fire and forget” approach. You set it up and you can just let it run till next year. It is much harder to find companies that can move your budget around. The problem is that you can get loaded up with ineffective marketing and a complete lack of flexibility. Then you are stuck till the contracts expire. It’s more work to set up flexible marketing and then adjust monthly. However it is also more effective if you have control of your marketing budget and can shift it around. Try to set up flexibility into your marketing efforts right from the start. There are companies that offer this (such as ours). Also internet advertising can be pushed up and down fairly easily.

Seasonal Factors: December is often a slow month for dentistry. January can be strong as people start taking care of dental issues they put off over the holiday season. Each practice will see its own seasonal factors. If you have flexible marketing you can push harder in the slow months and ease off in the strong months. This helps even out your schedule.

Percentage Based Marketing is the Recommended Standard: The Small Business Association and many other references point to percentage based marketing as the correct method. See below for some quotes regarding this.

Effective dental marketing must take into account a number of core factors

Numbers vary a lot for marketing. In some case 6% is recommended all the way up to 12%. Here are the factors you should consider when setting your amount.

Size of existing Client Base. The larger the client base, the stronger the referral traffic. If you have a small client base you must push your advertising budget up.

Length of Time in Business. The longer you have been in business the more brand awareness you have. New practices must advertise harder because they have little brand awareness in their communities.

Size of Practice. This is largely determined by how many dentists you have and how many chairs are available. It can be strongly influenced by how skilled your dental assistants are. A single orthodontist could have thirty chairs and a single family dentist could have three. Your income potential is controlled largely by those two factors. Your marketing should be pushed up or down based on your potential to deliver.

Competitiveness of Your Area. You have to look at how hard other dental practices in your area are advertising. If you do not have aggressive competition you can keep your percentage low. But if there are other dentists who are marketing very aggressively you must compete or they will capture the area.

The Profit Margin of Your Speciality. Cosmetic dentists, implant dentists and orthodontists generally have a much larger profit margin and handle larger fees per client. But they have very little repeat business compared to general dentists. Because of this the specialities advertise much harder than general and family dentists. If you are delivering higher fee speciality services, you must push up your advertising percentage.

Using a Percentage for Your Dental Marketing: References

Small Business Association:

As a general rule, small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8 percent of their revenues to marketing. This budget should be split between 1) brand development costs (which includes all the channels you use to promote your brand such as your website, blogs, sales collateral, etc.), and 2) the costs of promoting your business (campaigns, advertising, events, etc.).

This percentage also assumes you have margins in the range of 10-12 percent (after you’ve covered your other expenses, including marketing).

If your margins are lower than this, then you might consider eating more of the costs of doing business by lowering your overall margins and allocating additional spending to marketing. It’s a tough call, but your marketing budget should never be based on just what’s left over once all your other business expenses are covered.

From the Small Business Association Website

EHow

Percentage Spent on Advertising

The most closely followed guideline for large consumer companies is to spend about 7 or 8 percent of their revenue on advertising, with half that devoted to the labor involved in the project.

Consumer focused companies spend larger amounts, up to ten percent, while business focused companies spend around five percent. According to a 2007 IDC survey, companies had an average of one marketing professional for every $16 million in revenue they had.

– Ehow Article

Chief Marketing Officer Council Website

Companies who drive more than 10% of total sales from the internet allocate more of their budgets to marketing (16.4%) than companies with less than 10% of their sales coming from the internet (10.2%). August 2012 11

Marketing spend represents 11% of their firms’ revenues, up from 8.5% reported in a similar Duke University study conducted in early 2012. August 201212

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Wayne Baumgarten

Simple and Easy to Follow Instructions:When You Need to Add a Manager to Your Google Plus or Google My Business Page.

Step 1. Log in to your Account.

Step 2: Navigate to Google Plus (click the image for enlargement)

Step 3: Access the Google Plus Menu.

Step 4: Go to Pages and Select the Google Plus Page you Want To Manage

Step 5: You Are On Your Google Plus Page, Click Settings

Step 6: Now You Still Have To Navigate to Google Plus Managers.

Step 7: Finally You Can Grant Access To Your Account – Google Plus and Google Business Page is the same thing in this case.