What dental SEO actually costs in the UK

Ask what dental SEO costs and you will get a range so wide it is useless. So here are two real figures from one independent practice in Cheshire, taken from the actual agreements rather than from a rate card.

The fifteen-keyword plan is not a quote. It was a live monthly subscription, paid, until it was cancelled in August 2026. So when you see "dental SEO from £X" on an agency site, the real world number for a single-site independent practice sits somewhere around £540 to £780 a month including VAT, which is £6,480 to £9,360 a year before anything is spent on ads. (Quoted the other way round, that is £450 to £650 a month before VAT. The two lines in the table are quoted on different bases, which is itself worth watching for when you compare proposals.)

What you are buying

It is worth being fair about this, because the number on its own is not damning. For that fee a competent agency will typically do content work, technical fixes, some link building and reporting. That is real labour by people who do it every day, and for a practice with nobody in-house it can be money well spent.

What you are not buying is more important:

• You are not buying the whole market. Fifteen keywords is fifteen keywords. Every search a patient makes that is not on that list is outside the agreement, including terms your competitors are winning.
• You are not usually buying independent measurement. The reporting comes from the party being paid on the strength of it. That is not an accusation, it is a structural conflict, and it exists at every agency.
• You are not buying the local pack. Most SEO reporting shows organic positions. The map that appears above them, which is where a patient searching for a nearby dentist actually clicks, is often not in the report at all.

The three questions to ask before you sign

1. How many searches am I actually paying to be watched on?

Ask for the keyword list before you sign, not after. If it is ten or fifteen terms, ask how they were chosen and what happens when a competitor starts winning something that is not on it. A good answer exists. An evasive one tells you something.

2. Does the reporting include the map pack?

For "dentist [your town]" on a phone, the local pack sits above the organic results and takes a large share of the clicks. If your monthly report only shows organic positions, it is reporting on the part of the page most patients scroll past.

3. What does the number look like from somewhere other than your postcode?

Local results change with the searcher's location. A practice can rank first for a patient standing outside its own door and be nowhere three miles away, where most of its new patients live. One position, measured once, hides that completely.

What to measure, whoever you pay

If you keep an agency, keep them honestly, and measure the thing independently. If you drop them, you still need to know where you stand. Either way the same short list tells you most of it:

1. Your share of the search value in your town, not your position on a handful of terms. Position 4 on a term nobody searches is worth less than position 8 on one they do.
2. Who holds the three map places for your main terms, and what their review counts are. That is the real bar, and it is public.
3. What your rivals rank for that you do not track. This is where the fifteen-keyword ceiling bites, and it is invisible from inside the agreement.
4. Whether any of it moved. One reading is not a trend. Two readings a month apart are the beginning of one.

The honest comparison

A tool that measures is not a substitute for someone who does the work. If you have nobody to write the pages, fix the site and chase the listings, a tool will show you the gap and the gap will stay there.

What a tool changes is the asymmetry. At £540 to £780 a month including VAT you are entitled to know whether it is working, on the whole market rather than a chosen fifteen, measured by somebody who is not paid on the answer. That is a reasonable thing to want, and until recently it was hard to get for a single practice at a sensible price. It now runs from £249 a month, which is worth holding against the numbers above.

Whichever way you go, decide what "working" means before the first invoice, and make sure the thing that proves it is not produced by the same people sending it.