The Dental Practices Winning New Patients From Google All Do These Things

The Map Pack — the three local listings that appear beneath a map on Google search results — is where most new dental patients are choosing their provider. Google uses three core factors to decide who appears there: proximity, relevance, and prominence.

• Proximity is how close your practice is to the searcher's location. You cannot change your address, but you can influence how effectively Google identifies your practice's location by maintaining consistent NAP data across your website and all directories.
• Relevance is how well your profile and website match what the patient searched for. A profile optimized for "family dentist" will outperform a generic dental profile for that query. Specificity in your categories, services, and descriptions signals relevance.
• Prominence is the broadest factor — it includes your review count, the authority of your website, how often your practice is mentioned across the web, and how complete and active your Google Business Profile is.

Most practices have reasonable proximity but underinvest in relevance and prominence. That gap is where local SEO creates real competitive advantage. A practice that actively manages its profile, builds reviews consistently, and has location-specific website content will almost always outrank a competitor who set up their GBP once and stopped.

One important caveat: prominence takes time to build. In our experience working with dental practices, consistent effort over 4-6 months typically produces measurable improvement in local rankings, though competitive markets with many established practices may take longer.

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the most visible piece of your local SEO presence — it controls what patients see before they ever visit your website. Getting it right is non-negotiable.

Categories

Your primary category should be "Dentist" in most cases. Add secondary categories for any specialties you offer — orthodontist, pediatric dentist, cosmetic dentist, oral surgeon — but only if those services are genuinely offered at your location. Inaccurate categories can hurt both your rankings and patient experience.

Name, Address, and Phone (NAP)

Your practice name, address, and phone number must be identical on your GBP, your website, and every directory listing. Even minor inconsistencies — "St." versus "Street", suite number formatting — can dilute your local authority. Audit these annually at minimum.

Photos and Visual Content

Profiles with regular photo uploads tend to receive more engagement. Geo-tagged photos — where location metadata is embedded in the image — can reinforce your practice's geographic relevance. Add photos of your exterior, reception, treatment rooms, and team. Avoid stock photography; Google and patients both respond better to authentic images.

Services and Descriptions

Use the Services section to list every procedure you offer, with brief descriptions. This is a direct relevance signal. Your business description should mention your city, your primary services, and what differentiates your practice — in plain language, not marketing copy.

Posts and Updates

Weekly GBP posts keep your profile active. These can be short — a seasonal reminder about dental cleanings, a new service announcement, or a patient education tip. Activity signals to Google that your profile is maintained and current.

Reviews are among the strongest prominence signals in local SEO. But the pattern matters as much as the total count — Google appears to weight recent reviews more heavily than older ones, which means a practice that earned 80 reviews three years ago and stopped is at a disadvantage to a practice that earns 10 reviews per month consistently.

What Drives Review Volume

The single biggest factor in review generation is simply asking. Most satisfied patients don't leave reviews because it doesn't occur to them. A direct, frictionless ask — a text message with a link, or a request from a front-desk team member at checkout — converts far better than a passive reminder on a receipt.

Timing matters too. The best window for asking is immediately after a positive appointment, while the experience is fresh. Delayed requests, or generic email blasts sent to all patients at once, underperform significantly.

Responding to Reviews

Respond to every review — positive and negative. For positive reviews, a brief, specific thank-you (mentioning the service or the team member if they did) shows both patients and Google that your practice is engaged. For negative reviews, keep responses professional, brief, and never defensive. Do not include any patient-specific health information in a public response — this is a HIPAA concern. (This is general guidance; consult your practice's compliance advisor for specific protocols.)

Where Reviews Matter Most

Google is the priority. Healthgrades, Yelp, and Zocdoc also influence patient decisions, but Google reviews have the most direct impact on Map Pack rankings. Concentrate your review-generation efforts on Google first, then expand to other platforms once you have a consistent process.

Your physical address gives you a natural ranking advantage in your immediate neighborhood, but most dental practices draw patients from a broader area — surrounding zip codes, adjacent neighborhoods, or nearby towns. Service-area pages let your website compete for those searches.

What a Service-Area Page Is

A service-area page is a location-specific page on your website targeting a geographic term — "dentist in [Neighborhood]" or "family dentist [Nearby City]". These pages work best when they contain genuine, locally relevant content rather than thin copy that only swaps out the city name.

What to Include

• Specific mention of the target neighborhood or city, used naturally throughout the page
• Local landmarks, transit routes, or parking information that a patient from that area would recognize
• Services most relevant to that community (if you know the demographic skews toward families, lead with pediatric and preventive services)
• An embedded Google Map showing your practice location relative to the service area
• A clear call to action to book an appointment

How Many Pages to Build

Build pages for areas you can realistically serve — where patients would actually travel to your practice. A practice in a mid-size city might have four to eight service-area pages. A suburban practice might have two or three. Creating pages for areas 30+ miles away without any realistic patient base is unlikely to generate useful traffic and can dilute your site's topical focus.

Each page should be genuinely distinct. Google has become effective at identifying thin or templated location pages, and they tend to rank poorly regardless of optimization signals.

A local citation is any online mention of your practice's name, address, and phone number. Citations appear on general directories like Yelp and Google, healthcare-specific directories like Healthgrades and Zocdoc, and local business directories run by chambers of commerce or city organizations.

Why Citations Matter

Citations help Google confirm that your practice exists where you say it does. Consistent NAP data across authoritative directories reinforces your local relevance. Inconsistent data — especially if you've moved locations, changed phone numbers, or rebranded — creates conflicting signals that can suppress your local rankings.

The Most Important Directories for Dental Practices

• Google Business Profile (managed separately — your highest priority)
• Yelp
• Healthgrades
• Zocdoc
• WebMD Health
• Vitals
• Facebook Business Page
• Your state dental association directory
• Local chamber of commerce listings

Citation Audits

If your practice has been operating for several years, you likely have outdated citations from old addresses or phone numbers. Auditing and correcting these is foundational work — not glamorous, but necessary before other local SEO efforts will perform at full effectiveness.

Tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark can help identify citation inconsistencies. Many SEO providers also offer citation cleanup as a standalone service. Once your citations are consistent, they require minimal ongoing maintenance — this is a one-time investment with lasting returns.

Local SEO is not a switch you flip — it's a compounding process. The timeline varies meaningfully depending on your starting point, your market's competitiveness, and the consistency of your effort.

Months 1-2: Foundation

This phase is about getting the baseline right. Claiming and fully optimizing your GBP, auditing citations for consistency, ensuring your website has clear NAP data and at least one strong location page, and setting up a review-generation process. Patients rarely notice changes at this stage, but Google does.

Months 3-4: Early Movement

With consistent review generation and an active GBP, most practices begin to see improvement in Map Pack visibility for lower-competition queries — longer-tail searches like "emergency dentist [city]" or "dentist accepting new patients [neighborhood]". These searches often convert well even when overall ranking isn't at the top.

Months 5-6 and Beyond: Sustained Ranking

By six months of consistent effort, practices in mid-competition markets typically achieve stable Map Pack presence for their primary keywords. Competitive metro markets with many well-established practices take longer — sometimes 9-12 months before sustained top-three visibility.

The important reality: local SEO results don't plateau the way paid ads do. A practice that builds review velocity and a well-maintained GBP over two years is genuinely difficult for a competitor to displace quickly. The investment compounds.

Industry benchmarks suggest that local search drives a significant portion of new dental patient inquiries, but the exact share varies by market, how rural or urban your area is, and how digitally active your patient demographic tends to be. Track your GBP insights monthly — calls, direction requests, and website clicks from your profile are the most direct indicators that local SEO is working.