Year-end dental benefits and the calls you miss

Six weeks left in the benefits year, and most of the practices we work with are carrying a schedule that never recovered from the spring. Hygiene recall slipped by months. Treatment that was diagnosed in February is still unscheduled. Chairs are running at lower turnover than they used to because of the extra time between patients.

That is an odd combination: more demand than usual sitting in the system, and less capacity to absorb it. It changes what the next six weeks are for. This is not the month to chase brand new patients with a discount. It is the month to be findable for the searches people are already making, and to stop dropping the calls those searches produce.

The window patients are in right now

Annual maximums on most dental plans reset on the first of January and unused benefit does not carry over. Deductibles reset with them. Flexible spending money has to be used or it is gone. Every practice knows this. Most patients do not think about it until somebody reminds them, and in a normal year the reminder comes from the front desk. This year plenty of those reminder calls never got made, because the office was closed in the spring and catching up in the summer.

So the reminder has to come from somewhere else: the recall call you make this week, the text you send, and the listing and website a patient finds when they finally think about it at nine on a Tuesday night.

The searches worth being visible for

We look at the same short list for every practice, and Google’s new performance insights inside Google My Business now show a breakdown of the searches that surfaced your listing, which makes this easier to check than it was a few months ago.

• “dentist near me” and “dentist open saturday”. The default. If you have any Saturday or early morning hours, they belong in your hours, not just on your website.
• “emergency dentist” and “tooth pain”. These convert fastest and they do not care about your marketing. They care about whether you pick up.
• “dentist that takes [plan name]”. Heavy in a benefits window. Name the plans you are in network with, in your services list and on a page on your site. Vague “most insurance accepted” copy loses to a practice that writes the plan names out.
• “dentist accepting new patients”. Say it explicitly. A lot of people assume the answer is no.
• Treatment searches that benefits and spending accounts pay for. Crowns, implants, clear aligners, night guards. One real page per treatment you want more of, written for a patient rather than for a search engine.
• Cost questions. “How much is a crown”, “root canal cost without insurance”. You do not have to publish a price list to answer honestly about what affects the cost and what insurance usually covers.

Where the calls actually leak

The listing work is the easy half. In the accounts we run, more year-end revenue is lost between the ring and the booking than anywhere in search.

• Nobody answers at lunch. The office is closed twelve to one, and so is the phone. A patient with an expiring maximum calls the next practice on the map in under a minute.
• Holiday hours are wrong on the listing. Thanksgiving is Thursday, and there are two more closures coming. If your listing says open and the door is locked, you do not just lose that visit, you collect a one star review about it.
• The after-hours message is a dead end. “Our office is closed, please call back during business hours” is the most expensive sentence in dentistry. It should say when you open, and point to a way to book or leave a callback request.
• Web forms go to an inbox nobody reads in December. Test yours today. Send one from your phone and time how long it takes to reach a human.
• No appointment link on the profile. Patients who will not call at all will book at eleven at night if you let them.
• Calls are not tracked, so nothing gets fixed. If you cannot tell how many rings went unanswered last week, you cannot argue about staffing with any evidence.

The listing work that pays inside six weeks

Everything here is same-day work, and none of it requires a new website.

1. Set special hours for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year now, before the week they fall in.
2. Publish a post about using benefits before they reset, and refresh it every couple of weeks so it stays live.
3. Add or fix the appointment link so it goes to real availability and not a contact form.
4. Put the plan names and the treatments in your services list and description, in the words patients use.
5. Keep the health and safety attributes accurate. Patients who are still nervous about coming in read those before they call, and they are the reason some of your backlog has not booked.
6. Reply to every review from this autumn, including the good ones. Ask for reviews from the patients you have already treated well. Never gate the ask on how happy someone is, and never offer anything for one.

What to do this month

• Pull the list of patients with unscheduled treatment and remaining benefit, and work it by phone this week, not by email.
• Set your holiday hours on the listing and on your site today.
• Record your after-hours greeting again so it names your reopening time and gives a booking option.
• Add call tracking, then look at unanswered calls by hour and adjust who covers the lunch hour.
• Write or fix one treatment page for the procedure you most want to fill chairs with in January.
• Test your own web form and your own phone line as a patient would, and fix whatever annoys you.

None of this is clever. It is the boring half of local search for a dental practice, and in a year like this it is worth more than any campaign. The listing changes above sit inside our Google My Business work, and the pages you build now are what keep the phone ringing once the benefits window closes, which is the whole point of ongoing local SEO.