Where the money goes and why nobody can find it
Marketing for dentists has a strange failure mode: the practice spends real money for a year and cannot tell you what it bought.
There is a website that somebody rebuilt in 2021. There is an agency sending a monthly PDF full of impressions. There may be a Google Ads account nobody has opened since the person who set it up left. Somewhere in there are new patients arriving, and if you ask the front desk which ones came from which thing, you will get a shrug, because nobody at the front desk has ever been asked to find out.
That is not a marketing problem yet. It is a measurement problem, and until it is fixed every other decision is a guess with an invoice attached.
This page is the whole system. What each piece does, which order to build it in, what it costs, how long before it shows up in the schedule, and how to tell whether the person pitching you knows anything at all.
A dental practice buys marketing in pieces, from different vendors, on different contracts, and almost never with a single number at the end of it.
The website came from one company. The SEO comes from another, often one that sells the same package to nine hundred practices and prices it low enough that nobody asks hard questions. The ads are run by a third, or by nobody. Reviews are handled by whichever front desk person is best with computers, which means they are handled in the gaps between patients.
Each of those vendors reports on its own work in its own units – and every one of those reports looks fine. Impressions are up. Rankings are up. Click-through is up. Meanwhile the schedule has the same three gaps on Thursday afternoons it had last year, and nobody’s dashboard has a row for that.
The first thing worth fixing is not any of the channels. It is the one number underneath them: how many new patients arrived this month, and where each one came from. Everything else on this page is easier to decide once that exists.
What a new patient is worth, and why the number changes the argument
Every marketing decision a practice makes is really an argument about this number, and most practices have never worked it out.
We are deliberately not putting a national average here, because the number is different in Walla Walla than it is in Phoenix, and a figure invented for a web page is worse than no figure at all. Work out yours. It takes an afternoon with the practice management software and it changes every conversation afterward.
Dental SEO
Organic search is the channel that stops costing money and keeps producing patients, which is why it is worth the wait it demands.
Somebody two blocks from your office cracks a molar at nine on a Tuesday night and reaches for their phone. What happens next is decided by three things working together: the map pack listing and how healthy your Google Business Profile is, whether you have a real page for the procedure they searched for, and whether the site loads before they give up. A practice that gets two of those three right usually sits on page two, wondering what went wrong.
The part most practices get wrong is chasing “dentist near me” and its cousins, which are the most defended searches in the category. The winnable searches are the procedure terms and the situation terms: the person searching for a specific treatment, or searching at eleven at night with a phrase that tells you exactly what has happened to them. Those have less volume each and they convert like nothing else – the person typing them has already decided to spend money.
We have written the whole method out, with the difficulty data, the map pack work, the schema, the cost ranges and the timeline. It is on dental SEO and it is the longest page on this site for a reason.
Dental website design
The website is where every other channel cashes out, which makes it the worst place to economize and the most common place practices do.
Ads send people to it. Search sends people to it. The referral from a neighbor ends there too, because people look you up before they call. If the site takes six seconds on a phone, or buries the phone number, or has one page called Services covering fourteen procedures, then every dollar spent driving traffic is a dollar spent proving the site cannot convert.
There is also a trap specific to dentistry, which is the all-in-one vendor: website, hosting, SEO and reviews bundled together on a platform you do not own, at a price that looks reasonable until you try to leave. Ask who owns the domain, the content and the patient data. Ask what happens to the site if you cancel. The answers are occasionally alarming.
Full treatment on dental website design.
SEO for dental offices with more than one location
Multi-location dentistry breaks most of the standard local search advice, and the practices it breaks hardest are the ones growing fastest.
Two offices in the same metro compete with each other in the map pack. A shared website with one Locations page will rank for neither. Each office needs its own real page, its own Google Business Profile with its own reviews, its own hours and its own directions, and the pages need to be genuinely different rather than the same page with the city name swapped, which search engines have been able to spot for a decade.
Full treatment on SEO for dental offices.
Google Ads for dentists
Ads do one thing that nothing else on this page does, which is produce appointments this week.
That is worth a great deal to a new practice, a practice that has just added an operatory, or a practice with a hole in the schedule right now. It is also the channel most easily wasted, because dental keywords are expensive and a broad match campaign will happily spend a month’s budget on people searching for dental school, dental insurance and dentures when you do not place dentures.
The honest framing is that ads and search do different jobs at different speeds and most practices should run both at different weights. A new practice leans on ads and shifts weight to organic as it builds; an established practice with good rankings uses ads surgically, for the procedures it wants more of.
Full treatment on Google Ads for dentists.
How to choose a dental SEO company
The single most useful question you can ask a vendor is what they found when they looked at your site.
If the pitch arrived before the audit, the pitch is a template and you are on the list it went out to. Ask what happens in month one, month three and month six, because vague timelines mean vague plans. Ask whether you own the site, the content and the data. Ask to speak to a dental client they have had for more than two years, since anybody can show a first-year spike.
The tells run the other way. Guaranteed rankings, from anybody, ever. A price that is suspiciously round and suspiciously low, the same package for a solo practice in Walla Walla and a six-location group in Phoenix. Reports full of impressions, which are the metric you show when the patients are not there.
Full treatment on how to choose a dental SEO company.
Dental practice marketing ideas that are not search
Not everything is search, and some of the highest-return work in a practice costs nothing and happens at the front desk.
Review velocity matters more than review count, which surprises people: a practice with sixty reviews earned steadily over two years reads better to both Google and a human than a practice with ninety that all arrived in one panicked month. Asking every satisfied patient, at the right moment, in a way the front desk can actually sustain, is worth more than most paid campaigns.
Full treatment on dental practice marketing ideas.
What dental marketing costs
Anything under about a thousand a month is almost certainly buying reporting rather than work. That is not a rule of thumb we enjoy repeating, but it has held up every time we have looked at what a cheap package actually delivers.
Ad spend is separate and sits with the platform rather than with us, and we would rather tell you to pause a campaign than keep managing one that is not returning.
The number worth watching is not the monthly invoice but the cost of a new patient, which is the invoice plus the ad spend divided by how many people actually arrived. A practice that knows that figure can have a real conversation about whether to spend more or less, and a practice that does not is negotiating in the dark with somebody who is not.
How we run it
Phase one is finding the floor, which takes about two weeks and is mostly unglamorous. What ranks now, what the site does on a phone, what the Google Business Profile looks like, how many new patients arrived last year and where they came from.
Phase two is the foundation: speed, structure, the Business Profile, and the procedure pages that do not exist yet. This is where most of the movement in the first six months comes from – and it is the least interesting work on the list.
Phase three is the compounding work, which is content, reviews and links, and which is the part most likely to get cut in a slow quarter. Cutting it in a slow quarter is exactly backwards, since it is the only part still working during the next one.
Common questions
How long before marketing for dentists shows up in the schedule?
Ads produce appointments within days of the campaign going live, which is the whole reason to run them. Map pack movement usually appears somewhere in the first thirty to sixty days, assuming the Google Business Profile was neglected rather than actively damaged. Organic search is a six to twelve month timeline in most markets, and a practice with an aged domain and a decent existing site moves faster than a brand new one.
Do we need a new website first?
Frequently no, and we will tell you honestly which situation you are in. Most existing sites can be repaired, sped up, restructured and expanded without a rebuild. The rebuild conversation is real when the site sits on a proprietary platform you do not control, or when it is slow in a way that cannot be fixed from outside.
Can our office manager do this?
Some of it, genuinely. Reviews, the Google Business Profile and keeping hours accurate are best done inside the practice by somebody who is there every day. The technical work and the content production are a different job, and asking an office manager to do them between patients is how both end up half done.
Should we work with an agency that only does dental?
It cuts both ways, and the honest answer is that it matters less than whether they audited you before they pitched. Dental specialists know the category. They also frequently sell the same nine hundred practices the same package.
Do you work with practices outside Walla Walla?
Yes, and most of our work already is. Inland Family Dentistry is here in the valley and a good deal of what we build is not, because the searches a practice needs to win behave the same way in any market with more than one dentist in it.
Who owns the site if we stop working together?
You do, and that includes the site, the content, the domain and the patient data that passes through any form on it. We do not hold client sites hostage, and neither should anyone you hire; the question is worth asking every vendor in the building before you sign with them rather than afterward.