Common questions
Questions we hear most
How do dental practices get found on Google?
Through dedicated pages for each treatment and each area you serve, combined with a Google Business Profile that is actually maintained. Patients search by need: emergency dentist, Invisalign, dental implants, kids' dentist, dentist open Saturday. A practice with one services page cannot rank properly for any of them. A practice with a detailed page for each, written around how people in its area search, captures them all. The map pack is where most of it is decided. For a general practice it is usually the largest single source of new patients, and it moves on signals that have nothing to do with your website: distance from the searcher, rating, how recent and how numerous the reviews are, whether the hours and photos look current, and whether the profile names the treatments you actually want. Reviews matter more in dentistry than in almost any other local category, because a patient is choosing someone to trust with discomfort, and a practice collecting two reviews a week looks materially safer than one whose last review is from March. The order of work that pays: complete and maintain the profile, build one page per high-value treatment with the real questions answered including price, then add area pages only for the neighbourhoods you genuinely draw from.
Can dentists advertise on Google and Meta?
Yes, and dentistry has an easier time of it than most health categories. The platforms treat routine dental services as ordinary local advertising, so the constraint is competition rather than compliance. That competition is real: dental terms are among the more expensive local searches in most Canadian and US markets, because every practice within driving distance wants the same click. Campaigns pay for themselves when three things are true. They are weighted toward the treatments that carry real value, since an implant or an Invisalign case supports a cost per click that a hygiene appointment never will. Each ad group points at a dedicated landing page for that treatment rather than at the homepage, because a patient who clicked on implants and lands on a general practice page leaves. And the search terms report gets read weekly, so the clicks that were never going to become appointments, the job seekers, the students, the people looking for free dental care, stop being paid for. Meta plays a different role here. It works for awareness of cosmetic treatments and for filling a specific offer, and less well for emergencies, which are searched rather than browsed. A generic campaign pointed at a homepage burns budget in this category faster than almost anywhere else we work.
What does a new patient cost from advertising?
It depends on the treatment, your area and how well your booking flow converts, so we give honest ranges rather than promises. The arithmetic that matters is patient lifetime value against cost per booked appointment. An implant case or a full Invisalign course justifies an acquisition cost many times what a cleaning could carry, which is why a single blended number for a practice is close to meaningless. What we do instead is set a target cost per booked appointment per treatment, and manage each campaign against its own target. Across our healthcare clients we track that figure monthly; for one Toronto clinic it fell from $95 to $18 as organic and Maps visibility took over demand that paid search had been buying. The part most practices underestimate is what happens between the click and the chair. In dentistry the phone is usually the conversion point, and a call that rings out at lunchtime is a paid click thrown away. Practices that answer within a few rings, or text back a missed call within minutes, convert far more of the same ad spend than practices that do not. Before recommending a budget increase we look at how many existing calls were missed, because that is almost always the cheaper win. We would rather show you the method than promise you a number.
How long does SEO take for a dental practice?
For most practices starting from a thin site, meaningful movement in local rankings begins within three to six months, and Google Maps often moves faster than that. The order is predictable. Profile work and the obvious technical problems shift within weeks. New treatment pages start collecting the specific searches, the ones with a price or a question attached, within a month or two of being indexed. The head terms, your city plus dentist, take longest, and in a dense urban market they can take a year of consistent work. We have run dental SEO and Google Ads since 2009, and the practices that get there fastest are the ones that keep asking for reviews while the pages mature. SEO compounds, which is the real argument for starting now: a practice that has been building treatment pages, gathering reviews and keeping its local signals consistent for a year is dramatically harder to displace than one that started last month. Three things slow it down: a site that renders its content through JavaScript, thin pages that name a treatment without answering anything about it, and a review profile that has gone quiet. While paid campaigns bring appointments this month, the organic foundation becomes the cheapest and most durable source of new patients you have, and it keeps working in the months you decide not to advertise.
Can AI tools like ChatGPT recommend my practice?
Yes, and it is worth knowing what the tools are working from. When someone asks an assistant for a good dentist nearby, or whether implants are worth it at their age, the answer is assembled from what has already been crawled and from the sources the model trusts: your own site, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and the directories and local publications that mention you. Consistency decides whether you can be named at all. If your practice name, address, phone number and treatment list differ across those places, the assistant has no confident answer and names a competitor whose details agree with each other. What gets quoted is content that answers a question plainly and completely in one place. A page that states what an implant costs in your city, how long the process takes, what recovery involves and who is not a candidate will be cited. A page of adjectives about compassionate care will not. Schema markup helps by stating the facts in a form the machine does not have to interpret. Reviews carry real weight, because assistants lean on them when ranking local options, and a practice with recent, detailed reviews reads as the safer recommendation. We build that citation potential into every site and campaign we run, and in healthcare it is already a referral channel rather than an experiment.
