SEO for dental practices: a practical guide

Most guides to dental SEO are written to sell dental SEO. This one is organised around the decisions a practice owner actually faces: whether to bother, what to do first, whether to pay somebody, and how to tell if any of it worked.

1. Is it worth bothering with?

For most practices, yes, but for a narrower reason than usually claimed. Search is where people go when they need a dentist and do not already have one. That is a small, high-intent group: someone typing "dentist" and your town is not browsing, they are looking to register or to be seen.

The caveat before the caveat: if you hold an NHS contract and are already on course to deliver your UDAs, more general local visibility may not help you. Work above the contract is unpaid, so the growth worth chasing is private and plan treatment rather than new registrations, and the pages worth writing are the treatment ones rather than "dentist in [town]".

The second caveat is that the numbers are modest. A market town might carry a few hundred searches a month for its main dental terms across all practices. This is not a channel that transforms a practice overnight. It is a channel where being invisible costs you a steady trickle of patients who go somewhere else without ever knowing you existed.

2. What are the parts?

Four things, roughly in order of how quickly they move.

Your Google Business Profile

The listing behind the map pack. Free, fast to fix, and the most commonly half-finished thing in dentistry. Categories, every treatment listed as a service, accurate hours, real photographs. Practices routinely leave services blank and then wonder why they do not appear for those services.

Your website's content

One page per thing you want to be found for. The single biggest structural mistake is a "Treatments" page that lists twelve procedures in a paragraph each. That page competes for nothing. Twelve pages, each properly answering what a patient asks about that treatment, competes for twelve things.

Technical health

Speed, mobile layout, pages that are actually reachable, titles that differ from one another, descriptions that exist. Unglamorous, usually cheap to fix, and it sets a ceiling on everything else.

Reviews and reputation

The slowest lever and the one most people start with. Worth doing steadily, worth measuring against your own town rather than a national figure.

3. What should you do first?

In this order, because each one is cheaper than the next and the early ones sometimes make the later ones unnecessary.

1. Finish the Google Business Profile. An afternoon. No cost. Often moves the map pack within weeks.
2. Check the technical basics. Does every page have its own title and description? Does the site work properly on a phone? Is anything broken?
3. Write the missing treatment pages. Start with the treatment you most want more of, not the one that is easiest to write.
4. Get your listings consistent across the directories that carry dental practices.
5. Then, and only then, think about links and reviews at scale, which are the slow expensive parts.

4. Should you pay an agency?

One independent Cheshire practice was quoted £450 plus VAT a month for ten tracked keywords and paid £780 a month for fifteen. That is one practice's agreements rather than a survey, so treat it as a reference point rather than a market rate.

It can be money well spent if you have nobody to do the work. Three things to establish before signing:

• What is on the keyword list, and who chose it. Ask to see it first. A list written before anyone mapped the market is a guess with a monthly invoice attached.
• Whether reporting covers the map pack or only organic positions. Most patients never reach the organic results for a local search.
• Who verifies the result. Reporting produced by the party paid on the strength of it is a structural conflict, present at every agency, and worth naming pleasantly at the start rather than resentfully later.

5. How do you tell whether it worked?

This is where most practices lose the thread, because the obvious measure is the wrong one.

"What position are we?" is a bad question. It has no single answer. Local results depend on where the searcher is standing, so a practice can be first from its own doorstep and absent three miles away where much of its catchment lives. One position is one point on a map with hundreds. Measuring the whole catchment rather than a handful of terms is what Practice Radar does.

Better questions:

• What share of the searchable value in our town do we hold? This weights each term by the traffic it carries, so it does not reward first place on something nobody types.
• Who holds the three map places, and what do they have that we do not? Names and review counts are public. When one changes, something real happened.
• What are competitors ranking for that we are not even watching? Almost always the largest blind spot, and structurally invisible inside a fixed keyword list.
• Has anything moved since last month? A single reading is not a trend, however confidently it is presented.

6. What is realistic

Profile fixes can move things in weeks, new pages take one to three months, and anything depending on other sites linking to you is a six-month-plus project. The timings are set out in more detail here.

Across 1,532 UK places we measured in September 2026, the median practice holding a local pack place had 113 reviews. In the 112 English towns measured in August, 83 per cent of pack places were held by independents rather than chains. The ground is not lost to corporates. It is mostly held by practices down the road who filled in their listing properly and wrote the pages.