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Google Releases a Mobile Robot on Your Dental Practice’s Web site Scott Helter

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by Scott Helter

Important things are going on at Google's headquarters on Amphitheater Parkway in Mountain View, California, and it involves the fate of your dental practice. This time on stage for performance is a secret operation that involves robots that plan to change the face of the dental marketing industry as we know it today. This isn't a story about spaceships or aliens landing just yet, but hold on to your seat for this one. What we are about to announce will likely be the most vital topic you have ever read concerning the survival of your practice in this mobile Web time continuum.

Behind the curtain, Google has released Google-Bot Mobile. It is scanning dental practice's Web sites searching aggressively for quality mobile content. We'll define what's quality and what's not later, for now, let's talk about the "bot" which is defined as a software application or program that runs automated tasks through the Internet. Generally speaking, bots perform tasks that are complicated or simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. It's a new robot search engine program that is now scanning Web sites every two weeks to see if they have high caliber mobile solutions associated with them. If this content is located, then it reports back to Google's indexing engine that is now partitioned just for mobile users that are browsing and delivering their results independently and uniquely from normal Web site results.

The Problem
The problem is that the majority of all dental Web sites don't have this solution and coupling that with the fact that Google's ranking is now different from the standard desktop Web results, there should be an alarm going off in your head as you read these words. Google's goal, as we all know, is to try to deliver the most appropriate content for the user's who are browsing, and with there being five mobiles for every one computer (and growing), the majority of searches are now coming from mobile users. This means that dentists who are spending excessive amounts of money on SEO for their Web sites, spending thousands of dollars to keep up with their competitors only to "raise the bar" to get unreliable results, now have a new weapon to launch in their local town. Some dentists have even been seen defecting back to Yellow Pages' last attempt to survive on their slowly fading landscape of the Internet by cloning/mirroring sites only to potentially damage Web ranking results by being blacklisted by Google for the "cloning or mirroring."

The Mobile Market
This is now a huge opportunity for dentists to jump on the bandwagon early and to get mobile with Google. If you remember the day (years ago, of course) when dentists were trying to figure out how their competitor down the street was building patients at an unfathomable rate, and they found out that he had this thing called a "Web site," they all soon got one and the race was on. However in the mobile community, the numbers are more than five times that and growing exponentially!

In addition Google is all about history, meaning the longer you have been reliable to them and allowed them to deliver your results to users, this gives you extra weight above newer competitors who will soon come on board to realize the power of mobile six to 12 months from now. What this means is that a dentist who gets a quality mobile solution for his Web site prior to his competing practices, is going to have an amazing advantage and create a ranking curve for slow adopters.

Patients now search on their mobile all the time. During the day corporate workers are now being outsmarted by their network admins who block all access to the Internet in an attempt to make the workday more efficient by restricting Google browsing, Facebook, Twitter, etc. However, now with our handy mobile weapons and 3G/4G networks, the solution is in the palm of their hands to bypass big brother and network restrictions. Not to mention, they can use the Internet anywhere. Stay at home moms and dads out to lunch, at Starbucks, waiting in the school lot for kids to get off school, on the way to soccer or football practice are all using their phones to surf the Web.

Web sites are Slowly Becoming Obsolete
Each day Web sites are becoming more and more obsolete due to the high usage of mobiles. Dentists should all look to see how their Web site appears on a mobile phone; they might be surprised and severely disappointed with not only the aesthetics, slow load times and puzzling navigation, but the fact that Google's mobile engine passed them by with no good grades for search results.

The Solution
Quality mobile content refers to solutions that go beyond old technologies of the past such as basic mobile plug-ins and standard mobile Web sites since these are essentially just compacted versions of their Web site with stripped down images and text that are stuffed into a small area of real estate in an attempt to fit our mobile device's screen size. These are not solutions since they are only pulling or copying content from your Web site to a smaller page. You'll find some companies starting to offer this service and although it might seem new or affordable (they run about $500 on average), it's already outdated in most cases. Keep in mind that a small paragraph or even a few sentences from your Web site looks much longer on a small screen. You don't want to make viewers scroll for too long.

Mobile Web sites are like dinosaurs that are now long extinct and there's a new breed of solutions available in the tool belt of dentists called a mobile app. Getting a mobile Web site versus a mobile app would be the difference between having an amalgam filling versus a composite filling. Mobile apps have features such as scheduling, ability to add custom icons to the home screen of your phone, smile galleries and testimonials all which support the phone's orientation.

A mobile app runs in the cloud or from the Web and is independently built from your Web site, but conveniently integrates without requiring you to modify your Web site. It is not something that Web site designers are generally capable of creating, as it requires a separate set of skills. So beware if you are offered something from your Web site designer or hosting company, it's most likely a mobile Web site and not a mobile app. Mobile app development requires an expert very well-versed in app technology and the investment is a bit more (normally about $1,900- $2,900). One patient alone will pay for it and then some.

A dental mobile app delivers a similar high quality look, feel, navigation, speed and interactivity of an native application without the need to download. A mobile app is an advanced programming platform that eliminates specific phone dependencies so that the patients or "soon to be" patients browsing from their mobiles don't have to have a certain type of phone. Be sure that you work with professionals only and spend the extra money.

A dental mobile app can be developed to work on any mobile phone (Droid, iPhone, LG, Nokia, HTC, Motorola, even the iPad just to name a few) and can be programmed to automatically appear when a dental practice's Web site is visited on a mobile. It integrates with every dental practice's Web site and does not require any modifications to the site either. Even better, it's not cloned or mirrored content, but a custom-created solution that is specifically designed to solve the mobile content solution and to ecstatically communicate to Google's new "bot" that this practice has stepped in bounds and is ready to be beamed up to the top of ranking results. It's worth your practice's weight in gold to investigate this if you plan on competing on the Web going forward.
Author’s Bio
Scott Helter has worked as an SEO specialist and Web developer since 1998. He now focuses his energy on the latest technologies for mobile marketing and patient building for the dental and orthodontic industry. He enjoys connecting with doctors and keeping them up-to-date on the most current information and techniques to keep their practices on the cutting edge. He can be contacted at 513-445-2008 or info@promeddevs.com.
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September 2025
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