Last year I audited a dental clinic’s website that had seen a 35% drop in organic traffic over eight months. The clinic had not changed their website, not removed any pages, and not done anything obviously wrong. What had happened was slower and harder to see: their content had aged
The dental clinic ranking above yours for your most valuable keyword is not winning because they have a better practice. In most cases, they are winning because they have made more deliberate SEO decisions: more comprehensive content, stronger backlinks, better technical performance, or a more active Google Business Profile. Dental
The practice owner had just spent £12,000 on a new dental website. It looked excellent: professional photography, clean layout, a prominent booking button. Six months after launch, their new patient enquiries had not increased. They called me because their web designer had told them the site was performing well —
A dental practice owner called me recently with a question that stopped me mid-sentence: “I searched my own practice name on Google and a competitor came up above me.” Not a general dental search. Not “dentist near me.” They searched their own practice name — the name on their door,
A patient wakes up at 7am with severe toothache. They search “emergency dentist near me” on their phone. They tap your website. The page loads slowly. The text talks about your “comprehensive emergency dental services.” There is no phone number visible without scrolling. There is no indication you are open
A dental practice in Sydney contacted me after noticing their local pack position had dropped from second to fifth over a three-month period. Nothing else had changed: same website, same Google Business Profile management for dentists setup, same content. What had changed was their review profile — three one-star reviews
Two dental practices. Same suburb. Similar services. One has a three-week wait for new patient appointments and turns away enquiries it cannot accommodate. The other is actively spending on Google Ads, printing flyers, and asking the receptionist to follow up every lead personally — and still has gaps in the
Three years ago, every dental patient who wanted to know the cost of Invisalign in their city would type that query into Google, scan the results, and click through to a dental practice website. Today, a growing proportion of those patients type the same question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s
When a parent is looking for a dentist for their child, they search differently from someone looking for their own dentist. They are not just looking for proximity and availability. They are looking for reassurance — that the practice is experienced with children, that the environment is child-friendly, that their
Google’s May 2026 Core Update finished rolling out on 14th June. I have spent the past two weeks reviewing the ranking shifts across dental websites I follow closely — practices in the UK, Australia, and North America. The patterns are clear and consistent. This update changed which dental websites win
