One Entrance Against a Hundred Posts
This Part
Look at the list from the previous part and you will see that you have already answered most of its questions. You have put up a post about pain after an implant, had a few stories on the same subject, and explained it dozens of times in direct messages in almost identical sentences. This part is about what difference it makes when that same answer is written once on your own site, compared with those hundred times. The difference is not in the quality of the answer. The difference is in what happens to that answer as time passes.
An Instagram post gets its greatest visibility on day one and goes downhill from that same day. For the first day or two it is in front of people, then newer posts arrive and push it down, and after a week practically nobody reaches it or sees it. The people who did see it in those first days saw it by chance, not because they had that question that day. The person who really has that question types it into Google three months later, and at that moment your post is nowhere on their path. It is true that since July 2025 Instagram has let Google show public posts from professional accounts in its results, but for a treatment question an Instagram post does not, in practice, come up at the top of the results. The next Instagram post on the same subject meets the same fate. A hundred posts about one question means a hundred rises and falls, without any of them adding anything to another.
A site entrance goes exactly the opposite way. On day one almost nobody sees it, but as time passes it is seen more, not less. In part 4 we said that one of the things that matter to Google is the age of the address. An entrance that has stayed in place for a year, has answered one specific question, and in that time has been found and clicked on by people is more trustworthy to Google than an entrance built yesterday. So with every month that passes, that same entrance climbs higher and reaches more people. An Instagram post never reaches that age or that state, because after a week nobody sees it anymore for its age to count. The effort behind both is the same, but one gets better and deeper with time and the other is wasted by it.
The second difference is that a site entrance has an address, and an address is something that can be sent to others. The patient who asks in a direct message gets the link. The patient who asks at the chair has the same link sent to them by the receptionist on their way out. The patient who is worried at eleven at night finds it on Google themselves. They all arrive at one place and they all get one answer. The answer you gave in a direct message was only for that one person, and afterwards it is hard even for you to find it, but an answer that has an address is the same complete answer every time it is sent. That is why, ever since I launched the DentCast site, when I answer someone’s scientific question in a direct message, if the question is interesting, I raise it on the site as well.
The third difference is updating. If your view on something changes, or you want to add a point, on Instagram you have to put up a new post that starts again from zero, while the old posts stay where they are with what they said before. On a site you correct that same entrance, and every link you have sent before reaches the new version from today on. One answer that keeps getting better, against a hundred answers each stuck on its own date.
We do not want to conclude from all this that you should not post on Instagram. The conclusion we mean is that you notice a post and a site entrance do two different jobs. A post is good for telling the people who are there today that you have an answer on this subject, and for sending them to it. A site entrance is the place where the answer itself lives, and stays.
The problem arises when you write the complete answer only in an Instagram post that nobody reaches a week later.
So far we have talked about questions that relate to treatment. But a large share of searches are not about treatment at all. The patient writes “dentist near me” or “implant Ahvaz”, and instead of the usual list, Google shows them a map. The next part is about where that map is fed from, and why your practice is or is not on it.