What is dental SEO?
A short, plain answer, without the jargon and without pretending it is more precise than it is.
Practice Radar shows a dental practice where it ranks against every practice nearby, and does the work to move up.
Thirty days free. No card, and nothing starts automatically when it ends.
Dental SEO is the work of making a practice appear when someone nearby searches for the treatment they need. That is the whole of it. Everything else is detail about how.
The two halves
Search results for something like "dentist Macclesfield" have two distinct parts, and they are won differently.
The map pack is the block of three practices with a map, sitting above everything else. It is decided mostly by how close you are to the searcher, how clearly your listing says what you do, and how well known you appear, which largely means reviews. This is local SEO.
The organic results are the ordinary blue links below it. These are decided more by your website: whether you have a page answering what was asked, whether the site is technically sound, and whether other sites link to you. This is what most people mean by SEO generally.
A practice can hold the map and have a weak website, or the reverse. They need different work, and a report showing only one of them is showing you half the page.
See this for your own town.
Every practice competing with yours on one map, sized by the share of local search each one holds, re-checked every week. The sample town shows the whole thing now, with no sign-up.
Run on our own practice first: ninth of the 14 practices measured in its town in May, first of 18 in September, on UK-wide search value. Page-one keywords: 6 in May, 194 in September.
Thirty days free. No card, and nothing starts automatically when it ends.
What it is not
It is not ads. Google Ads buys a position for as long as you pay. SEO earns one and keeps it when you stop, but it takes months rather than days and nobody can guarantee it.
It is not a keyword list. Plenty of packages are sold as "ten keywords" or "fifteen keywords". Patients do not search from a list. They type whatever is in their head, and the searches your competitors win are usually the ones nobody thought to track.
It is not one number. "We rank third" is meaningless without saying for what, and measured from where. Local results change with the searcher's location, so a single position is a single point on a map that has hundreds.
What it is reasonable to expect
Honest expectations, in the order they usually arrive:
- Weeks: fixes to your Google Business Profile can move the map pack quickly, because you are correcting information rather than earning trust.
- One to three months: new pages for treatments you did not previously cover start to appear for the searches they answer.
- Six months and beyond: anything that depends on other sites linking to you, or on out-reviewing an established competitor.
Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either talking about a term nobody searches or is not being straight with you.
Where to start
Before spending anything, find out where you actually stand. Search your main term on a phone, from your practice and again from a few miles away, and note who holds the three map places and how many reviews they have. That five-minute exercise tells you more than most first meetings with an agency, and it tells you which of the three levers is the one holding you back. Our own dental SEO software starts from the same map, for every practice in your town.
Start with where you actually stand
Before spending anything, see your town the way Google shows it: every practice competing with yours, who holds the map, and what they have that you do not.
Run on our own practice first: ninth of the 14 practices measured in its town in May, first of 18 in September, on UK-wide search value. Page-one keywords: 6 in May, 194 in September.
Thirty days free. No card, and nothing starts automatically when it ends.