Dental SEO
A dental practice starting search from zero should not spend its first six months attacking “dental seo” or “dentist marketing.” Those results are held by agencies with domain authority in the 40s and years of accumulated links. The ground that is actually available is the Google Business Profile, one page for each procedure the practice wants more of, and the cost and comparison questions patients type before they ever call an office. NetPageTwo runs that work at $489 or $1,297 per month, month to month, no contract.
The dental SERP is the hardest one we have measured
Dental search looks approachable on paper. The difficulty scores are low, the volumes are real, and the commercial intent is obvious.
| Keyword | Searches per month | CPC | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|---|
| dentist marketing | 1,900 | $26.15 | 32 |
| dental seo | 1,300 | $37.50 | 27 |
| dental seo services | 1,300 | $33.91 | 19 |
| dental seo company | 1,000 | $37.39 | 17 |
| local seo for dentists | 1,000 | $35.03 | 9 |
| seo for dental practice | 390 | $39.82 | 7 |
| dental website seo | 140 | $70.43 | n/a |
| dental marketing companies near me | 90 | $93.80 | n/a |
The difficulty scores are misleading, and here is the measurement that shows why. On “seo for dental practice,” the softest term on the list at difficulty 7, the click distribution across roughly 299 measured clicks looked like this.
| Position | Measured clicks | Share of measured clicks |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 246 | about 82% |
| 2 | 12 | about 4% |
| 5 | 7 | about 2% |
Position one takes almost everything. Position two takes a rounding error. The weakest domain in that top ten had domain authority 22; the top result had 41. The netpagetwo.com domain is seven weeks old and sits at authority 3.
So the plain version: this page is not going to outrank Coalition Technologies next quarter, and any agency telling a dentist otherwise is selling on a claim it cannot support. The same math applies to the practice. A general dentist in a metro area is competing on head terms against DSO marketing departments and against agencies whose entire business is holding those positions. Winning “dentist [city]” outright is a multi-year link and content project, and it is not what $489 a month buys.
What is actually available from a standing start
Four things move for a practice with no authority, in this order.
The Google Business Profile
Google’s own documentation for Business Profile lists three local ranking factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. Distance is fixed by the address. Relevance is category selection, services listed, hours, attributes, and the words in the profile matching what people search. Prominence is reviews, mentions, and links from around the web. Two of the three are work a practice can do, and most practices have not done them. This is the highest-return hour in dental search and it does not require a single new page.
One page per procedure, written like the patient asks
Most practice sites have a services page with a list on it. Implants, clear aligners, veneers, whitening, all in one place, none with enough text to rank for anything. Each procedure the practice wants more chair time for gets its own page, with the cost question, the financing question, the “how long does it take” question, and the comparison question answered on the page rather than gated behind a call. These pages are also the ones that pull elective cash-pay work rather than routine insurance visits.
The long tail where competition thins out
Nobody is fighting hard over “how much do implants cost in [suburb]” or “clear aligners vs braces for adults.” The volume per query is small. The intent is close to booking, and there are hundreds of these queries for a single practice. Volume adds up across the set instead of resting on one term.
Getting cited by the AI answer
This is the part that has changed most in the last year, and it is the section worth reading twice.
AI Overviews now sit above most local dental search
Whitespark studied 540 local queries; the results were published through Search Engine Journal. AI Overviews appeared in 68% of local searches, compared with 39% for local packs. On informational local queries, AI Overviews appeared 92% of the time. On hybrid-intent queries, 97%.
Their worked example was “average cost of dental implants in Phoenix.” That is not an analogy borrowed from another industry; that is the literal query in the study. The most valuable question a prospective implant patient types is now answered above the map pack, and the practices cited in that answer are the ones the patient sees first.
Two findings shape how a page gets cited. Kevin Indig analyzed 1.2 million ChatGPT responses and found 44.2% of citations come from the first 30% of the page content. Answers buried under 600 words of introduction do not get pulled. Omniscient Digital reviewed more than 23,000 citations and found that on branded queries only about 23% came from a company’s own content; roughly 77% came from off-page sources. Owned pages matter, and so does what other sites say about the practice.
Worth naming the other side of this. Google’s own documentation states there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary,” and that structured data “isn’t required for generative AI search.” A large share of what is currently sold as AI search optimization is not documented by Google as necessary. The work that holds up is answering the real question near the top of the page, in clear language, on a page that can be crawled, with the practice’s name and details consistent everywhere else on the web.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | Included |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | $489 per month | Technical SEO, on-page SEO, AI search optimization, monthly strategy meeting, email support |
| Visibility + Revenue | $1,297 per month | Everything in Visibility, plus conversion rate optimization, unlimited landing pages with one in flight at a time, bi-weekly calls, Slack access |
Month to month, 14 days notice to cancel, no contract.
Some context for the number. The ADA Health Policy Institute puts average gross billings for a general practice at $965,660. Visibility at $489 a month runs $5,964 a year, roughly 0.6% of that figure. Visibility + Revenue runs $15,564 a year, roughly 1.6%. On the paid side, a single click on “dental marketing companies near me” costs $93.80 and a click on “dental website seo” costs $70.43, which is what the competition for this attention is currently worth to the people bidding on it.
Delivery is roughly 90% AI and 10% human, run by one operator. That is why the price is what it is. There is no account manager layer, and the strategy calls are with the person doing the work.
Who this is not for
- A practice that needs to beat a DSO on head terms this quarter. That is a budget and authority problem, and this service does not solve it on that timeline.
- Anyone who wants a ranking guarantee, a promised timeline, or a projected number of new patients. None of those are offered here.
- Anyone who needs a dental case study before signing. NetPageTwo has no dental clients and no dental results. The published case studies are two law firms and a mortgage CRM company.
- A practice that wants a large team on the account. One operator with AI tooling is the model; there is nobody else to escalate to.
What is on offer is the work that is actually available to a practice starting from zero authority, priced so it does not need to produce a miracle to be worth keeping, cancellable with 14 days notice if it does not.
Next step
Book a call and we will look at the practice’s Business Profile, the procedure pages, and which queries in the local market currently return an AI Overview. If the answer is that paid search is the better use of the money right now, that is what gets said on the call.