For dental practices
Most dental practices run on two engines. Recall and rebooking keep existing patients coming back, and new-patient flow replaces the ones who move away or drift off. The first engine is a front-desk discipline. The second one is marketing, and it is usually the one running rough.
Sound familiar?
Some weeks the phone rings, some weeks it does not, and nobody can say why. Without a steady baseline of new patients, one departing family or one associate leaving takes a visible bite out of production.
Plenty of dental sites are essentially a brochure with a phone number. They rank for the practice name and nothing else, so they only capture people who already knew about you, which is the one group you did not need help with.
If you have run ads or paid an SEO retainer before, you have probably seen reports full of impressions and rankings with no line connecting them to booked appointments. That is a reporting choice, not a limitation.
Dental is a favourite target for agencies selling identical packages to every practice in a postcode. It is fair to be sceptical. A good test is whether the person pitching can explain the difference between an implant enquiry and an emergency toothache without notes.
The economics
Dentistry is unusual in how wide the value range of a single enquiry is, and a marketing plan that treats them all as one number will quietly spend your budget on the cheapest kind. It helps to be honest about who each channel actually brings in.
Someone searching for a toothache late at night wants the nearest practice with a gap tomorrow. These enquiries convert fast, but many are one-visit patients with no loyalty to your practice yet. Valuable, especially for filling short-notice gaps, but not the foundation of growth on their own. The opportunity is in what happens next: a practice that turns an emergency visit into a comprehensive exam and a recall placement has converted a one-off into a patient.
People who have just moved suburbs search calmly, compare two or three practices, read about the team and check whether online booking works at eight in the evening. They are choosing a dental home, often for a whole household, and the lifetime value of that decision is years of recall visits. This is the searcher your website has to be built for.
Implants, orthodontics and cosmetic work involve weeks of quiet research before anyone fills in a form. These patients read pages properly. A thin service page loses them; a genuinely informative one, written inside AHPRA's rules on outcome claims, is what earns the consultation. One accepted implant plan can outweigh a month of emergency traffic, which is why this page deserves the most care on your whole site.
Marketing fills the top of the funnel, but dental practices are ultimately recall businesses: hygiene visits, periodic exams, treatment plans completed over time. New-patient marketing works best when the practice systems behind it are ready to keep the people it brings in. If your rebooking rate is weak, we would honestly rather you fix that first, and we will say so.
What patients type
A useful way to sanity-check any dental marketing plan is to look at real searches and ask what the person typing each one actually needs. Here is the shape of it.
| The search | Who is typing it | What wins it |
|---|---|---|
| “emergency dentist near me” | In pain now, wants an appointment today | Won by ads and a fast mobile site that shows availability and a tappable phone number |
| “dentist [suburb]” | Choosing a regular practice, comparing options | Won by local SEO, reviews and a website that answers questions before they call |
| “dental implants cost australia” | Early research, weeks from booking | Won by honest, detailed treatment pages that explain ranges and process without overpromising |
| “invisalign vs braces adults” | Comparing treatments before comparing providers | Won by guide-style content that respects the reader's intelligence |
How we help
A dental practice website has three jobs: help a new family choose you, help a researcher trust you, and make booking effortless, including through whichever online-booking system your front desk actually uses. We build fast, accessible sites with proper treatment pages, real photography of your practice and none of the stock-smile clichés.
About practice websitesLocal SEO for dentists is mostly unglamorous work done consistently: a well-maintained Google Business Profile, suburb-level relevance built honestly, treatment pages that answer real questions, and reviews earned the compliant way. No doorway pages for every suburb within twenty kilometres, because that approach reads as spam to Google and to patients.
About local SEOGoogle Ads suits dentistry best where intent is urgent or high-value: emergency terms, implants, orthodontics. We build tightly themed campaigns with honest landing pages, track actual bookings rather than clicks, and tell you plainly which campaigns pay for themselves. Healthcare ads have policy limits worth knowing about first, and we walk you through them before spending anything.
About Google AdsAdvertising rules
Dental advertising sits under the National Law's advertising rules, and the details matter. We build marketing that a board complaint could not dent. A few of the rules we design around:
Patients are free to review you on Google, and those reviews matter for local SEO. What a practice cannot do is use testimonials about clinical care in its own advertising, which includes pasting those reviews onto your website. We design social proof that stays inside the rules.
Orthodontists, periodontists and other registered dental specialists can use the title. A general dentist with an interest in orthodontics cannot be called a specialist in it, and wording that implies it is a problem too. We write team and treatment pages with this in mind.
Phrases that promise painless treatment or perfect results create what the law calls an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. There are honest, warm ways to describe gentle care and good outcomes without crossing that line, and they usually read better anyway.
A new-patient offer or a discounted exam is fine, but the conditions have to be stated in the ad itself. Vague asterisks are how practices end up explaining themselves to a regulator.
Fair questions
Yes, though the sweet spot is one to three locations. Each location gets its own genuine page and Google Business Profile strategy rather than a templated clone, which is also why we cap how many locations we take on at once.
Yes. HotDoc, Centaur, Dental4Windows online booking, Praktika or a plain contact form: the website is built around whatever your front desk runs, not the other way around.
Ranking for your own name mostly captures people who already know you. The growth is in the searches where people have not chosen a practice yet, such as suburb searches and treatment research, and that is where the work goes.
We draft them, you review them for clinical accuracy. You are the dentist; we are careful never to put words about clinical outcomes on your site that you have not approved.
Yes, you can promote implants, but the wording needs care. Keep outcome language realistic, and if you show a price, show the total rather than an introductory or partial figure. Most implant enquiries start as research, not a booking, so a page that explains the consultation, the stages and what moves the cost usually does more than a headline number. Our AHPRA advertising guide covers the wording in more detail, and we write the page for you to approve.
It depends on whether you can answer. Someone with a toothache searches, clicks and calls within minutes, so a missed call is a wasted click. If your front desk can take calls during the hours the ads run and you hold some same-day time, ads can pay for themselves. If not, fix the phone and diary first. We would rather tell you that than start a budget. See Google Ads for healthcare for what is allowed.
Yes, and the plain approach works best. A short, useful note to patients who have not been in for a while beats anything with urgency in it, because creating pressure around a health outcome is itself a compliance risk. Marketing messages to your patient list generally need express consent, a clear sender and a working unsubscribe. Our guide to patient emails, recalls and the Spam Act sets out how to do it properly.
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Tell us about your practice and we will send back a short written plan: what we would fix, in what order, and what it should cost. Genuinely free, genuinely useful, yours to keep.