Dentists Watch Their Websites Closely. Too Many Don’t Have One.
70.7% of dental practices watch what their website does, 7th of 47 industries. Only 76.5% of them have a website to watch, which is 42nd.
“My traffic goes up every single month. So why was February so quiet?”
A dentist said that to me on a call last spring, about ninety seconds after he turned his laptop around to show me a chart.
Six months of visits to his new patient page, with a friendly little slope on the end of it that he had clearly been waiting all morning to show someone.
I told him the chart was fine.
Then I asked what he made of the white space underneath the line, and he said there was nothing down there.
Right. Nothing.
Every person who went looking for a dentist that month and never landed on him would sit in that empty part of the graph, if there were any honest way on earth to draw them.
I get his question on nearly every sales call I take, and I usually have about thirty seconds to answer it before someone steers us back to timelines and budgets. He deserved longer than thirty seconds, and so do you.
Two habits that shouldn’t belong to one trade
Someone in the practice said yes to tracking at some point, and it runs today on 70.7% of the dental practices I looked at.
Think of it as a guest book by the door that signs itself. Someone comes in, and it writes down that they came, which street they walked from, and which shelf they stopped at on the way through.
The rest of the small business world? 58% of it runs analytics, so dentistry is well clear.
Now the other half.
76.5% of those same practices have a website at all, against 83% across every small business I sampled.
I put all 47 industries in order on both of those, and dentists came out 7th on the counting and 42nd on the owning.
Near the top for watching. Near the back for having a thing to watch.
The practices in that second group are still being described online by strangers, on directories and review sites and one neighborhood group after another, with nobody from the practice anywhere near the writing.
That pair sat open in a browser tab for two weeks before I wrote a word of this, because I could not get two facts about one trade to sit still beside each other.
Which half is your practice in?
Why a careful trade lands here
Dentistry already runs on numbers, and I don’t think that’s a personality thing so much as the way the job is built.
Production per hour. Chair time. Hygiene recall. Case acceptance.
Your practice software prints every one of those, someone in the office reads the report on a Monday morning, and the whole team is used to being told how last week went.
The vocabulary of a dental practice is full of numbers long before anyone mentions a website. I can’t say that about most of the businesses I work with.
So when a web guy says “let me add tracking,” it lands like one more report on a pile of reports. Easy yes. Nobody in the building has to hold an opinion about the waiting room photo.
A website is a different animal.
It’s a project. A vendor to choose, a bill to sign, four staff with four opinions about the colors, and one of them stuck writing the words at home on a Sunday night.
Then a full waiting room finishes the thing off. A project with no deadline loses to a busy Monday every single time.
So it stays on the list. Year three, year seven, year eleven, still on the list, and nobody in the building has ever had to defend leaving it there.
Recognize the shape of that? I’ve watched it play out at three good practices this year, and since dental practices make up most of my client list, I get to watch it more often than I’d like.
What a counter at the door can’t count
Analytics counts arrivals. Its job ends at your front door.
There’s no row in it for the woman who typed “dentist open saturday” at nine at night, scrolled past the map, and tapped whoever happened to come up third. You were never in her list to begin with.
She isn’t a bounce. She isn’t a lost session. Your chart has no column for her at all.
Nor does it have one for her sister, who asked her on Sunday who she’d ended up seeing. That answer travels around a neighborhood for years, and none of it touches your dashboard.
Good tracking on a thin web presence plays a mean little trick, too. The better your numbers look, the fewer of the interested people they’re describing.
A practice with no site gets the same silence, except nobody in the building is counting it, and silence with no chart attached feels an awful lot like everything being fine.
So how would you ever know? If every person in your city who needed a dentist last night went looking and never once saw your name, which report was supposed to tell you?
The honest answer to his question
He wanted to know how a rising line and a soft February could happen in the same practice, and the answer was never going to be in the chart.
A chart reports on the people who already found you. It has nothing whatsoever to say about the size of the crowd you weren’t in the running for.
Every dashboard I have ever been shown has that same ceiling, and no amount of extra tracking lifts it.
When I sit down with an owner, they want to talk about the numbers they already have. I’d rather talk about the two they don’t.
How many people went looking for what you do and never reached you?
And how many did reach you, read the whole page, and still couldn’t work out how to turn themselves into a patient? Dentistry counts its visitors better than almost anyone and then hands most of them a page with nothing to fill in, which is a strange way to treat a chart you paid for.
Your web person can’t answer either one, so please don’t let anyone charge you for a report that pretends to. Telecommunications companies already track their visitors about as closely as you do, and I talk them out of buying the same thing twice most times it comes up. Both gaps close from the outside, by fixing what your practice is missing on the screen, and your reports get more useful as a side effect of that work rather than instead of it.
One job, and I mean one
Own a page a stranger can land on, written by you, sitting on an address that belongs to your practice.
The woman who typed “dentist open saturday” at nine at night has to have something of yours to find. Everything else your web person wants to sell you is downstream of that.
Ignore the rest of what I’ve written here. Ignore the chart and the trick it plays, ignore my two questions, ignore the story about February, ignore the rankings and where your trade sits on them.
Do that one job and never think about another word of this, and you’ll be ahead of a big chunk of your own trade, and February will have an explanation you can act on.
Then turn the laptop around and show me the chart. I want to see the white space too.
