Dental Practice SEO: A Complete Guide

Most dental SEO advice ignores how patients actually search

Generic local-SEO posts tell you to "optimize your title tags" and "claim your Google Business Profile" — and stop there. That's table stakes. Dental practices live and die on specifics: which patient question your page answers, whether your title makes the local pack, and whether your trust signals match what an anxious patient is looking for at 11pm with a toothache.

This post is for agencies serving dental clients. It assumes you already know the basics of local SEO and want the dental-specific levers that move the needle.

What's different about dental search

Three things separate dental from other local-business SEO.

Patients search by problem, not by service. They type "tooth pain when biting", "wisdom tooth removal cost", "dentist that takes [insurance name]". They rarely type "dental services". A site organized around services (Restorative, Cosmetic, Preventive) misses the actual queries.

Trust outranks proximity for first visits. A 4.9-star practice 4 miles away usually beats a 4.2-star practice 1 mile away in the local pack — but more importantly, in the click-through. Reviews compound.

The first impression is the homepage on a phone at 10pm. Most dental decisions happen outside business hours. If the homepage takes 4 seconds to load on 4G or the booking link is below three call-to-action sections, the patient is on the next listing.

Title-tag pattern that works

Local pack listings typically truncate around 60 characters on mobile. Dental practices need three signals fitting under that limit: specialty, city, brand. In that order.

Bad: Smith Family Dental – Your Premier Dental Experience in Austin Good: Family Dentist Austin TX | Smith Family Dental

The geographic modifier should be the city plus state abbreviation if the city name is shared (Austin, MN vs. Austin, TX). The specialty should match the actual primary search — Family Dentist, Pediatric Dentist, Cosmetic Dentist, Emergency Dentist — not internal industry terms like "general dentistry".

Run your title through the Meta Tag Analyzer to confirm length and structure. The analyzer reports the rendered title length in pixels (Google truncates around 580 pixels on desktop, less on mobile) and flags titles that are missing the H1 mirror, which Google has used as a re-ranking signal since 2024.