Getting Back to the Basics: Why Foundational Marketing Matters for Every Dental Practice

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Narrator: You are now listening to another episode of the Insurance Untangled podcast, where we explore the various challenges faced by dental practices due to their reliance on insurance. Join us in this podcast as we dive deep into the issues surrounding dental insurance dependence and offer practical solutions and strategies to help you take control of your practice’s financial future.

Ben Tunei: Welcome to another exciting episode of the Insurance Untangled podcast. My name is Ben, and I’m one of the co-hosts on this podcast, and we built this for you to help you untangle yourselves from the mess of insurance that we’re all dealing with on a regular basis. Today, I have my good friend and co-host with me. I’m gonna be interviewing him. Naren, how are you, my friend?

Naren Arulrajah: I’m doing great, Ben. You know, I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I think we are gonna talk about a really, really, really important topic today, so I’m looking forward to it.

Ben Tunei: Absolutely. Well, awesome. Looking forward to talking about this amazing topic. So what we are gonna talk about today is this—getting back to the basics: why foundational marketing matters for every dental practice, which I think is an important thing to discuss, especially in today’s day and age, where holy smokes, there are so many things to consider. You know, when you look at marketing in general and dentistry, there’s social media, there are influencers, there are ads, there’s SEO, email campaigns, and the list goes on and on and on and on, Naren. So as a dentist, when I’m looking at doing marketing and considering all the different things that you could do, how do you even know where to start with a marketing concept?

Naren Arulrajah: That’s a great, great, great question. So let me start with the foundational things, right? Let’s start with the basics. Mm-hmm. So what are the basics in 2025 you need to pay attention to? Number one, you need to have a website that converts, right? Because if a website doesn’t convert patients into booked appointments, it’s not doing half of its job.

Number two, that website needs people finding it, right? People have to get to that website. People have to find you either through the website or your Google My Business profile. Or now, with AI, they need to know you exist, right? If they don’t know you exist, how can they even consider you? So are you showing up when people are looking for someone like you? That’s number two. One of the ways you know that is if you’re ranking for a hundred or more keywords.

If you’re not ranking for a hundred or more keywords, then it’s not gonna work. Number three is Google Ads—Google Ads that fill the gap while your SEO builds traction. So think of Google Ads as something that is the expensive dessert. I mean, you might pay sometimes $20 for the main dish, but your dessert is 15 bucks, you know what I mean? So is it really why you go to the restaurant? No, you’re going for the main dish, right? But it’s almost as expensive as the main dish because restaurants know when people are in a happy mood, or even drinks, right? They spend like three times the money on drinks, even though they know they can get the same bottle of wine at the wine store for like 30% of the price they’re paying at the restaurant.

Right, so it’s not really going to help you a lot, but it’s okay. Google Ads are kind of like that, and the reason for that is Google Ads get more expensive over time, and people don’t trust that. So pretty much to create the same benefit you would create from SEO—that is, good SEO—you’ll end up spending five times, ten times as much. Meaning instead of a thousand bucks, you’ll spend five thousand, or instead of two thousand bucks, you’ll spend ten thousand dollars.

So it still has its purpose. If you are going to make a lot of profit from a certain kind of client, you might say, “You know what? I don’t mind spending a thousand dollars to get that patient because I make five thousand dollars from that patient.” So it’s okay. It has its place, but it’s more of a cherry on top, like a dessert, than anything else.

Naren Arulrajah: So those are the three fundamentals — a website, solid SEO, and then Google Ads to fill in the gaps. Now, of course, email marketing used to work. I don’t think it works anymore.

Social media, again, you have two options: one is ads and one is organic. Organic is wonderful, but it’s hard because 1% of you will get enough traffic to make organic work for you. And to become that 1%, you have to become a celebrity.

But ads are kind of like Google Ads. They’re really, really expensive. Actually, social media ads are even more expensive than Google Ads because, remember, the person was watching a video about something they’re into — for some people it might be celebrities, for others it might be animals, whatever. They’re watching videos, and now all of a sudden this ad pops up. So they don’t even remember clicking on the ad.

A lot of times they don’t show up, so you have a lot of issues with no-shows and stuff. So I just wanted to give you kind of the sequencing — a great website and SEO, those are the foundational things. And then, on top of that, Google Ads. Those three would still be part of the foundation for me.

Ben Tunei: Got it, got it. You’d mentioned something earlier in the conversation about converting patients through the website. I often think and wonder, how do you achieve that? Like, how do you go about developing and creating a website that turns visitors into patients?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, I think that’s a great, great, great question. To turn visitors into patients, you need a website that does a few things. It has to be fast, right? Today, people don’t have patience. I still go to websites—we do what we call a marketing strategy review—and when we take over a client’s website, it doesn’t load fast, especially on a mobile device. It’s not optimized correctly to load fast.

And if you don’t optimize correctly to load fast, if somebody accidentally goes there—which is very rare, maybe your mother goes there or someone who knows you—but even they will get tired of it and bounce out of the website. You’ll never rank, because Google knows the same thing these people know: that your website is not loading fast. And Google won’t send anybody there, because why would Google send people to a website that isn’t optimized and then be the bad guy?

Remember, people are judging Google based on the websites they end up on through Google.

Another thing is, is it easy to call? Like, when I’m on a phone, do I see the phone number easily, and can I press that button and call you? Is the website easy to read? I still see, even in 2025, websites that look okay on a desktop but look terrible on mobile. Why? Because they don’t adjust the font sizes or redesign the screen layout. They just show the same website shrunk down. So you have to squint to read it. If somebody doesn’t have a magnifier, they can’t even read it.

Now, will Google send people to such a website? No. So you’ll never rank.

So, are you doing those foundational things to both convince the user that they’re in the right place, and at the same time make Google happy? Because Google won’t send traffic to your website if you don’t do those basics.

Those are some examples of things you should pay attention to: How fast does it load? Is it easy to read on a mobile device? Is the phone number easy to click on?

And then, of course, you need proof—social proof. Case studies are very, very powerful. You need people to get to like you before they come to your website. So, having personalized videos for each landing page helps a lot. On the implants page, that video should talk about implants; on the sedation page, it should talk about sedation. Those short, 45-second, home-style videos—authentic ones. You don’t need to hire anybody or do anything complicated. Just something simple. Talk to them as if you’re talking to a patient sitting across from you. Say, “Hello, welcome,” and make them feel comfortable. Use simple language—not credentials or complicated terms they don’t understand.

Ben Tunei: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we live in a very fortunate digital age. Twenty years ago, when you tried to do video shorts, it was quite a production, right? The lighting, the big cameras, and all that. These days, you just pull out your iPhone and you’re good to go.

Naren Arulrajah: Exactly, exactly.

Ben Tunei: Well, that’s awesome. So, another thing that you mentioned—SEO and Google Ads. Is it important to do both of them at the same time? Or could you do well just doing one of those?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, it’s a great, great, great question. Now, Google makes so much money from ads. Google is worth, I think, close to $3 trillion. Like, we can’t even comprehend how much money that is—like, wow.

Naren Arulrajah: India, with a population of around 1.5 billion people, has a GDP of about three-some trillion dollars, right? So Google is worth as much as what one and a half billion people in India produce in an entire 12 months. It’s massive, right? How do they make most of that money? Through Google Ads.

So, they make SEO really, really hard. It takes about a year for you to rank for a hundred keywords and get into the top 5% of individuals who get 95% of the free traffic. We know that because we do it day in and day out for our clients. It takes a year—they rank for a hundred or more keywords, and then they get into that top 5%.

Now, because it takes a year, it’s a long-term investment, right? But the beauty is, once you hit the top hundred keyword positions, you just have to keep getting better and better. So, starting year two, that investment is more than paying for itself.

Like, we charge $1,250 a month, and that investment more than pays for the cost of ongoing expenses on a monthly basis when it comes to SEO. So, SEO is the long-term investment.

But if you’re a startup, you might need ads. Why? Because you need patients in the meantime while SEO builds. So, you might need ads to cover the gaps. You might use ads strategically if you’re a startup.

If you’re a very successful practice, even with SEO, you might once in a while say, “I want to increase the number of Invisalign patients from two to three.”

Of course, don’t spend money on ads until your phone conversion is amazing, until you’re getting 10 or more Google reviews, and until you have great landing pages—because it’s kind of like leaks. Imagine if you’re only converting half of your new patients—now half of your ad dollars are getting wasted.

So, don’t put money into ads until phone conversion is amazing, Google reviews are 10 or more, and you have great landing pages with case studies. But once you have that, you could spend extra money to take it from 10 new patients to 20 new patients, and you could do wonderful things with it.

So, I do think you should look at SEO as the foundation—the long-term investment—and ads as a way to fill in the gaps: for startups, as well as for bigger practices who want to increase high-value patients in specific areas on a temporary basis.

Ben Tunei: Yeah, I totally get it. You know, I’m thinking about how—Google, $3 trillion—holy smokes, I didn’t realize how big they are.

Naren Arulrajah: If you had bought Google stock—I remember when they first went public—it was around $30 billion. In the first year or so, it wasn’t moving up much, just kind of dancing around. Now it’s $3 trillion, so it has gone up a hundred times. If you had put in a million dollars—or even a hundred thousand dollars—you’d have $10 million today. Literally. And you’d do nothing. You just buy the stock, go to sleep for 20 years, and wake up in 20 years.

Ben Tunei: Man, I wish I could’ve seen all this 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah.

Naren Arulrajah: Even in the last five years, their stock has continued to grow. So trust me, even the ones who bought it five years ago are still doing really, really, really well.

Ben Tunei: I know. And that tells me that people are on Google constantly—like I am. You know, I go to Google; that’s where I find the restaurants we go to and all that.

Naren Arulrajah: I’ll give you a stat on that — 12 billion times a day. Twelve billion times a day! That’s more than the number of people on the planet. And the average person in America goes to Google at least six times a day. Like, I use Google 10, 15, even 20 times a day because it’s so powerful.

And it takes less than a second, you know what I mean? You get the best of both worlds. I mean, if you were to hire a researcher and pay them hundreds of dollars, you wouldn’t get as good of an answer as you get from Google in a second — and it’s free. Like, why would I go anywhere else?

Ben Tunei: I know. And that’s—

Naren Arulrajah: And in the U.S., they have like a 95% market share. And worldwide, outside of China and Russia, they have an 89% market share. They own the market — it’s just Google or nothing else.

Ben Tunei: Right? You know how a lot of restaurants these days—restaurants that rely on foot traffic for new customers—they tell you, you want to build where there’s a lot of foot traffic. Google has everybody’s foot traffic. And I’m thinking, well, so does social media, you know? So I guess that’s the next question: what about social media in this whole mix of SEO and ads? I mean, I’m on social media all the time—that’s where people are too. Do you recommend looking into social media as well?

Naren Arulrajah: That’s a great, great question. I do think social media today is the modern remote control. What I mean is, in the old days—I remember 25 years ago—almost all of us went to an office, right? And then you’d come back from the office, you were tired after a long day. What did you do? You’d sit in front of the TV and just flip through the channels.

That’s Instagram in 2025. You’re flipping the channel—you just keep moving your fingers, and it keeps showing you a new video after a new video after a new video. And every two or three new videos, they’ll show you an ad. That’s what today’s remote control is.

And I remember in those days, there were even movies and shows about it—like, the husband has his own remote and TV, and the wife has her own remote and TV. One’s in the bedroom, one’s in the living room, because they all want to keep flipping through different channels. But nobody watches one show for long—they just keep flipping, flipping, flipping.

So, that’s what Instagram is. And I think Instagram figured it out—and the same applies to TikTok, YouTube, all of them. They figured out they can engage people a lot by showing them the kind of videos they like. There’s a little bit of variety, but they know there are five things you like, so they just keep mixing up those five types of things again and again.

So, that’s how social media works. And just like Google makes so much money from ads, so does Instagram. Trust me, Mark Zuckerberg is the second richest guy in the world. And, fun fact, his dad, Ed Zuckerberg—who I’ve interviewed a couple of times—is a dentist, by the way.

He’s very successful because he’s really good at understanding how people spend time on Instagram as the modern remote, and he’s great at selling ads to those audiences and making money from those ads.

So where do you fit in? If you’re an influencer, it’s wonderful. But I do think every single practice has to have a presence today. So we, for example, as part of our service, make sure we’re posting, managing their practice pages, keeping them updated with the right information, and obviously getting reviews.

Reviews, I still think, are a Google thing. Instagram and Facebook tried to go after reviews, but they don’t care anymore—they know their place. Their place is the modern remote, where we flip channels, and they make money through ads.

So I do think you should have a presence—make sure you’re posting consistently, or your marketing team is posting consistently—but don’t expect new people to find you unless you become an influencer. You have to know where your new patients are coming from.

It’s very good for existing clients or for prospects who are just checking to make sure you’re real. For example, they check your Google reviews, and some of them might go to Instagram and type your business name to see if you have a page. They’re not trying to decide whether to come to you—they just want to see, “Yeah, okay, they’re real, they’re modern, they have an active practice.”

So, from that perspective, have Instagram—not to expect new patients to find you through social media, but rather as a credibility checkbox.

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, they have an Instagram page. So that’s the way I would think about it. I wouldn’t spend more than, like, a hundred dollars on my Instagram or social media marketing for that reason.

Now, 5% of my clients—well, actually, about 1%—are influencers. Out of 500 clients, maybe five. They spend 15 to 20 hours a week and become celebrities on Instagram. They have a hundred thousand followers. It takes them four or five years to get there; maybe some do it in two years if they’re really, really committed—creating tons and tons of content every day.

Once they become an influencer, now they have an audience. But the difference between Google and social media is that the social media audience is global, while Google is local. Right? On Google, you’re typing the city name, you’re typing “near me,” so Google only gives you people in your neighborhood.

But social media gives you people in Bangladesh, a different city, a different state, a different country. So you want to make sure that you have a product or service, if you’re an influencer, that has a global appeal. Maybe you came up with a new kind of medical product that anybody can buy over the counter and order from your website. In that case, Instagram is wonderful, because it’s getting that new product in front of a hundred thousand people very inexpensively.

Yes, it takes work, but if you’re a local dentist—unless you are a celebrity dentist, where people are willing to get on a plane to come see you—most people are not going to come to you because of Instagram. So don’t expect it to translate into a lot of new clients.

But it is a numbers game anyway. So if you’re in that top 1% and you’re getting a hundred thousand people to see you, trust me—at least a thousand of them will live in your community, and out of that thousand, you’ll probably get five to ten patients. So it does work once you become an influencer.

But if you don’t have any plans of becoming an influencer, don’t spend more than a hundred dollars a month. Just make sure it’s getting posted consistently and maintained properly. That’s the way I would think about social media.

Ben Tunei: Mm-hmm. Yeah, influencers—it’s not an easy job. I know a lot of influencers, and it’s a full-time job for many of them, right? If you want to do it the right way, it’s a lot of planning and a lot of work.

But that’s the form of marketing I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Going back to what you said about Google being a $3 trillion company—that’s a direct result of the fact that people are there. Everybody’s using it, right?

So how do you find these potential patients? I think you hit the nail on the head with some really, really great recommendations and thoughts here.

So, Naren, last question I have for you: I always think about those listening to this podcast—doctors who might be thinking, “I want to grow my practice this way,” or at least, “I want to grow and have an expert guide me in terms of spending marketing dollars in a way that will have a pretty decent return on investment.”

FInal Thoughts

Ben Tunei: What do you recommend for a doctor that’s thinking that? Where should they start?

Naren Arulrajah: Yeah, I do think they need to start with the foundation. They need to know where they stand. So I recommend doing a marketing strategy meeting — the link is insuranceuntangled.com/msm. We’ll put it in the show notes. I think it’s a great place to start.

We’ll look at you and your website and see how you’re doing when it comes to SEO. Are you ranking for hundreds of keywords, or just three keywords, or no keywords? And why are you not? If you’re ranking for hundreds of keywords, just keep doing what you’re doing — at least as far as SEO is concerned.

If you’re not, what are the root causes? Is it NAP, is it Lighthouse Core, is it E-A-T, is it CRUX? I could spend hours explaining all of that, but that’s one of the things our team will do.

They’ll tell you the root cause and how to fix it. And finally, they’ll also look at your competition. They’ll say, “Okay, how is your competition doing?” Because at the end of the day, you don’t have to be better than everybody else. You just have to be better than the people you’re competing with. If you’re better than your competitors, you’re going to get more new patients than they do, and you’re going to be more successful than they are.

So, how are you doing against your competition? And finally, it’s like a roadmap. Regardless of where you are, how do you get to your final destination — where you’re on top of the world, dominating Google, dominating conversions, getting more new patients than anybody else, at the lowest cost possible?

Why do I say lowest cost possible? Because when you do things organically, your cost is one-fifth, even one-tenth, of Google Ads and social media ads. And that’s only because of the trust factor. So that’s where I would start — insuranceuntangled.com/msm.

Ben Tunei: Perfect. That is wonderful. Check that out in the show notes — that link is going to be posted there. For those of you who want to take advantage of that, which I highly recommend, every single time I hear a doctor during that marketing strategy meeting, there’s a great amount of gratitude and a sense of direction on where they want to go with great marketing concepts.

So thank you for sharing that, Naren. And I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today on another amazing episode of the Insurance Untangled Podcast. Share this episode with friends if you found that it resonated with you — you never know who else it might resonate with or who might need this type of education or knowledge.

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And don’t forget to check out insuranceuntangled.com for all perks, freebies, and for the marketing strategy meeting — just add /msm to the website to find your invitation to take advantage of that free offering.

Folks, thank you again for joining us today. Until we meet next time, we wish all of you the very best of success. Take care now.