Marketing a dental practice is unusual in one respect that changes everything downstream: the buying decision is local, semi urgent and heavily influenced by reviews, which means visibility and reputation are not separate projects. A practice can rank well and still lose the call to a competitor with better reviews two streets away. It can also have excellent reviews nobody sees. Most proposals a practice receives address one half and price it as if it were the whole. This page sets out which activities actually produce booked appointments, what the advertising rules require of the copy, and the questions worth asking before a retainer starts.
Where new patients actually come from
For most single location practices the order is stable. Word of mouth and existing patients first, which marketing supports rather than creates. Then local search, meaning the map result and the practice pages that a nearby search surfaces. Then paid search, which produces appointments the month it runs and stops when it stops. Then everything else: social, video, print, sponsorships, all of which build familiarity slowly and are very hard to attribute. That order suggests where a first budget goes. Get the business listing accurate and complete, make sure a person on a phone can book without telephoning during office hours, get the review flow working, and only then argue about content strategy. Google publishes local business structured data guidance for exactly this layer, so a practice can state its hours, address and service area in a form search engines read rather than infer. A proposal that opens with a website rebuild and never mentions the booking path is proposing the expensive part first.
Reviews, testimonials and the rules around them
Reviews are the last thing a prospective patient checks and the easiest thing for a practice to get wrong legally. The Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guides govern testimonials and incentivised reviews, and in 2024 the FTC announced a final rule addressing fake reviews and testimonials, which raised the stakes for practices whose marketing supplier generates reviews on their behalf. The safe pattern is dull: ask every patient, ask them the same way, do not filter by expected sentiment before the request, disclose any incentive, and never publish a patient story without written authorisation. Ask a candidate provider to describe their review process in detail, and listen specifically for whether unhappy patients are routed somewhere other than the public review form. That single mechanic is what separates a compliant programme from one that will eventually be a problem, and it is the question most practices never think to ask.
Claims about treatment are advertising claims
Copy about outcomes, longevity, comfort or results is subject to the same substantiation standard as any other health advertising. The FTC's health products compliance guidance expects a claim to be supported by competent and reliable scientific evidence at the time it is made, and the advertiser is the practice, not the agency that wrote the sentence. In practice this means agreeing at the start who approves copy, what evidence backs any comparative or outcome claim, and how before and after imagery is handled. It is also a fast way to assess a provider's depth in the sector: a firm that has run dental accounts seriously will have a review step already and will describe it without prompting. A firm that treats the question as unusual is telling you which of its pages about being a dentist marketing company were written for search engines rather than from experience.
What to hold a provider to
Four commitments, all of which a competent firm will accept. First, the practice owns every account: listing, ads, analytics, Search Console and domain. Second, tracking exists before campaigns do, meaning call tracking that records source and a booking form whose submissions are counted somewhere you can see. Third, reporting starts at spend and ends at booked appointments, not at impressions, and the underlying data is available to you rather than shown on a shared screen. Fourth, a written review point with an agreed definition of a disappointing result. None of these is a concession, they are the conditions under which the engagement can be judged at all. A provider who resists them is not necessarily bad at the work, but you will not be able to tell either way, which comes to the same thing when the invoices are monthly.
Questions people ask about marketing dentist
How much should a small practice budget?
Rather than a fixed figure, work backwards: what is a new patient worth over their first two years, how many extra do you have capacity for, and what would you pay to acquire one. That gives a ceiling with meaning. Then insist any proposal states how the money splits between the tap channels that work immediately and the compounding ones that do not.
Is paid search worth it for a dental practice?
Usually yes for high value treatments and for filling immediate capacity, because it starts producing enquiries in the first weeks. It is less compelling as a permanent substitute for organic and listing work, since costs rise with local competition and stop producing the day the budget stops. Most practices end up running both with a deliberate split.
Should the provider write patient stories?
They can draft, but the practice must supply the facts and obtain written patient authorisation before anything is published, and the copy has to reflect a real, typical experience. Ask to see the authorisation process in writing. A provider who publishes a patient story on your behalf without one has created a problem in your name.
How quickly should I expect results?
Listing corrections and review flow can move the phones within weeks. Paid search produces enquiries in the first month. Organic pages for treatments typically take months, and Google's own guidance notes some changes take effect quickly while others take much longer. Judge each channel on its own clock rather than cancelling slow work on a fast one.