One page for every treatment
The most common and the most expensive. Six treatments named on one page means six searches lost, and they are the searches with money attached.
Guide
Local SEO for dentists
Dentistry is decided in the map pack and then in the reviews. Somebody with a broken tooth, or a partner who has finally agreed to book a check-up, opens Google, sees three practices on a map, and reads the reviews on all three. The website is where they confirm a decision they have mostly already made, which is why work on the Google Business Profile usually moves more appointments than work on the site.
By Hamza Rivera
Short answer: Local SEO for a dental practice mostly means a complete Google Business Profile, steady reviews, and a separate page for each treatment, with insurance, emergency and opening-hours questions answered in writing. The map pack and the reviews usually decide the booking, so profile work usually moves more appointments than work on the site.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
The second thing that decides it is whether the practice answers the question that was actually typed. Nobody searches "dentist". They search whether you take their insurance, whether you can see a child, whether you are open on a Saturday, what an implant involves, and whether it will hurt. A practice with a page for each of those gets the booking; a practice with a treatments list and a contact form does not.
Neither of those is a technical problem, which is the good news. Almost none of it needs a developer.
What dentists are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- dentist near me
- emergency dentist [city]
- dentist that takes [insurance]
- how much is a dental implant
- paediatric dentist [neighbourhood]
- dentist open saturday near me
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
Claim and finish the Google Business Profile
Primary category set to Dentist, not Doctor. Every service you actually offer added as a service, because those are matched against what people type. Opening hours correct including the hours you are not open, holiday hours set, and the appointment link pointing at your booking system rather than the home page.
- 2
Get reviews arriving steadily, not in bursts
Twenty reviews in one week and none for six months reads worse than two a week for a year. Ask at the point the patient is happiest, which is usually at the desk after treatment rather than by email two days later. Reply to every one, briefly, and never discuss a patient’s treatment in the reply.
- 3
Write a page per treatment, not a treatments list
Implants, veneers, whitening, root canal, clear aligners, children’s dentistry. Each one is a different search with a different question behind it and deserves its own page explaining what happens, how long it takes and what recovery looks like. A bulleted list on one page ranks for none of them.
- 4
Put the insurances you accept in writing
"Dentist that takes [insurer]" is one of the highest-intent searches in the trade and most practice sites answer it nowhere. A plain list, updated when it changes, with the insurers named. If you are out of network, say so and explain what that means for the patient.
- 5
Answer the emergency search properly
Somebody searching at eleven at night for an emergency dentist wants to know whether you will see them tomorrow and what to do tonight. A page that says both, with a number that rings somewhere, wins a patient who has no loyalty to anyone yet.
- 6
Give each dentist a real page
Patients search a dentist by name after a recommendation, and directories usually outrank the practice on that name. A page each with qualifications, years in practice, what they treat and a photograph takes that search back.
- 7
Add photographs of the actual practice
Reception, surgery, the parking. Stock photographs of a model with perfect teeth signal nothing. Real ones let an anxious patient see what they are walking into, which is most of the decision for a nervous booker.
- 8
Fix the booking path last, and check it on a phone
Most of this traffic is mobile. If the booking link opens a PDF, or a form that needs a date of birth before it shows availability, the ranking work is wasted at the final step.
What usually goes wrong
The profile category set to the wrong thing
Practices set up by a web agency are often filed under Doctor, Health, or Dental Clinic rather than Dentist. The category decides which map results you appear in at all.
Review requests sent in a batch after a marketing push
Google reads the pattern as well as the count. A burst is worth less than a trickle and looks worse to a patient reading the dates.
Treating the website as the shop front
For a dental practice the profile is the shop front. The website is the second visit, not the first.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Calls and direction requests from the Google Business Profile, month on month
- Appointment link clicks from the profile, which is the closest thing to a booking Google will show you
- Search Console impressions for the treatment pages, not just the home page
- How many new patients say they found you on Google when asked at the desk, which is the only number that reconciles the rest
Protecting what you build
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether dentists still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
For a dental practice the specific risk is the review process. Practices under pressure to compete on reviews are the most heavily targeted market for review-selling services, and a filtered batch takes the listing with it. The second is a website rebuilt by the practice management software vendor, which routinely ships without redirects because ranking was never their job.
What actually breaks a business in search
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
A redesign or a platform move
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
A plugin or a setting nobody audited
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
Losing control of an account
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
A suspended Google Business Profile
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Letting the work stop
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
What to refuse, however it is sold to you
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
-
Bought links, in any packaging
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
-
Reviews you did not earn
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
-
Keywords stuffed into the business name
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
-
Pages written to have pages
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
-
Anybody who guarantees a position
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
The monthly discipline
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
- Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
- Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
- Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
- Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
- Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
- Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
- Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.
Own your own accounts
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for dentists
What is local SEO for dentists?
It is the work that makes a practice appear when somebody nearby searches for the treatment they need: the Google Business Profile, reviews, a page for each treatment, and the site being clear about insurance, hours and location. It is distinct from general SEO because the map pack, not the list of blue links, is where most dental searches are decided.
How long before a dental practice sees results?
Profile work shows first, often inside a month, because the map pack reacts quickly to a complete profile and fresh reviews. Treatment pages take longer, usually two to four months to settle, and competitive city terms longer again.
Do dental reviews really change rankings?
They change both the ranking and the booking, and the second matters more. Volume and recency feed the map pack; what the reviews say decides which of the three practices on the map gets the call.
Can a practice do this itself?
The profile work, yes, and it is worth doing whoever else you hire. The treatment pages and the technical side are where most practices run out of time rather than ability.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.