Case study · Healthcare and clinics
Dental Offices · Texas
The largest multiple on this site, and the one that needs the most context. A four times increase says nothing until you know what it started from.
How do dental practices grow new patient numbers through local marketing?
By making each practice genuinely findable in its own small area, then making sure the enquiries that arrive are answered and booked rather than left on an answerphone.
These Texas dental offices report four times growth in new patients from a local marketing programme. No starting figure was published, and a multiple without a baseline is the weakest form of evidence on this site, which is why this page spends most of its length on the method rather than the number.
Several practices, each competing in its own few miles
Local dental offices wanted more new patients.
Dentistry runs on new patient flow in a way that most healthcare does not. An established practice loses patients continuously through moves, insurance changes and life events, and a practice that is not adding patients is shrinking even when the schedule looks full.
Running marketing for several dental offices at once creates a specific tension. The efficient thing is to do the work once and apply it everywhere. The effective thing is to treat each practice as its own local business, because that is what search does. Every practice competes only against whoever is nearest to it, and nothing about a sibling practice ten miles away helps.
The other constant in dental marketing is that the bottleneck is frequently the phone. Dental practices are famously difficult to reach: the front desk is with a patient, the calls go to voicemail, and the caller books with whoever answered. That is not a marketing problem, and it will defeat any marketing programme that ignores it.
What dental enquiries cost to buy
LocalIQ publishes annual search advertising benchmarks drawn from its own customers' Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns. It is a vendor dataset, not a market average, and it is quoted here as a sense of scale rather than as a target. These are their 2026 figures for Dentists and Dental Services.
SourceLocalIQ, Search Advertising Benchmarks, 2026
Note what this is and is not. It is cost per lead, meaning an enquiry. It is not cost per new patient, and the widely quoted dental cost-per-patient figures were rejected during our research because the underlying report could not be located and no methodology was disclosed. Converting one into the other quietly is how most dental marketing maths goes wrong.
What we assessed at each practice
The audit ran per practice rather than across the group, because the answers differed at every site.
Local visibility, measured as an area
Where each practice appeared across a grid of points around it, rather than as a single ranking. This immediately shows which practices were genuinely competing in their area and which were only visible from their own doorstep.
Profile quality, practice by practice
Category, services, hours, photographs, description and reviews, compared across the group. In multi-practice audits the variation between sites is almost always larger than the variation against competitors.
What happened to a phone call
We called each practice at different times of day and recorded what happened. This is the least technical and most revealing part of a dental audit, and it frequently reframes the whole engagement.
See the remaining steps: What we assessed at each practiceHide the remaining steps: What we assessed at each practice
Whether the website supported booking
How many steps from arrival to an enquiry, whether new patients were treated differently to existing ones, and whether insurance and pricing questions were answered anywhere.
Which treatments each practice actually wanted more of
Practices are not interchangeable. One wants implants, another wants families, another wants to fill hygiene slots. Marketing all of them identically produces the wrong patients for most of them.
One programme, run locally
| Item | Before | After the work |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of competition | The group | Each practice's own area |
| Profiles | Varied in quality | Consistently strong, individually set |
| Visibility measurement | A ranking | An area, mapped |
| Phone handling | Best effort | Measured, then addressed |
| Treatment focus | Same for every practice | Set per practice |
| Reporting | Group total | Per practice, compared |
The local marketing programme
Bring every profile up to the same standard
The fastest available gain in a multi-practice dental group. Categories set correctly, services listed individually, hours accurate, real photographs, and the description written for patients. Applied consistently, measured per site.
Build local relevance around each practice separately
Pages and content about each practice's own area and its own treatment focus, with internal structure that keeps the practices from competing against each other in the same searches.
Fix the enquiry path
Reduce the steps from arrival to enquiry, answer insurance questions where people ask them, and make the phone number prominent and tracked. New patients and existing patients need different paths, and most dental sites offer only one.
- New patient enquiry separated from existing patient admin
- Insurance answered in plain text, not in a downloadable document
- Calls tracked so the source of a booking is knowable
See the remaining steps: The local marketing programmeHide the remaining steps: The local marketing programme
Run a consistent review process at every site
Same process, same timing, same wording, no incentives, no filtering. Applied across the group so that no individual practice's rating becomes the weak link in the chain.
Report per practice and compare
Group totals hide the practice that is struggling. Per-practice reporting, compared against the others, is what turns a marketing report into a management tool.
One record per practice, correct everywhere
In a group, the business record problem multiplies. Each practice has its own name, address, phone number and hours, and each of them can drift independently.
Record errors in a dental group tend to be systematic rather than random. A shared phone number across sites, a head office address on a listing, or a practice name that includes the group brand in some places and not others. Each of these confuses the signals that decide which practice appears for which local search.
The fix is straightforward and tedious: one authoritative record per physical practice, pushed out consistently, then monitored so it does not drift back. Monitoring is the part that gets dropped and the part that determines whether the work lasts.
The reason this matters more for a group than for a single practice is that the failure is invisible. A single practice with a wrong phone number notices when the calls stop. In a group, the calls arrive somewhere, and nobody realises they were meant for a different site.
What changed, and what four times actually tells you
The practices saw four times growth in new patients. That is the figure the engagement reports and it is the practices' own count.
It is also the claim on this site that we would most want a reader to interrogate, so let us do it ourselves. A multiple is only meaningful with a baseline, and no baseline was published. Four times a starting point of five new patients a month is twenty, which is a good result for a single practice and an ordinary one for a group. Four times a starting point of fifty is a different story entirely. Without the starting figure, the multiple describes a direction rather than a magnitude.
The reason we have carried it forward anyway is that it appears on the live page and the instruction we work to is to report what is there without embellishment. What we will not do is present it as though it were a benchmark. It is one group's reported outcome, missing the context that would let you compare it to your own practice.
About these results
Four times growth is the practices' own reported figure. No baseline was published on the original case page, so the absolute size of the change is not knowable from it. A multiple without a starting point is weak evidence and should be read as such.
New patients is the practices' own definition. Practices count new patients differently, including or excluding emergency visits, hygiene-only appointments and returning lapsed patients.
This programme covered several offices. The reported figure is presented as a programme outcome and is not evidence that every individual practice moved by the same amount.
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
- A per-practice audit of local visibility, measured across an area rather than as a ranking
- Google Business Profiles brought to one standard and set individually
- Local content and structure built around each practice's own area and focus
- One correct business record per practice, monitored for drift
- An enquiry path that separates new patients from existing patient admin
See the full checklist: What was actually deliveredHide the full checklist: What was actually delivered
- Call tracking so bookings can be traced to a source
- A consistent, compliant review process at every site
- Per-practice reporting rather than group totals
If you run more than one dental practice
Ask for your baseline before you accept any multiple, including this one. Any agency that reports growth as a multiple without telling you the starting number is either being careless or is counting on you not to ask. The first question to ask about four times growth is four times what.
Call your own practices. Not as a test of your team, as a test of the system. Ring at eleven on a Monday and at four on a Friday and find out what a new patient experiences. In dentistry this is routinely the largest single leak in the funnel and it is invisible from any marketing report.
Read the full breakdown: If you run more than one dental practiceHide the full breakdown: If you run more than one dental practice
Report per practice, always. Group totals let a strong site carry a weak one for a year. Per-practice figures make the weak one visible in the first month, and the fix is usually already known because another site in the group is doing it right.
Decide what kind of patient each practice wants before you market it. Four times more of the wrong appointments is a worse business, not a better one, and a group that markets every site identically will get exactly that at most of them.
Growing a dental group?
We will benchmark your practices against each other before we look at anyone else's.
Straight answers.
What counts as a new patient?
It depends on the practice, which is why the figure on this page carries a caveat. Some practices count any first-time attendance, some exclude emergencies, some exclude hygiene-only visits, and some count a lapsed patient returning after two years as new.
Before measuring anything, write the definition down and apply it consistently. A change in the definition will otherwise look exactly like a change in performance.
Should each dental practice have its own website?
Usually each practice needs its own substantial page or section rather than its own separate website. Separate sites split authority and multiply maintenance.
What matters is that each practice has a genuinely distinct presence with its own address, its own local content and its own profile, not a duplicated template with the town name changed.
Why is call handling a marketing issue?
Because in dentistry a large share of new patients arrive by phone, and an unanswered call is a lost patient that no report will ever show you. The marketing produced the call. The business lost it.
It is also the cheapest thing on the list to improve. Call tracking makes the scale of the problem visible, and once a practice can see how many calls go unanswered at particular times, the staffing fix is usually obvious.
How should dental practices handle insurance questions online?
Plainly, in text, on a page that can be found. Which plans are accepted, whether the practice is in network, and what happens if it is not.
This is the most common pre-booking question in dentistry and the most common reason somebody quietly books elsewhere. Putting it behind a phone call adds friction at exactly the wrong point.
Can you promise a specific number of new patients?
No, and nobody should. New patient volume depends on the competition inside your radius, your reviews, your availability, your insurance participation and how your phone is answered, most of which is not in an agency's control.
What we will do is tell you what is currently limiting you, in order, and what each fix is likely to be worth relative to the others.
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 Ads Help: About conversion tracking for calls (opens in a new tab)Tracking a phone call as a measurable outcome.
- American Dental Association (opens in a new tab)The profession's own body for standards and patient guidance.
- 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.
- FTC: Advertising and marketing basics (opens in a new tab)What a claim in an advertisement has to be able to support.
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.