Dental / Local SEO & Google Maps
Nobody scrolls past three.
For “dentist near me” the map pack is effectively the whole result, and the tap it gets is a phone call. Local SEO and Google Business Profile work for dental practices: we rebuild the profile, the plans you take, the reviews and the pages behind them until you are one of the three.
from $1,200/mosingle location30 days notice
Four searches, four different patients
- “emergency dentist near me” 11pm, one hand, calls the first practice that answers.
- “dentist that takes Delta Dental” The filter applied before your name is ever read.
- “dentist open saturday” Hours decide this one. Nothing else does.
- “dental implants near me” The procedure that pays for the year, searched like a plumber.
Phrasings are illustrative. The audit pulls the terms your own area actually searches, and where you currently sit on each one.
- Price
- from $1,200/mo
- Scope
- Single location
- Commitment
- 30 days notice
- Free audit, findings in
- two business days
Your practice
Dentist · Emergency dental service · Cosmetic dentist
Open now · Closes 5pm · Sat 9–2
After-hours line answered
In network
Delta Dental Cigna MetLife + 6 more
Implants · Clear aligners · Crowns · Emergency care
Call Directions Website Book
The listing is the storefront
Five lines decide it, before anyone taps call
A patient choosing a dentist runs three filters in about ten seconds — is this practice one of the three, does it take my plan, do other people trust it. All three are answered inside the listing, which is why the profile is the asset and the website supports it rather than the other way round.
-
Categories
One primary category, plus the secondary ones that decide which queries you are eligible for at all. A practice with no emergency category does not appear for an emergency search, however good the rest of the listing is.
-
Hours, and what happens outside them
Wrong Saturday hours cost you the whole weekend. And if the listing says the line is answered after hours, something has to actually answer it.
-
Reviews, and how recent they are
The only reassurance a nervous stranger has. Recency carries more weight than raw count, which is why the ask belongs in the patient flow rather than in somebody’s good intentions.
-
Plans and procedures, spelled out
The plans you take and the procedures you sell, written as service items rather than buried in a PDF. This is the filter a patient applies before they read your name.
-
The call button
For dental the map pack action is a phone call, not a click. Everything above exists to get a thumb to this, and the retainer stops paying the moment the call is not answered.
What the work actually is
Six things, done every month
Local ranking is not one big fix. It is the same six pieces, maintained — which is why practices lose ground to whoever is more consistent rather than to whoever is smarter.
Profile rebuilt for dental queries
Correct primary category, the emergency and procedure categories that decide which searches you are eligible for, every procedure as a service item, attributes, hours that survive a holiday, booking link and call routing checked end to end.
The plans you take, made findable
In-network carriers listed on the profile, on the page a patient lands on, and in structured data — so a patient filtering by plan, and an assistant answering for them, both get the same answer.
Review engine
The ask built into the flow at the moment it makes sense — after a hygiene visit, not after a root canal — plus reply templates that never confirm anybody is a patient of yours.
Procedure pages
One page per procedure that pays: implants, clear aligners, crowns, emergency care. Written the way patients search, with the schema that ties each one back to your profile.
Technical foundation and citations
Speed, mobile, structured data, and name-address-phone consistency across the directories and insurance finders that still move local rankings for a practice.
Reporting in calls, not positions
Map positions for your terms, yes — but first: calls and direction requests from the profile, and where those turned into appointments. Countable in your own dashboard, not only in ours.
Honest timeline
Local SEO is slow, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing
This is the schedule we put in writing before you sign anything. Nothing on it is a best case, and the ranges assume a single location in a normal metro. Dense urban markets take longer, and you hear that before you sign rather than after.
- Weeks 1–2
Profile rebuilt: categories including emergency, service items per procedure, accepted plans, hours, photos, booking link and call routing. Technical fixes shipped.
- Weeks 4–8
First movement on long-tail and branded terms. Calls and direction requests from the profile climb before positions do, and you can count those yourself.
- Months 3–6
“Dentist near me” and the procedure terms that pay. This is where a practice that stayed consistent passes the one that did a single cleanup and stopped.
Three things we will not do to make it look faster
-
Buy links
The debt comes due on your domain, not on ours. We would be gone and you would still be filing disavows.
-
Touch the reviews
Not written, not bought, not gated behind a “was your visit good?” screen. That last one breaks Google’s policy and the FTC’s rules, and it risks the reviews you already earned.
-
Stuff your business name
Adding “Emergency Dentist” to your listing name ranks until somebody reports it. Where a competitor has done it, we file the redressal instead — free, sometimes slow, occasionally the whole fix.
What it costs
$1,200 a month
One location. Profile management, review flow, procedure pages, technical work and monthly reporting. No long lock-in — 30 days notice, any time.
The whole price list- What moves the number
- How many locations and how many treatments you want ranking. A single location with four treatments sits at the floor.
- Not included
- Paid ads, and any spend on review-request SMS beyond the first 500 a month.
- What you can check yourself
- Calls and direction requests from your own profile dashboard, every month, whether or not you believe our report.
When to spend the money elsewhere
Five practices we would tell to wait
Written down before you ask rather than after you sign. The first one costs us the sale most often, and it is still the first one.
-
Your phone rings out after five
Ranking harder at 11pm pours more emergencies into the same voicemail, and a patient in pain does not wait for a callback. If the audit finds calls going unanswered, we will say fix that first — even though this is the page you clicked on.
What answers the 11pm call62%
of callers who do not get through call a competitor instead
Published call-tracking benchmarks. These are published industry benchmarks, not Oris results. Your own numbers come out of the free audit.
-
You are out of network with the plans on your street
Insurance is a filter applied before your name is read, and no ranking work moves it. We can make the plans you do take impossible to miss. If the employers around you are all on a plan you do not take, that is a business decision, not a marketing one.
-
Nobody at the desk will ask for the review
Recency is the strongest local lever there is, and the one we cannot pull on our own. We build the ask into the flow and write the templates. A human still has to press send.
-
You need patients this month
Then this is the wrong line item. Local SEO compounds; it does not rescue a quarter. If the schedule has holes in it now, recall calls and answered phones fill them faster than anything on this page.
-
You sit outside the search radius
Proximity is a ranking factor and nobody can move it. A practice six miles out will not appear for a “near me” search made downtown, whatever anyone charges you. What we can move is everything inside your radius.
Questions practice owners ask
Straight answers
Someone searches “emergency dentist” at 11pm. Does any of this help?
It decides whether you are one of the three practices they see. It does not decide what happens next — they tap call, and the practice that answers gets the patient and usually the family. So the audit checks both, and if your line rings out after five we will tell you to fix that before you spend a month on ranking.
How long before we move in the map pack?
Profile and technical work show up in four to eight weeks; competitive procedure terms take three to six months. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either guessing or planning to buy links that will cost you later.
Patients filter by insurance before they look at anything else. Can you do something about that?
We can make the plans you already take impossible to miss — listed on the profile, on the page a patient lands on, and in the structured data an AI assistant reads when someone asks it who near them takes their plan. What we cannot do is change which networks you are in. That is a contract with a carrier, not a ranking factor, and no agency should charge you as if it were one.
We already have a Google profile. Is that not enough?
Having one and having one that ranks are different things. The gaps are usually the same five: a single generic category and no emergency category, no service items for the procedures that actually pay, no list of accepted plans, hours that are wrong on a Saturday, and reviews that stopped eighteen months ago. Every one of those is both a ranking factor and a reason a patient picks someone else. The free audit tells you which of the five apply to you.
Do reviews really matter that much for a practice?
More than they do almost anywhere else, because choosing a dentist is a high-anxiety purchase and the review count is the only reassurance a stranger has. Recency matters more than raw volume: a practice with 60 reviews and nine this quarter usually outranks one with 300 that stopped in 2023. We build the ask into your patient flow, at the moment that makes sense, and write reply templates. We do not write reviews, we do not buy them, and we do not gate them behind a “was your visit good?” screen — that is against Google’s policy and the FTC’s rules, and it is how practices lose the reviews they already earned.
A competitor has “Emergency Dentist” stuffed into their business name and outranks us. What then?
That is a listing violation, and it works until it is reported. We file the redressal with the evidence, and we keep filing. It is free, it is sometimes slow, and occasionally it is the entire fix for a market. What we will not do is stuff your name to match — it ranks until somebody reports you, and then you are the one rebuilding a profile.
Will this work for a practice our size?
A single location is the floor this is priced for, not the exception. How many locations and how many treatments you want ranking. A single location with four treatments sits at the floor. If your area is too thin to support the work, the free audit says so — we would rather lose the month than sell a retainer that cannot pay for itself.
What about multiple locations?
Each location needs its own profile, its own page and its own review stream, and they must not cannibalise each other. That is scoped separately — the price on this page is one location.
What does it cost, and what is not included?
$1,200 a month for a single location: profile management, review flow, procedure pages, technical work and monthly reporting. No long lock-in — 30 days notice, any time. Not included: paid ads, and any spend on review-request SMS beyond the first 500 a month.
Does any of this touch patient data?
No. Everything we work on is public — your Google Business Profile, your website, your directory listings and your reviews. We never ask for a patient list, and review requests go out from your own system to your own contacts. One dental-specific detail: our reply templates never confirm that the reviewer is a patient of yours, because a friendly “thanks for coming in on Tuesday” in a public reply is exactly the kind of disclosure that gets a practice a complaint. We are HIPAA-aware and build to documented practice; we are not lawyers, and your state board may add rules on top.
Why trust a team outside the US with a US practice?
Oris is the clinic practice of HeadPills, a digital agency running since 2021 out of Wroclaw, Poland, with more than a hundred businesses shipped across Europe. Local search is public work: the profile, the pages and the reviews are all things you can check yourself from your own phone, in your own market, on any day of the month. It is also why this depth of work costs what it costs rather than what a US agency charges for it. We have not yet run a US dental account, and we would rather you read that here than find it out later.
Read next, and what it works with
Free practice audit
See your listing next to the three above you
The free audit puts your Google profile side by side with the three practices currently outranking you: categories, service items, accepted plans, review velocity, hours. Then we call your line like a patient in pain and write down what happened.
- Findings in two business days
- No call required to receive them
- Yours to keep either way
Request received
We have your details.
The audit takes us about two business days. It arrives as a short written document — where calls are being lost, what the map pack looks like for your treatments, and what AI assistants say when someone asks for a clinic like yours. No call required to receive it.
While you wait: what missed calls are costing you