I review dental clinic websites almost every day. And the pattern I see consistently is this: a website that looks professional, loads reasonably well, and yet generates almost no patient enquiries. The practice owner cannot understand why. They invested in design. They have good reviews. They are listed on Google.
In most cities and suburbs, the top three local search positions for “dentist near me” or “dental clinic [area]” are held by the same handful of practices week after week. Not because they are the best dental clinics in the area — in many cases they are not. But because
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 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
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
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
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
Most dental practices set up their Google My Business for dentists once and then leave it almost entirely untouched. They update their hours if they change, maybe add a photo occasionally, and wait for patients to leave reviews. Meanwhile, their Google Business Profile has a feature that is actively being
Most dental service pages rank reasonably well but convert poorly. The practice gets traffic — patients who searched “dental implants [city]” and clicked through — but those patients leave without booking. The page ranked. The visit happened. The appointment did not. This is one of the most common and most
Most dental websites communicate with search engines through text. The website says “we offer dental implants in the city centre.” Google reads the text, makes inferences, and decides where to rank the page. That process works, but it introduces uncertainty. Schema markup replaces uncertainty with fact. It tells Google, in
