Dental SEO agency or do it yourself?

The choice is usually presented as expertise versus cost. That framing is wrong, because a good deal of what agencies charge for is work a practice can genuinely do in an afternoon, while some of what practices try to do themselves is a genuine specialism.

Here is the split as we would draw it, having been on the paying side of it.

What you can do yourself, this week

• Your Google Business Profile. Categories, every treatment as a listed service, hours including bank holidays, real photographs. This is the largest single lever on the map pack and it is free. Practices routinely leave it half-finished for years.
• Treatment pages. Nobody knows what a patient asks about implants better than the person who places them. An agency writing this is usually paraphrasing your website back to you with more adjectives.
• Review requests. Building the habit at the front desk is an internal process change. No external party can do it for you and plenty charge as if they could.
• Directory listings. Tedious, not difficult. An afternoon with a list.
• Page titles and descriptions. The part of on-page SEO that moves rankings is the title and the description on each page carrying the search it should own. A tool that reads your site can propose those; with the site connected, approving one applies it, and nobody needs to log in to WordPress.

What is genuinely specialist

• Technical site work. Speed, structure, redirects, schema. Real expertise and easy to make worse by guessing.
• Earning links. Slow, relationship-driven, and the part most practices have no route into.
• Sustained content at volume. Not one page. Twenty, written properly, over a year. This is where "we will do it ourselves" usually dies quietly in month three.
• Knowing what to do next. Arguably the real product: not the work, the judgement about which work.

What it costs

One independent practice we have the paperwork for was quoted £450 plus VAT a month for ten keywords and paid £780 a month for fifteen. That is one set of agreements, not a survey, so read it as the order of magnitude and nothing more precise. Including VAT that is £540 and £780 a month, so £6,480 to £9,360 a year, the same pair the other post annualises.

Against that, an in-house route costs your time. Being honest about how much of it you have is the whole decision. A practice owner with two clinical days and a young family does not have twenty hours a month, and pretending otherwise produces the worst outcome of all: paying nobody and doing nothing.

The three questions, whichever way you go

What is being watched?

Ten or fifteen keywords is a small window onto a market. Patients do not search from a list, and the terms your competitors quietly win are usually the ones nobody put on it. Ask to see the list before signing, and ask what happens when something outside it starts mattering.

Does it include the map?

For local dental searches on a phone, three practices sit in a map above the organic results and take a large share of the clicks. A report showing only organic positions is reporting on the part of the page many patients scroll straight past.

Who checks the answer?

This is the one that matters most and is asked least. Reporting produced by the party being paid on the strength of it is a structural conflict. It exists at every agency, including good ones, and naming it pleasantly at the start is far easier than raising it resentfully in month nine.

How to decide

Do the free things first, whichever route you pick. Finish the profile, write the two treatment pages you most want patients for, fix anything obviously broken. Give it two months.

If that moves you, you have learned the ceiling was lower than you feared and you may not need much help. If it does not move you, you now know the constraint is something structural, and that is exactly the point at which paying a specialist is a considered decision rather than a hopeful one.

What you should not do is sign a twelve-month agreement before knowing which of those two worlds you are in. That knowledge costs an afternoon.