What the Patient Types
This Part
The previous part ended on this: everything starts from the question the patient types, and our guess about that question is usually wrong. The reason for that error is simple. We have spent years thinking in the names of treatments, and the patient thinks in their own problem.
When you ask a dentist what their site should be about, the answer is a list of treatments: implants, endo, fixed prosthodontics, wisdom tooth surgery. From where we stand that list is complete, because those are the things we do. But the patient types none of them in that form. The patient writes “does an implant hurt”, “my tooth still hurts after the root canal, is that normal?”, “my front tooth has gone loose, what should I do?”, “implant or bridge, which is better?”, “how many years does a crown last?”.
There are two differences in these examples. The first is in the words. We say endo, or root canal treatment, and the patient says nerve removal. We say complete denture and the patient says false teeth. A text written only in our words is, to Google, not close to a question asked in the patient’s words, even when the right answer is sitting right there. This does not mean writing incorrectly or colloquially. Google usually understands the colloquial “dandoon” and the standard “dandan” as one and the same, and the patient’s spelling is not your problem. It means the word the patient uses for that treatment has to be in your text, next to its correct name.
The second difference matters more, and it is in the question itself. The patient almost never asks “what is an implant”. What they ask is one of a few kinds: they are afraid and want to know whether it hurts. They want to know what it costs and how long it takes. They are stuck between two options and want to compare. Or they have had the treatment, they are feeling something now, and they want to know whether it is normal or whether they should come back. That last kind is the one we take least seriously, while the patient who is worried at eleven at night after surgery is precisely the one who types their question out in full, with all the details.
The question now is where to find these questions without guessing. You have two sources and both are free.
The first source is your own practice. The questions you hear at the chair several times a week, the questions your receptionist answers on the phone, and the messages that arrive in your Instagram direct messages. These are the same questions the rest of the people in your city type into Google; it is only that these few had access to you. The important thing is to write the question down in the patient’s own sentence, not in your translation of it. “The patient asked about sensitivity after a restoration” is your note. “The tooth you filled shoots pain with cold water” is the patient’s sentence, and the second one is what you need.
The second source is Google itself. As you start typing, Google suggests the rest of the sentence, and those suggestions come from what people have actually searched for. Type “dental implant” and pause, and see what appears underneath. Then search one question in full. In the results there is usually a section showing several other related questions, and at the bottom of the results a list of similar searches. All three of these are real questions from real people, in their own words.
There is a common mistake here too. We like to write about what is interesting to us: the complex case, the new technique, the new material. These are interesting to a colleague and the patient is not looking for them. The question worth writing about is the one that gets asked a lot, not the one whose answer delights you.
What this part asks of you is this: for one week, write down every question a patient asks, in their own sentence, and ask your receptionist to do the same. At the end of the week, start typing a few of them into Google and add its suggestions to the list as well. To check whether you have done it right, read the list once and see whether there is a word in it that a patient would never say out loud. If there is, you wrote that line, not the patient.
Keep this list. Your site’s first entrance is going to answer one of these very questions, and the parts that follow all work from this same list.
Probably, when you look at the list, you will see that you have already answered most of these questions before, in posts and stories and direct messages, and some of them several times over. The next part is about what difference it makes when that same answer is written once on your own site, compared with the hundred times you have said it on Instagram.