SEO for Dentists.

Your reception phone already tells you what the website is missing.

Two calls come in on the same afternoon. One wants to know whether you’re taking NHS patients, and that’s the whole question, because they’ll ring five more practices before lunch. The other has been reading about Invisalign for a fortnight and wants prices and finance options. Most practice sites answer the first badly and the second not at all. Agencies selling SEO for dentists hand over the package they sell plumbers, so you get a brochure for a building instead of an answer.

An NHS caller wants a yes. A private patient wants a fortnight of reading.

The NHS side is a scarcity search. Someone types “NHS dentist accepting patients” plus their town, works down the list by phone, and wants a yes or a no, so your registration status has to be readable in two seconds. The private side is nothing like it. A patient weighing up implants or a course of Invisalign compares practices, studies before-and-afters, checks finance and takes weeks over it. That patient also stays, booking check-ups and the odd crown for a decade, which is why the research search deserves more work than it gets. Answer both with the same welcome-to-our-practice page and you’ll lose the one that pays for the building. A mixed practice needs its NHS position stated plainly, waiting list and all, and the private treatments given room of their own.

Implants and whitening don’t belong on the same page.

They’re different patients with different budgets. An implant page has to handle bone grafting, healing time, single tooth against full arch, and cost. A whitening page has to explain how what you do differs from the beauty salon down the road, because that’s the actual question in that patient’s head. One Treatments page ranks for neither and reassures nobody. Split them and you can deal with price properly, which most practice sites still won’t go near.

The GDC reads websites too.

Dental marketing sits under General Dental Council guidance on ethical advertising, and that’s where generalist agencies land clients in trouble. Claims have to be accurate and provable. “Specialist” only applies if you’re on the relevant list. Prices have to be clear rather than a “from” figure nobody pays. Before-and-after photos need real consent. A copywriter who’s never worked in a regulated sector will happily write “the best dentist in Kent” and think it’s done you a favour. We’d sooner write something you can defend, because a complaint costs you more than a ranking gains you.

Getting quoted in the AI answer is less mysterious than it sounds.

Google says the only requirement for citation is a page that’s indexed and eligible for a snippet, with no additional technical requirements. Ahrefs looked at 863,000 results pages in March 2026 and found only 37.1% of AI Overview citations rank in the organic top ten, while 36.7% don’t rank in the top hundred. The answer box isn’t a mirror of page one, so a proper treatment page can turn up in it before it ranks on it. Ofcom found 75% of online UK adults read these summaries at least sometimes, so it’s worth writing for.