Episode 401: Traffic Isn’t the Problem: Why Conversion Is Costing You Non-Insurance Patients

Don Adeesha: Welcome back to the Less Insurance Dependence podcast. I’m your host, Don Adeesha. It’s great to have you here. Today, we’re talking about a part of marketing that often gets overlooked: conversion. A lot of dental practices focus heavily on getting more traffic, more clicks, and more people to the website. But the real question is, once those people find you, are they actually taking the next step? Are they calling? Are they scheduling? Are they becoming the kind of patients your practice wants more of? So today I’m joined by Naren Arulrajah, founder and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, to talk about what helps turn online traffic into non-insurance-driven patients, why call handling matters just as much as marketing, and where many practices may be losing good patient opportunities without realizing it. Naren, welcome back to the show.

Naren Arulrajah: This is going to be a wonderful conversation, Don. I’m looking forward to it. Conversion is when somebody takes one step, and what percentage of them go on to the next step. If somebody goes to your website and leaves, they’re not converting. If they go to a second page, they’re starting to convert. If they call your phone, they’re converting even further. You want every one of these steps optimized, because a lot of blocks can stop you from doing really well.

Naren Arulrajah: Practices often think they need more traffic, but traffic is not the main issue. The way I measure traffic is what percentage of people are finding you through sources like Google, because they are quality traffic, because they typed in "dentist near me" or "dental implants." Google said 2.5 billion people use AI Overview. That’s three times as many as ChatGPT every single month. Doesn’t matter which way people are finding you; Google still controls 95% of the market. Many of our clients are seen 30,000, 40,000 times, some even 60,000 times. When they start with us, they’re seeing zero times or a hundred times. Then slowly but surely, when you work on it, it compounds. It doesn’t grow 10%, 20%. It goes from 300 to 20,000.

Naren Arulrajah: If you want to attract high-value, high-margin patients who are going to do bigger cases, accept treatment, and invest in their dentistry, look at reputation. Are you getting 10 or more five-star reviews every single month on Google? Do you have a wonderful landing page with the evidence to convince them you’re the right choice, the full case after pictures, the transformations? Another way to earn trust is through awards. If you’ve won any awards, highlight them on your homepage. We’ve done studies, and people who have won awards tend to convert sometimes 50% more than people who have not, just from that award being featured. People trust you implicitly.

Naren Arulrajah: People today, at least 85 to 90% of them, book their first appointment after making a phone call. The reason they call is that they want to make sure they made the right decision; they don’t want to waste their time, book an appointment, come there, and find out it’s the wrong dentist. If that validation is not happening, the average dental patient is only booking one out of three new patient appointments. Two problems with that. One, two-thirds of everything you do, the reviews, the reputation, the before and afters, the SEO, is getting wasted. If you’re spending a hundred thousand dollars, $66,000 is getting wasted because of this. The second implication: those who don’t book never show up again. They write you off, and might even leave a nasty review.

Naren Arulrajah: For me, the benchmark is 70% of new patients should be booking appointments, and 95% of all calls should be answered during working hours. If you are hitting those benchmarks, keep doing it. But if you’re not, I would invest in that early in the cycle, because that way every marketing dollar is now amplified. Seventy percent conversion versus 25%, that’s a three times amplification. You’re getting three times the benefit with the same marketing.

Naren Arulrajah: The book now button has become popular in recent years. I’ve seen many of our clients putting it on, but when we actually clicked on it with the client and showed them what was going on, our clients cringed and immediately took it off. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer, er, would I go share personal information with someone I don’t know, like, or trust yet? One of the things I noticed is that many people are clicking, but only like 5% are booking. We are literally bringing our best quality patients to the front door, and then we keep this huge, scary-looking bulldog at the front, and everybody walks away. It should be less than two minutes. It shouldn’t have any intrusive questions. It should work on every platform and load up fast.

Naren Arulrajah: Trust is probably the most important thing in healthcare. When they’re screening, they’re screening you for trust. The problem with an AI receptionist right off the bat is that it’s telling them: you are not important enough for me to have someone in my team who I have trained to answer the call. It’s kind of like going to somebody’s house and instead of the host coming to greet you, they send a servant. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the house is; you get turned off. So I wouldn’t use it for new patients. But AI has a role, especially in rebooking, because it can have a conversation: " Hey, you missed your last appointment, we want to rebook you. They already have trust in your practice. In those cases, I would use an AI text-based, intelligent rebooking tool.

Naren Arulrajah: Start by looking at the full patient journey. Are you showing up on Google for the services you care about? Use Google Analytics, don’t manually type it in. Then look at things hurting you, like the book now button that turns people off, get rid of it if it’s broken. Google provides tools like Google Lighthouse and the CRUX tool to look at the customer experience. Then look at the conversion rate and the number of new patients calling versus booking. That’s a conversion rate. How many calls are not getting answered during office hours that’s your missed call percentage, and you want that under 5%. You want the conversion rate higher than 70%. And finally, look at the cost of a new patient across different methods, so you can put more money into the channel that’s working.

Naren Arulrajah: If you want some serious people who know what they’re doing to do comprehensive research, book a marketing strategy meeting. The link is lessinsurancedependence.com/msm. Book that meeting, and it’ll help you fine-tune what you’re doing, help you find your gaps, and find the things that are holding you back. We spend six hours creating it, then you can decide what to do with it.

Don Adeesha: Thank you, Naren, for this wonderful conversation. Now, for our dentists listening in, take a moment after this episode to look at your website, your calls to action, your book now button, and really ask yourself: are we making it easy for the right patient to choose us? If you want help answering that question, go ahead and book that complimentary marketing strategy meeting at lessinsurancedependence.com/msm. You can also book a complimentary Coaching Strategy Meeting with Gary Takacs at lessinsurancedependence.com/csm. Thank you for listening to the Less Insurance Dependence podcast. I’m your host, Don Adeesha, and we’ll see you on the next one. Take care.