Most SEO problems don't announce themselves. A practice can lose three Map Pack positions over six months and attribute the drop to 'the algorithm changed' when the real cause is a Google Business Profile that hasn't been touched in two years.
Dental SEO mistakes compound because search signals are cumulative. Google evaluates your practice across hundreds of signals simultaneously — citation consistency, review velocity, page relevance, site speed, backlink quality. One weak area rarely tanks a site. But three or four weak areas working against each other create a ranking floor you can't break through, no matter how much content you publish.
The other reason mistakes persist: dental practice owners are busy. SEO typically gets delegated to a front-desk staff member, a website company that built the site five years ago, or no one at all. Without someone actively monitoring performance, problems accumulate quietly.
In our experience working with dental practices, the most damaging situations aren't dramatic — they're neglect. A GBP listing that was never fully completed. Service pages written for the dentist's peers rather than for patients searching on their phones at 9pm. A review strategy that consists of hoping happy patients remember to leave one.
The good news: these are solvable problems. Most of the mistakes below can be diagnosed in an afternoon and corrected within one to three months. The practices that recover fastest are the ones that stop treating SEO as a one-time setup and start treating it as an ongoing system.