A dental practice competes with the six or seven surgeries within a short drive, and in 2026 that contest is decided mostly inside Google's own surfaces: the Business Profile, the local pack, and increasingly the AI answer that appears above both.
The website still matters, but mostly as the evidence Google checks. This is the checklist we work through for practices, in the order that tends to move results soonest. The strategic view lives on our dental SEO page; this is the hands-on version.
How Google decides which dentist to show
Google says local results are ranked on three things: relevance (how well the profile matches the search), distance from the searcher, and prominence, which it describes as how well known a business is, including how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. It also states plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (Google Business Profile Help).
Distance you cannot change. Relevance and prominence you can, and everything below is one or the other.
"Near me" still comes up in every practice call. Google reads the searcher's location whether or not they type it, so "emergency dentist" on a phone gets the same proximity treatment as "emergency dentist near me". Skip the phrase on your pages and make the profile and the page match the treatment the patient typed.
Google Business Profile: the part that does most of the work
Categories
The primary category is the single strongest relevance signal on the profile. For most general practices it should be Dentist. A clinic that is genuinely orthodontics-only or implants-only can be more specific. Google's guidance is to use as few categories as possible, choose ones that are as specific as possible while still representing the main business, and never use categories as keywords (Google Business Profile Help).
Secondary categories are for services the practice actually provides: Cosmetic dentist, Dental implants provider, Emergency dental service, Teeth whitening service, Pediatric dentist. Do not add Orthodontist unless a GDC-registered specialist works there, for reasons covered in the compliance section. We tested category changes across a set of local businesses and wrote up what moved in how a Business Profile category change affects local rankings.
Business name
The name must be the real-world name, as it appears on the sign and the website. Google's guidelines prohibit adding taglines, service information, location information or phone numbers to it, and say unnecessary information in the name can get the profile suspended (Google Business Profile Help). "Smile Dental" is fine. "Smile Dental Invisalign Implants Nicosia" is a suspension waiting to happen.
Services
Fill in the Services section treatment by treatment, with a description and, where you are comfortable, a price, and match the service names to the treatment pages on your site so the two agree.
Everything else on the profile
Opening hours including the emergency line, an appointment link that goes straight to online booking, photos of the actual reception and surgeries rather than stock, a description that names the treatments and areas served, and Q&A answers for what reception hears every day (parking, NHS versus private, nervous patients, payment plans).
Reviews after Google's 2026 crackdown
Reviews feed prominence, they feed AI answers, and they are where practices get into trouble.
In February 2026 Google began emailing business owners when it detected fake or incentivised reviews on their profile, telling them the reviews had been removed and warning that continued violations "may lead to restrictions being applied on your profile" (Search Engine Roundtable). Then on 17 April 2026 Google added two explicit prohibitions to its Maps policy: merchants requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews, and merchants requesting reviews that include specific content, including content that identifies a staff member (PPC Land).
The full policy now reads as a list of things dental practices have done for years. You may solicit or encourage content that represents a genuine experience, without offering incentives. You may not offer payment, discounts or free goods for a review, discourage or prohibit negative reviews, selectively solicit positive ones, set staff quotas, or ask for reviews that name a team member (Google Maps user-generated content policy).
So the "free whitening for a five-star review" card at reception is gone. So is the tablet that asks "how was your visit?" and only sends the happy patients to Google. So is "please mention Dr Andreou by name". We covered why Google is enforcing this now, and what it means for AI answers, in Google's fake and incentivised review crackdown.
What still works, and what we set up for practices:
- A single short link or QR code to the Google review form, sent to every patient after the appointment, not a filtered subset.
- The ask made by the person who treated them, in person, with no script about what to write.
- A reply to every review within a few days, with no clinical detail about the patient, even when they have shared it themselves.
- A monthly check of the review count against last month, because a sudden burst is the pattern Google's filters look for.
The GDC and UK advertising rules
For UK practices the regulator sits on top of Google's rules. The GDC's guidance on advertising says all publicity about dental services should be legal, decent, honest and truthful, that you must avoid statements likely to create an unjustified expectation about results, and that you must not display information comparing the skills or qualifications of any dental professional with those of others (GDC). The same guidance restricts "specialist" to dentists on a GDC specialist list; everyone else may say "special interest in" or "experienced in", and dental care professionals cannot use titles such as "Smile specialist".
Nothing in the GDC guidance bans patient testimonials, but the CAP Code that the ASA enforces requires marketers to hold documentary evidence that a testimonial is genuine, along with contact details for the person who gave it (CAP Code, section 3). Keep the consent form and the original review. A testimonial that promises a result ("pain-free implants, guaranteed") fails both rules at once.
The GDC guidance also lists what a practice website must display: the practice name and address, contact details including email, a link to the GDC, the complaints procedure, the date the site was last updated, and each professional's qualification, country of qualification and GDC number. Check yours. Many practice sites we audit are missing at least two.
AI Overviews and AI Mode for local dental queries
Whitespark's May 2026 guide to AI Mode for local businesses found that AI local results draw on Business Profile data, review platforms, unstructured mentions on blogs and community sites, and website content; that many AI packs show fewer unique businesses than the classic three-pack; that some have no click-to-call button; and that two people searching the same thing from the same place can see different practices (Whitespark).
Two consequences. First, there are fewer slots, so the profile, review and citation work above is now competing for a shorter list. Second, dentists cannot buy their way in: Google stated in December 2025 that it does not show ads in AI Overviews for sensitive verticals including healthcare (Search Engine Roundtable). Organic is the only door. Our wider read on how "near me" behaviour is changing under AI search is in local SEO in 2026.
Treatment pages, one per service
A page for every treatment you want to be found for: implants, Invisalign, emergency appointments, hygienist visits, children's dentistry, whitening, root canal, dentures. Each page covers what the treatment involves, who it suits, what it costs or how pricing works, how long it takes, and who at the practice does it, with their GDC number for UK practices.
The mistake is a single "Our services" page with a paragraph per treatment. It cannot rank for "dental implants [town]" against a competitor with a full page, and it gives the Services section on your profile nothing to point at. Match page titles to the treatment plus the town, and use a meta title and description generator to keep them inside the length Google actually shows.
Location pages for multi-site practices
A group with three surgeries needs three Business Profiles, each verified at its own address, and three location pages on the site, each with its own address, phone number, opening hours, team, photos and embedded map. Copying one page and swapping the town name creates near-duplicate pages that Google folds together, and the profiles end up pointing at pages that do not distinguish them.
Location pages link to treatment pages, and treatment pages list the locations that offer them. More on the structure in local SEO for multiple locations.
Dental schema
Schema.org has a Dentist type that inherits from both LocalBusiness and MedicalBusiness, so it carries the local fields (opening hours, price range, payment accepted) alongside medical ones such as medicalSpecialty and isAcceptingNewPatients (schema.org). Google's LocalBusiness documentation asks you to use the most specific subtype available and recommends name, address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification, geo and priceRange (Google Search Central).
Put one Dentist block on each location page, with the exact name, address and phone number that the Business Profile uses. Our schema markup generator produces the JSON-LD; paste it in and validate it. Schema's job is to remove doubt about which entity a page belongs to, which matters more now that AI answers assemble profiles from several sources.
NAP consistency and citations
Name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere: website footer, every location page, Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, NHS and private directories, dental association listings, Facebook. Identical, down to "Street" versus "St", on every listing.
Every mismatch is one more reason for Google or an AI system to be unsure which practice is which. Audit the top twenty places your practice is listed once a year and fix the drift. If the site itself has structural problems, a website audit will surface them alongside the citation issues.
Local links that a practice can actually get
Prominence includes links, and dental practices are better placed for local links than most small businesses because they are already part of the community. The ones that come up again and again:
- Sponsoring a junior football team, a school fair or a local charity run, with a link from the club or event site
- Membership listings with dental associations and the local chamber of commerce
- Local news coverage of a new surgery, an oral health talk at a school, or a free check-up day
- Referral partnerships with GPs, orthodontists, pharmacies and gyms that list partner practices
Skip paid directory packages and guest posts on marketing blogs. For a structured programme, our backlink building work for healthcare clients focuses on exactly this local layer.
Tracking calls and bookings
If you cannot see which channel produced a booking, you will keep paying for the wrong one. The minimum setup:
| What to track | How |
|---|---|
| Calls from the Business Profile | A dedicated tracking number set as the profile's primary number, with the main number as an additional number, so the citation stays consistent |
| Calls from the website | Dynamic number swapping keyed to the traffic source, in GA4 |
| Online bookings | A conversion event on the booking confirmation, with the source carried through |
| Direction requests and profile clicks | The Business Profile performance report, exported monthly |
| Which treatment pages get seen | Search Console, filtered by page, watched for impressions before clicks |
Reception can add the one question that ties it together: "How did you hear about us?" logged in the practice management system. Six months of that answer, set against the tracking above, tells you whether the money should go to the profile, the site or the sponsorships.
If you would rather not build the spreadsheets from scratch, our free SEO templates include a local tracking sheet. For healthcare practices generally, and dental practices in particular, the pattern is the same: the profile does the ranking, the site provides the evidence, reviews earn the click, and tracking tells you which of the three needs work this quarter. That is what our local SEO programme covers, and a free SEO review will tell you which of the sections above your practice is failing before you spend anything.
Frequently asked questions
Can a dental practice ask patients for Google reviews?
Yes. Google allows you to ask for reviews that reflect a genuine experience, without incentives. What you cannot do is offer discounts or gifts, filter who gets asked based on how happy they seem, set staff review quotas, or ask patients to name a staff member. In the UK, the GDC also expects anything you publish to be honest and not to create unjustified expectations about results.
Which Google Business Profile category should a dentist use?
Use Dentist as the primary category unless the practice is genuinely a specialist clinic, in which case the specific category (Orthodontist, Cosmetic dentist, Dental implants provider) may fit better. Add secondary categories only for services the practice really provides. Google says to use as few categories as possible and never to use them as keywords.
How do AI Overviews and AI Mode affect dentists?
Local dental queries increasingly get an AI answer that draws on Google Business Profile data, reviews and citations, and research from May 2026 found these AI packs often show fewer businesses than the classic three-pack. Google does not currently show ads in AI Overviews for healthcare, so a practice can only get into those answers organically, through the profile, reviews and site.
