Case study · Healthcare and clinics
Dental Clinic · Florida
Dentistry is decided inside a few miles. A practice that is invisible in that small area is invisible, no matter how well it ranks for anything broader.
How does a dental practice start showing up in local search?
By getting the Google Business Profile right first, then building pages that are genuinely about the small area the practice serves rather than about dentistry in general.
This Florida practice went from not appearing in local results to ranking consistently for its core terms across roughly a five-mile radius, through local SEO and Google Business Profile optimisation.
A practice nobody could find
The practice was not showing up in local search.
That is a blunt statement of the problem and it is more common than it should be. A dental practice can be well established, clinically excellent and busy with existing patients, and still be effectively absent from the results that produce new ones. The existing book hides the problem until it does not.
Dentistry is unusually geographically constrained. People choose a dentist near home, near work or near their children's school, and the search behaviour reflects that: the queries are short, local and heavily served by the map result. A practice that does not appear in that small block of three results is not competing.
It is also one of the most crowded local categories in the country. In a typical suburb there are more dental practices within five miles than there are urgent cares within twenty. That density is what makes the radius the right unit of analysis, and it is why a practice cannot win by being generally good at SEO.
How the clicks split on a local results page
BrightLocal's Local Services Ads Click Study, published in 2018, remains the clearest public breakdown of where clicks go on a local service results page when Local Services Ads are present. It is dated, it predates AI Overviews, and it is quoted here with that caveat attached.
SourceBrightLocal, Local Services Ads Click Study, 2018, more than 5,500 US internet users
The figures are from 2018 and the page has changed a great deal since. What has not changed is the shape of the finding: the local pack and the organic results both matter, and a practice absent from one of them forfeits a substantial share of the page by default.
Why a practice does not appear
Invisibility in local search has a short list of causes. Working through them in order is faster and cheaper than assuming the answer is content.
Is the profile verified, and is it verified at the right address
An unverified profile, a profile at a previous address or a duplicate profile competing with the real one will all produce the same symptom. This is the first thing to check and it resolves a meaningful share of cases outright.
Is the primary category correct
Dentist, cosmetic dentist, orthodontist, dental clinic and oral surgeon are different categories and they surface for different searches. A general practice listed under a specialty, or the reverse, will be missing from the searches that matter to it.
Does the site say where the practice is, in a way a machine can read
Address on the page, consistent with the profile, marked up as structured data, with the service area described in the text rather than implied. Practices routinely bury their address in a footer image and wonder why they do not rank locally.
See the remaining steps: Why a practice does not appearHide the remaining steps: Why a practice does not appear
Are there pages for what people actually search
Not a services list. Individual pages for the treatments that carry real search demand, written for patients rather than for the practice's own terminology.
Is there any local content at all
Most dental sites are entirely generic and could belong to any practice in any town. That is the single largest differentiator available in a crowded category, and almost nobody takes it.
From a generic dental site to a local one
| Item | Before | After the work |
|---|---|---|
| Profile | Incomplete and unoptimised | Verified, categorised, maintained |
| Where the practice is | Implied | Stated in text and in structured data |
| Treatment pages | One services list | A page per treatment with real demand |
| Local relevance | None | The neighbourhoods and routes people come from |
| Photographs | Stock imagery | The real practice, team and building |
| What it competed for | Dentistry, broadly | The terms inside a five-mile radius |
Profile first, then the pages
Get the profile into proper shape
Verification, primary and secondary categories chosen deliberately, services listed individually, hours accurate, real photographs of the practice, and the description written for patients. This is the highest-yield work in local dentistry and it is almost free.
Make the practice unambiguously locatable
Address in text on every relevant page, consistent with the profile to the character, structured data describing the practice as a dental business at that address, and a map that loads without slowing the page down.
Build a page for each treatment that people search for
Written in patient language, answering what the treatment is, what it costs to the extent that can honestly be stated, what it involves and what the alternatives are. A single page listing fifteen treatments competes for none of them.
- Patient vocabulary, with clinical terms alongside rather than instead
- The practical questions answered: time, discomfort, aftercare, cost factors
- No outcome claims, and no imagery the practice does not own
See the remaining steps: Profile first, then the pagesHide the remaining steps: Profile first, then the pages
Make the site genuinely local
Content about the actual area: the neighbourhoods served, where patients travel from, parking, transport, the practical detail of visiting this practice in this place. It is the one thing a competitor cannot copy without it being obvious.
Keep the profile fed
Ongoing photographs, updates, accurate hours and a steady review flow. A profile that is set up well and then abandoned loses ground to one that is merely adequate and actively maintained.
Why five miles is the honest unit
Local rankings are not a single position. They change depending on where the person searching is standing, which is why a practice can rank first at its own front door and nowhere at all two miles away.
This is the most misunderstood fact in local SEO. When a practice asks where it ranks, the honest answer is a map rather than a number, because proximity between the searcher and the business is one of the strongest factors in the result. Google says so directly, and every serious study of local ranking factors puts proximity near the top.
The practical consequence is that improvement is measured as an expanding area rather than a rising position. A practice that ranked only within half a mile and now ranks across five miles has multiplied the population that can find it, without moving a single position on any individual search.
It also sets the honest ceiling. No amount of work makes a practice appear for a search taken twenty miles away when there are forty dentists in between. Anyone promising that is describing something other than local search.
What changed, and how we have described it
The practice went from not appearing in local search to ranking consistently across roughly a five-mile radius.
The original case page described this as going from not showing up to dominating searches within a five-mile radius. We have not carried the word dominating forward, because it is not a measurable state. There is no threshold at which a business is dominating a radius, and the word invites a reader to imagine something more absolute than any local ranking ever is.
What can be said, and what we have said, is that the practice moved from absent to consistently present across that area. That is the substance of the original claim without the part that cannot be checked. The five-mile figure comes from the original page and is retained.
About these results
The word dominating appears on the live case page and has been deliberately restated, because it is not a measurable state. The underlying change, from not appearing to ranking consistently across the radius, is what is reported here.
No patient, enquiry or revenue figure was published for this engagement. Local visibility is an input, and how much of it becomes a new patient depends on the practice, its reviews, its pricing and its availability.
Local rankings vary by where the searcher is standing and change continuously as competitors act. A radius described at one point in time is not a permanent position.
Results are from a specific client engagement and vary by market, budget, competition and other factors. They are examples of past outcomes, not a guarantee of future results.
What was actually delivered
- Google Business Profile verification, categorisation and full optimisation
- Accurate hours, services and real photographs of the practice
- Address and practice details in text and in structured data
- Individual pages for the treatments with genuine local search demand
- Local content about the area the practice actually serves
- Ongoing profile maintenance rather than a one-off setup
If you are a single-site dental practice
Spend your first effort on the profile, not the website. In local dentistry the Google Business Profile is the higher-yield surface by a wide margin, it costs nothing but attention, and most practices have never had anyone review its settings properly.
Stop measuring your ranking as a number. Ask where you appear, on a map, and watch that area grow. It is the only measurement that reflects how local search works, and it prevents the common and demoralising experience of ranking first from the practice car park while being invisible in the next neighbourhood.
Read the full breakdown: If you are a single-site dental practiceHide the full breakdown: If you are a single-site dental practice
Give every treatment with real demand its own page. A services list is a menu, and menus do not rank. This is slow, unglamorous work and it is what separates practices that appear from practices that do not.
Be genuinely local on your website. Name the neighbourhoods, explain the parking, mention the routes. It sounds trivial. In a category where every competitor's site is interchangeable, it is the cheapest available differentiation and it also happens to be useful to patients.
Invisible outside your own street?
We will map where your practice actually appears across your area, which is usually the first surprise.
Straight answers.
Why does my practice rank first at the office and nowhere else?
Because proximity between the searcher and the business is one of the strongest local ranking factors. At your own address you are the closest dentist, so you win. Two miles away, three other practices are closer.
Expanding that area is the actual work of local SEO for a dentist, and it is achieved through relevance and prominence, which are the two factors that are not fixed by your lease.
How big can a dental practice's realistic radius be?
It depends entirely on how many competing practices sit inside it. In a dense suburb, a few miles is a genuine achievement. In a rural area, the same effort might cover twenty.
The honest way to set expectations is to count the competition inside your target area first. If there are forty practices in five miles, the goal is to be consistently visible rather than consistently first.
Do you publish cost-per-new-patient figures for dentistry?
No. The widely circulated dental cost-per-new-patient numbers trace back to agency blogs citing a report that cannot be located, with no disclosed methodology. We checked, and we will not publish a figure we cannot link a reader to.
What can be sourced is cost per lead for dental search advertising, which is a different thing. A lead is an enquiry. A patient is somebody who sat in the chair, and the conversion between the two belongs to the practice.
Should a dental site have a page for every treatment?
A page for every treatment with genuine search demand and genuine commercial value to the practice. Not a page for everything in the fee schedule, which produces thin pages that dilute the site.
The test is whether you can write something substantial and specific about it that a patient would actually want to read. If you cannot, it belongs as a section on a broader page.
What should a dental practice avoid putting on its website?
Stock photography of models with unnaturally white teeth, before and after images that are not the practice's own patients with documented consent, and any claim about outcomes that could not be substantiated.
We also never generate synthetic clinical imagery. If a practice does not have its own photographs, the answer is to take some, not to fabricate them.
Where this comes from.
Primary documentation and published research behind the guidance on this page.
- Google Business Profile Help: Guidelines for representing your business on Google (opens in a new tab)The rules that decide whether a profile stays live, including name and category policy.
- Google Search Central: Local business structured data (opens in a new tab)The markup that tells search engines what a location is and where it is.
- Google Business Profile Help: Add or claim your Business Profile (opens in a new tab)The verification path that has to be finished before anything else works.
- American Dental Association (opens in a new tab)The profession's own body for standards and patient guidance.
- Google Search Central: SEO Starter Guide (opens in a new tab)Google's own baseline for what a page needs before it can rank at all.
Talk to the team
A short call, a look at how the business currently shows up, and a straight answer on what we would do first.