Antoine Dental Center: #4 Most Google Reviewed Practice in the USA
At the end of 2021 the marketing team at My Social Practice did a study of the practices with the most Google reviews in the largest 100 cities in the USA. The #4 most reviewed practice in the USA was Antoine Dental Center.
This local dental SEO interview is with Oscar Rivera who is the Office Manager at Antoine Dental Center. He is primarily responsible for setting up a review campaign that helped them become the 4th highest rated practice. Oscar shares some of his local dental SEO secrets, why he, the doctor and the dental team put so much emphasis on acquiring thousands of Google reviews.
Meet the Interviewer / Interviewee
Adrian Lefler
Vice President of My Social Practice
Adrian is the Vice President at My Social Practice, an agency providing expert SEO support, social media marketing content, and strategy to dental practices.
Adrian has been involved in Google maps SEO for more than 12 years and has helped thousands of companies grow and thrive through digital marketing. Adrian and his wife Emilie have four children and live in Suncrest, Utah.
Oscar Rivera
Office Manager of Antoine Dental Center
Oscar Rivera was 18 in 2009 when he started at Antoine Dental Center. His first job at Antoine was scrubbing the dental instruments as well as the toilets. Within a few years he had worked his way up to running the practice as the office manager.
Oscar is a hard-working, forward-thinking team member who has helped Antoine Dental Center become a multi-million dollar practice. At the end of 2021 Antoine Dental Center was the fourth highest Google review rated practice in the largest 100 cities in the USA. Much of that success has come from Oscar’s crazy but brilliant marketing ideas. You can check out their dental practice reviews here.
One idea that every dental practice needs to check out is their review wall.
Watch The Interview
Webinar Transcript
Speaker 1:
Tell me a little bit about your history. How did you get into dentistry, how long you’ve been working at Antoine Dental Center, tell me a little about yourself.
Speaker 2:
At 17, I got a job at a bank and I’ve always just been like a natural sales guy. Everybody’s turning 18, so I have all my friends, this entire school turning 18. They want to open bank accounts and that was part of the sales, like, “Hey, can you generate new accounts?” I mean I had the entire school, 18 year olds turning 18, entire class opening accounts, the other schools, everybody I knew, just generating a lot of new business. With that comes commissions. Obviously when you give a 17 year old kid a lot of money, you tend to act up and get in some trouble.
Speaker 2:
That led to going to work late, missing work and going down the wrong path. I ended up getting fired from the bank. At the time, I had gotten a vehicle financed through my dad and he got this stupid low interest rate. I’m like, “All right, dad helped me finance a vehicle, have a brand new car. I just got fired from this job, but I need to pay this car. I need to make this payment.” I’m like, “All right, let me find a job.” I had a little bit of savings, which was eating away every month that I made that payment. Three months down the road, I can’t find a job. Six months down the road, I can’t find a job.
Speaker 2:
I apply at AutoZone. I apply at Walmart, Target. I’m like 19 years old and can’t find a job anywhere. I literally thought that they put my face on this do not hire list, this thing, like don’t hire this kid. He’s going to be good in the beginning, but then he is going to start making money and is going to be irresponsible. I’m like, “Wow. I’m literally on this do not hire list.” I couldn’t get a job anywhere doing anything. I’ll come to interviews. I’m like, “Man, I nailed that interview,” and I just couldn’t get a call back.
Speaker 2:
I went on Craigslist and then there was this job post that said, “Sterilization help needed, no experience necessary.” I’m like, “No experience necessary. That’s my job.” I’ve never heard the word sterilization. I’m from Hispanic background, Spanish is my first language. I’m like, “I don’t know what this means,” but I go to this interview in a suit and tie, vest, everything looking good. They’re like, “You know this job requires you to clean and scrub toilets and instruments. Right?”
Speaker 2:
No, I had no idea, but I’m like, “Yes, I do know.” They’re like, “You’re overdressed.” I’m like, “No, I’m dressed perfect for this.” Like, “When can you start?” I’ll start right now. This was in 2009 and I started just doing that. Fast forward, we’re in 2022, and now managing a multimillion dollar business that’s helping it scale and grow. I’ve been along through this journey that I was fortunate enough to have a doctor invest in some informal education and just believed in the crazy ideas that I had.
It’s like, “Hey, let’s try this. Is this going to work? I don’t know. We might lose a little money or we might make a ton.” He’s like, “All right, let’s try it.” Just kind of had… I’ve always been empowered to just create and do things differently. It’s been a great career over this past, what, 13 years now. That’s a little bit of my story.
Speaker 1:
What year did you begin working at the dental practice?
Speaker 2:
I got in here in 2009.
Speaker 1:
Oh, that was 2009. You were scrubbing toilets at the dental practice?
Speaker 2:
2009, yeah. Now I’m managing a multimillion dollar business, man.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Got it. Got it. Okay. What’s your position now at Antoine?
Speaker 2:
I’m the office manager.
Speaker 1:
Oh, you’re running the practice. Oh, nice. That’s fantastic, man. That’s great. Good for you. Great American story of just hustling and making it happen.
Speaker 2:
I always say I’m not the only one here. We got a couple of guys and I would say, “Man, doctor took these kids from the street and turned into systems and gave us the opportunity, believed in us, and then let us shine.”
Speaker 1:
That’s actually a brilliant… You’ve got probably just a fantastic boss. Your dentist can obviously see things and help develop somebody and give them opportunities when the time’s right. That’s awesome. Okay, cool. When did you start running the practice? What year did you become the office manager?
Speaker 2:
Running the practice, I started around 2000, I want to say 2014, ’15, 2015. Started transitioning over to officially being an office manager title. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
You had some ideas about how to start getting reviews and that you felt that it was important. Was the practice actively trying to get reviews before you became an office manager, or was that something that you kind of implemented?
Speaker 2:
We kind of come across this unconsciously, and we’ve always been early adopters in technology. We started seeing the trends going from radio to TV to digital. Right? Then, slowly, we started noticing that we became reviewers ourselves. We would go somewhere and I looked at my Google history and I’m like, “Man, every time I go somewhere, I have a bad experience, I leave a bad review. I’ve never left a good review.”
Speaker 1:
You’re one of those guys, huh? That’s you. Okay, great.
Speaker 2:
Not anymore, man. Not anymore. Now I’m a Google… What do they call it? Tour or something.
Speaker 1:
Guide. Yeah. It’s like they give you a gold star basically.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, man. They sent me Google socks. They’ve sent me so many things. I’m not a negative reviewer anymore. I give everybody, all these small businesses a chance.
Speaker 1:
Local guides. I think you’re a local guide.
Speaker 2:
Local guides. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:
That’s what they call it, local guide. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Well, anyway, I just started noticing that. We were obviously wanting to… We saw this dental advertising, actually we saw this billboard. There was this dental office, who is now shut down, but they were advertising we have over 100 five star reviews. Over 100 five star reviews. Then, we kept seeing them. They were marketing like crazy. They were slapping it on billboards, posting on their dental Facebook page. Then, that kind of lit a fire in me, kind of pissed me off, like, “Man, are they really that much better than us? What the heck?”
Speaker 2:
I’ll give them credit. They’re the ones that really lit that fire on us to actually really want to go after reviews. My goal was like, “I want to beat them.” We were at 80 reviews, sub 100. I think they were like at 300 at the time [inaudible 00:07:28] and our goal was just to beat them. That was the goal. It’s like, “Hey, we want to get more reviews than them.” We see so many patients. We’re a big dental practice, we have about 27 [inaudible 00:07:42].
Speaker 2:
We see a lot of patient volume and the thinking was, if we can get one patient a day, we’re seeing about 200 patients a day maybe sometimes, it’s like, “We should have 200 reviews every day.” We started asking just like, “Hey, would you leave us a review?” We started, and then the entire office as a group kind of got together, it’s like, “Hey, we’re coming after them. We’re going to take them down.” That was the goal. We were all in it together.
Speaker 2:
Then, slowly over time, we started seeing that there was all these technologies that you can send them a link and make things easier. What we would do, we started with a tablet and just hand it out, and then that wasn’t working. It was getting flagged. We went through all of these things and we started just finding ways that make it work. There’s softwares, I’m sure you offer one, I use three different ones. The thing is, in my point of view, it’s a numbers game. Right? You see 10 patients a day. What is your conversion ratio on reviews? Are they all going to leave one?
Speaker 2:
The odds are no, but we can ask everyone and then the odds of them doing it, very slim, so we send them reminders through one app. Are they going to do it? Maybe we’ll get one out of 10, one out of 100. Right? We’re sending them out every day. Then, if they don’t go through that one, we send them a different one. We use multiple avenues. Then, on top of that, we also have the internal team that’s always asking.
Speaker 2:
The truth is in a dental office, and I’m sure most dental offices can relate to this, they get a lot of referrals, but they don’t say, “Hey, go to Papaya Dental.” They say, “Hey, go see Oscar at Papaya Dental. He’s going to take good care of you.” These staff members, they build these bonds with the patients and they always want to come back and see that staff member. They want to come back and see this… I want her to assist me. I want him to assist. I want Oscar to be in the chair with me.
Speaker 2:
Noticing that, we started asking them, was like, “Hey, the patients you have a great bond with, ask them for a review.” We started incentivizing it and it’s like, “Hey, if you can get a review, we’ll pay you five bucks per review.” What we noticed is we started getting reviews, but it was just a five star review. Then, it would say like, “Nice office, nice visit. It was great. I liked it.” We started getting a lot of that and there was no real value in it. I just like, “Man, you know what? This doesn’t have an impact.”
Speaker 2:
I started changing things up. I’m like, “If you get one of those reviews, I’ll pay you a dollar. We’ll do a dollar pay out. If you can get a review where they mention your name, you get the five bucks. If you can get a review where the patient shares their story, I’ll pay you 15.” The review quality started getting a lot better. We still get those had a great visit or just five stars, no comments.
Speaker 1:
How much do you think, guessing, have you invested in paying your team to ask for reviews to incentivize it?
Speaker 2:
I don’t know, but the return on investment has been insane. I mean every day we get people that are just like, “Oh, I looked at your reviews.” Yeah, you have some bad ones, but sometimes people drop the ball and that’s what they tell us. Then, we’ll get on there, get a review. We’re not perfect. We’re a 4.8 star office, not a five star. Obviously there’s always going to be some room for improvement. For every one bad review, immediately we get 10 great reviews and the bad one kind of gets buried away in there. We also reach out, we work really hard.
Speaker 2:
I also have these surveys. I wish the survey turnaround would be as good as the actually posting on the review sites, on Google or Facebook or Yelp because I get surveys coming in all day, every day, at night. My phone is pinging. I flag the three star and below and I reach out to them, just like, “Hey, where did we drop the ball?” Sometimes it’s wait time. Sometimes it’s just nobody acknowledged me or small things that had an impact on their visit.
Speaker 2:
The fact that we can step in and reach out before it escalates, they really appreciate that. I’ve gotten reviews taken down because of that. I’ve prevented negative reviews. I’ve gotten referrals from that. They’re like, “Hey, you know what? You dropped the ball, but you picked it up.” I don’t know how much I’ve invested in these because I use software after software, and I’m using two or three right now. Then, I’m also having the internal contest going on.
Speaker 2:
I have this one team member that she makes a killing off of this, makes a couple thousand bucks a year. It’s better than a raise. She’s making more than a dollar raise. It is just that. Actually the other day, I got a review that says, “Don’t believe all the reviews. They pay this girl to come around and push you to leave a review.” I was like, “What? This doesn’t sound like my team.” To be honest, we don’t want it to come across like that.
Speaker 2:
We want it to be genuine, so we always ask, ask the patients that you have that connection with, the ones that are asking for you, that are coming back and seeing you. Grab the phone, take a selfie with them for social media. Instead of being on Snapchat, take a selfie with your patients and post that, “Hey, they’re happy patient with me.” Right?
Speaker 2:
We want to ask those patients because those are the ones that are having the great experience, why not share it with the world? That’s kind of how we’ve gotten to this point. We’re always looking for the edge of what can we do? I shared a picture of my review wall. Did you see it?
Speaker 1:
It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s awesome. Tell me about it.
Speaker 2:
Okay. I had this crazy dental reputation idea, all right? I’m like, “Hey, I want to…” We rebranded, we changed our logos. That wall was just… You know when you go to the red carpet and they have the sponsorships in the back and you see like [inaudible 00:13:54] so we had that in our office of our logo everywhere. When we rebranded, we needed to redo the wall and we were thinking what it was. I said, “You know what? I got this dental marketing idea.” I couldn’t communicate it well. I couldn’t articulate what I had in mind, but [inaudible 00:14:13] you know what? Let me just design it.
Speaker 2:
I have some design background. I’d taken over some of the marketing here at the office internally. I’m like, “Let me just design this. We’ll look at it. Then, when I show it, this is going to get slapped up there.” Sure enough, I copied and pasted every review. I copied and pasted, and I think I only used Facebook. I didn’t use Google. I used every review on Facebook. I copied and pasted it and just made a long text and it’s just back and forth. You saw it, right?
Speaker 2:
Then, I overlapped our logos and the Google logo, the Facebook logo, the five stars. When we do our office tour, every new patient walks through that area. Every patient that walks through there, we always say, “Hey, by the way, this is our wall of reviews. All the reviews that patients have left us. Don’t forget to share your honest experience on Google, Facebook or Yelp, and maybe your review might make it to the wall one day.”
Speaker 1:
Oh, that’s brilliant. You don’t add to it, you just grabbed everything that you had and you put it on the wall and you’ve never redone it, right?
Speaker 2:
No, this has been up for maybe a year now, a little over a year.
Speaker 1:
Did you just go to a local print company to print that? Is it like a wall paper?
Speaker 2:
We have this guy that we use locally. He’s a little more expensive than using your VistaPrint or anything, but we’re supporting a small business. He’s been with us forever, since 2009 did I start working? He was working with all this printing for the office. He does our pocket folders, everything, but he’s very reliable and trustworthy. When I had this idea, I’m just like, “Hey, can you bring this to life?” He said, “Yeah.” It was an investment. We probably spent maybe $5,000 on getting it printed at a scale, at the right scale, getting someone to come out and install it properly, but definitely worth it. It’s definitely a way that reassures patients like, “Wow, I made the right choice in coming here.” [inaudible 00:16:16] everywhere with reviews.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. It’s amazing. You’ve done a fantastic job. I was going to ask of all the… You’re managing all the marketing then, right? Do you kind of like run the marketing or is that somebody else’s job?
Speaker 2:
I play a big role in it.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Of all the marketing that you guys are doing, how valuable is just the reviews, maybe you don’t know exactly how many new patients you get from it but just kind of a gut feel, how valuable is it compared to any other marketing strategy that you’ve used?
Speaker 2:
Well, the thing is the Google reviews are kind of like your investment protection. A lot of people don’t see it this way. The reviews for me is my investment protection, because I’m going to spend X amount of dollars to get a prospect to show interest in my practice, and what are they going to do? They’re going to go look at my reviews, right? That could make or break you. Right?
Speaker 2:
Having those testimonials, having the reviews there, I think that’s my investment protection. They come in, it reassures them that, “Hey, a lot of people are coming here, they’re having a great experience. Therefore, I have the peace of mind that I made the right choice. I’m going to give them a try.” That’s my perspective on it when it comes to [crosstalk 00:17:41].
Speaker 1:
That’s a great way to look at it, investment protection for advertising costs. You would imagine that if you spent, I don’t know, five or $10,000 a month on billboards and you got crappy reviews, you’re just wasting the money because all these people are going to check them before they call. You’ve paid for the awareness, but you’ve damaged the whole marketing campaign through your bad review profile.
Speaker 2:
Speaking of billboards, a lot of times a billboard can market for another office. You might be doing dental marketing for somebody else. You throw up your billboard about dental implants, about braces, whatever. You put your brand out there, you might put your phone number, you might put a good message, but it might get them thinking of searching for it. When they start search for implants, they’ll go to the better reviewed doctor so you just did some marketing for somebody else.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. That’s awesome.
Speaker 2:
To me, the reviews is like your investment protection.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Well, Dr. Nazari is lucky to have you. Honestly, you’re super forward thinking. I imagine that it’s been… My guess is that your dental SEO efforts with gathering reviews, putting the internal incentive program together for your team is a significant return on investment. Like huge.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
What I did is I reviewed the top 100 cities in the country. I looked at every single practice in the cities and then I counted them up. You guys were number four.
Speaker 2:
I got to get to number one now, man.
Speaker 1:
[inaudible 00:19:27] it’s awesome.
Speaker 2:
Now, you lit the fire that I need to become number one.
Speaker 1:
Well, yeah, well, you will read that report. You’ll see who is ahead of you. You see where you got to go, man.
Speaker 2:
I already did. I already did. I already got the numbers going. I’m putting the new KPIs. I’m thinking of new things to implement what we’re going to do.
Speaker 1:
Well, I’ll tell you. I’m going to be talking to Jessica from ChildSmiles FamilySmiles. They had 3,649 well, she has two, but I think that’s just the one location though.
Speaker 2:
Okay. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:
It is just the one location, but I’m going to tell her [inaudible 00:20:13].
Speaker 2:
Also, congratulate them for being number one.
Speaker 1:
I will.
Speaker 2:
It’s massive. It’s massive. It’s very impactful. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from them. Maybe I can see the call that you have with her, kind of help me rewire some strategies [inaudible 00:20:36].
Speaker 1:
I love it. Okay. Well, man, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for taking a few minutes.
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