A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Orthodontic Practices

An SEO audit is not a report card. It is a structured diagnostic that identifies the specific obstacles preventing your practice from ranking where prospective patients are searching. The word 'audit' gets used loosely — some agencies deliver a 40-page PDF of color charts with no clear next step. A useful audit does one thing: it tells you what is broken, why it matters, and in what order to fix it.

For orthodontic practices, a complete audit covers four distinct layers:

• Technical health — Can search engines crawl and index your site without errors? Are pages loading fast enough on mobile? Is your HTTPS certificate current?
• Content coverage — Do you have dedicated pages for every service you offer and every location you serve? Are those pages written for the way patients actually search?
• Local presence — Is your Google Business Profile fully optimized? Is your practice name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistent across Healthgrades, Zocdoc, dental directories, and general citation sources?
• Competitive position — Who is outranking you in your market, and what do their sites do that yours does not?

Each layer is independent but interconnected. A technically sound website with thin content will plateau. A content-rich site with inconsistent local listings will underperform in the map pack. Work through all four before drawing conclusions about where to invest first.

Note: This guide covers general SEO diagnostic principles. It does not constitute legal, medical, or regulatory advice. When auditing content for compliance with HIPAA, FTC endorsement rules, or state dental board advertising guidelines, consult qualified legal counsel.

Technical SEO problems are the most straightforward to identify and the most often overlooked by practice owners. If Google cannot efficiently crawl and render your site, no amount of content will move your rankings.

Core checks to run

• Crawl errors: Use Google Search Console (free) to identify pages returning 404 errors or blocked by your robots.txt file. Even one blocked service page can remove it from search entirely.
• Page speed: Run your homepage and your top service pages through Google PageSpeed Insights. Pay attention to mobile scores specifically — the majority of prospective orthodontic patients search on a phone. Industry benchmarks suggest mobile load times above 3-4 seconds meaningfully reduce engagement, though the exact threshold varies by audience and device.
• Mobile usability: Google Search Console's Mobile Usability report flags tap targets that are too close together and text that requires zooming — both common on older orthodontic website templates.
• HTTPS: Confirm your SSL certificate is active and that all pages redirect correctly from HTTP to HTTPS. Mixed-content warnings (pages loading some elements over HTTP) can suppress trust signals.
• Indexation: Search site:yourpractice.com in Google to see how many pages are indexed. If the count is dramatically lower than the number of pages on your site, you have a crawl or indexation problem worth diagnosing.
• Core Web Vitals: Google's three user-experience signals — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift — are confirmed ranking inputs. Search Console's Core Web Vitals report shows pass/fail by page group.

Technical issues rarely produce quick ranking jumps on their own, but they set a ceiling. Fix the foundation before optimizing anything else.

Most orthodontic websites underperform on content not because they are poorly written, but because they are structurally incomplete. A homepage that mentions 'braces, Invisalign, and retainers' in a single paragraph is not the same as three dedicated service pages that answer the specific questions patients type into Google.

Service page audit

List every treatment your practice offers. Then check whether each one has its own standalone page. Common gaps include:

• Invisalign vs. clear aligners (patients search both)
• Teen-specific orthodontic treatment
• Adult braces or adult Invisalign
• Retainers and post-treatment care
• Surgical orthodontics or orthognathic preparation
• Early (Phase 1) orthodontic treatment for children

Location page audit

If your practice has more than one office, each location needs its own page with a unique address, local phone number, and content specific to that area. A single 'Locations' page listing both addresses is not sufficient for local search.

Keyword intent check

For each existing service page, ask: does this page answer what a patient actually wants to know, or does it describe what your practice wants to tell them? Patient-intent content answers questions like 'How long does Invisalign take?' and 'Is Invisalign covered by insurance?' not just 'We offer state-of-the-art Invisalign treatment.'

Thin content flags

Pages under roughly 300 words rarely rank for competitive terms. Use your browser's word count or a free tool like Screaming Frog to surface the shortest pages on your site. Thin pages are not automatically a problem, but thin pages on core services are.

Content gaps are typically the highest-ROI fix for established orthodontic practices — the structural work is modest, and the ranking potential is significant once pages are indexed and earning links.

For orthodontic practices, map pack visibility — the three results Google shows with a map above the organic listings — is often more valuable than organic rankings. Patients searching 'orthodontist near me' or 'braces [city]' are in active decision mode. Local SEO performance is the variable that determines whether your practice appears in those results.

Google Business Profile audit

Log into your Google Business Profile and verify the following:

• Primary category: Should be 'Orthodontist', not 'Dentist' or 'Dental clinic'.
• NAP accuracy: Your practice name, address, and phone number must exactly match what appears on your website and across all directories.
• Services listed: GBP allows you to list individual services. Braces, Invisalign, retainers, and any specialty treatments should all appear here.
• Photos: Practices with more recent, practice-specific photos (office, team, before/after where compliant with consent and applicable regulations) tend to see stronger engagement signals in our experience.
• Review volume and recency: Google weights recent reviews. If your last review is six months old, that matters. A consistent cadence of new reviews signals an active, trusted practice.

Citation consistency check

Search your practice name across Healthgrades, Zocdoc, WebMD, Vitals, Yelp, and any dental-specific directories. Inconsistencies in your suite number, phone number format, or practice name spelling create conflicting signals that suppress local rankings. Tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark can automate this scan.

Review sentiment and response rate

Read your one-, two-, and three-star reviews. Do they reveal a pattern — wait times, billing confusion, front-desk communication? That feedback is both a reputation signal and a content opportunity. Responding to all reviews (positive and negative) is a trust signal Google weighs in local pack rankings.

Ranking is relative. You are not competing against a score — you are competing against the other orthodontic practices in your market. Competitor benchmarking tells you what the sites above yours are doing that yours is not, which is more actionable than a generic checklist of best practices.

Who to benchmark against

Search your core terms — 'orthodontist [your city]', 'Invisalign [your city]', 'braces for teens [your city]' — and record the top three to five organic results and the map pack results. These are your real competitors. Note that they may not be the practices you think of as competitors in the physical community.

What to compare

• Page count and structure: How many indexed pages does each competitor have? Do they have dedicated service pages you are missing?
• Domain authority: Tools like Moz, Ahrefs, or Semrush provide a domain authority proxy. A large gap in domain authority signals a backlink deficit — you will need to earn more links from credible local and industry sources.
• Content depth: Compare word counts and page structure on their top-ranking pages versus yours on equivalent topics.
• Review volume and rating: How many Google reviews do the top map pack practices have versus your practice? Review velocity (new reviews per month) is often the determining factor when two practices are otherwise evenly matched.
• Backlink sources: Where are their links coming from? Local chambers of commerce, dental association directories, local news coverage, and orthodontic supplier sites are common high-value sources for practices in this space.

Document your findings in a simple comparison table. You are looking for patterns — the two or three factors that appear consistently in competitors above you and are absent from your site. Those are your highest-priority targets.

Running an audit produces a list of problems. Prioritizing that list is where most practice owners get stuck. Not every issue has equal impact. A missing XML sitemap is a minor technical nuisance. A core service page that does not exist is a meaningful traffic and revenue gap. Treat them differently.

Prioritization framework

Score each issue you found across two dimensions: impact (how much will fixing this move rankings or traffic?) and effort (how long will it take?). Fix high-impact, low-effort issues first. Common examples for orthodontic practices:

• Quick wins (high impact, low effort): Correcting NAP inconsistencies, adding missing services to your Google Business Profile, updating page title tags that do not include location, fixing broken internal links.
• Strategic projects (high impact, higher effort): Building out missing service pages with full patient-intent content, launching a review generation process, earning local backlinks from community organizations.
• Maintenance items (lower impact, low effort): Compressing oversized images, fixing minor crawl errors, updating outdated copyright footers.

When to handle this yourself vs. when to bring in a specialist

Technical and local layers are largely self-serviceable with free tools (Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, PageSpeed Insights). Content strategy — deciding which pages to build, how to structure them, and how to target the right terms for your specific market — benefits from specialist input. Backlink acquisition almost always requires dedicated effort that is difficult to do effectively in-house alongside running a practice.

If your audit reveals issues across all four layers and your market is competitive, attempting to address everything simultaneously without a structured plan typically produces slow results. A phased approach — technical and local first, then content, then authority — is more effective in our experience.

If you want a second opinion on what your audit found, or want a structured analysis run by someone who works specifically with orthodontic practices, get a professional SEO audit for your orthodontic practice to see where the clearest opportunities are.