Local SEO for Dental Practices

Your Google Business Profile gets you onto the map. Whether you show up near the top of it, and whether your website appears underneath, depends on everything else Google can learn about the practice: what your website says, whether your name, address and phone number match across the web, whether other local organizations mention you, and whether your pages answer the questions patients are actually typing.

That is local SEO. Most of it isn’t technical, and very little of it requires an agency. It does require care, because the shortcuts that agencies sell in this area, such as fake locations, copy-and-paste city pages and bought links, tend to work for a while and then cost practices their rankings.

This guide picks up where the Google Business Profile guide leaves off. It explains how Google decides local rankings, then walks through the website, citations, patient question pages, local links, the tactics to refuse and how to measure results without fooling yourself.

Chapters

1. 01How local rankings workGoogle says local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence. Here is what each one means for a dental practice and what you control.
2. 02Website basics for local searchThe on-page basics that help a dental website rank locally: service pages, a real location page, title tags and Dentist schema markup.
3. 03Citations and NAP consistencyKeep your practice name, address and phone identical across directories, insurance listings and data aggregators, and clean up after a move.
4. 04Patient question pagesHow to build FAQ and question pages on your dental website that answer what patients really ask, reviewed by your dentist and never copied.
5. 05Earning local links and mentionsHow dental practices earn local links and mentions through sponsorships, community work, suppliers and local press, without buying links.
6. 06Multiple locations and tactics that backfireFake locations, doorway city pages and bought links can cost a dental practice its rankings. How to handle multiple locations the right way instead.
7. 07Measuring local SEO honestlyHow to tell whether local SEO is producing new patients: search data, fair ranking checks, call tracking and asking patients how they found you.