“Dental SEO company” is searched about 2,700 times a month in the US. Half of those people want a vendor. The other half want to know whether the last vendor was a mistake. This page is for both.
It is not a directory. It is the test we use when a practice asks us whether to hire, stay, or leave. The method itself is in the dental SEO pillar. The invoice is in pricing.
What the search actually means
Most results for this query are landing pages. They promise the pack, the first page, a 90-day turnaround, a 10× return. Some of that is possible in a quiet town. None of it is a contract the engine will honor.
A useful company sells the work: the profile, the pages, the crawl, the reviews, the report in chairs. An unuseful one sells a feeling about rankings. The rest of this page is how to tell them apart in a single call.
What a month of work contains
Ask what last month produced, in writing, before you sign. You are looking for something like this:
- Technical fixes that were actually shipped, not listed
- One treatment URL rebuilt as a direct answer — cost, time, recovery
- Local work: profile, listings, review replies
- A report that names calls, forms, and booked visits from unpaid search
If the answer is “we build citations and monitor keywords,” you are buying a dashboard. Dashboards do not fill Tuesday.
Proof you can click
A vendor whose own site ranks for nothing is describing a method they do not use. Ask to see Search Console, live, on a property they operate. Ask which URL sits on which query, in which city, this week. If they send a PDF of rising arrows and no links, the meeting is over.
Our own data
We publish our own numbers because we operate the sites. A page we built holds position one and the featured snippet ahead of the official Invisalign site, domain rating 67, with a single backlink. That is the kind of claim you should be able to click. If a company cannot show you theirs, they do not have one.
Phase one should touch the profile and the pricing pages. Those are the queries with intent. A plan that opens with “first we need to build links” or “first we need a new logo” is starting where it is easy.
Who owns the site when you leave
Some companies rent you a website on a platform you cannot export. The rankings, the copy, the photos — all of it stays when the retainer ends. That is not a partnership. That is a hostage.
The contract should say, in a paragraph a dentist can read: the domain, the content, the design files, and the analytics belong to the practice. On request, they hand over the keys. If that sentence is missing, assume the opposite.
How they report
Positions are the means. Chairs are the ends. A monthly PDF of “impressions up 12%” is how a retainer survives a quiet phone. Require:
- Calls and forms from unpaid search, this month versus the baseline
- Booked visits you can match to those clicks, even if the match is imperfect
- Cost per new patient from this channel, next to the retainer
- The local queries that trigger a pack, and whether you are in it
If they cannot connect a ranking to a patient, they are not doing dental SEO. They are doing reporting.
When to walk away
Also walk if they cannot talk about assistants. Search no longer ends at the blue links. A company that has never measured a citation, never heard of a blocked AI crawler, and treats “GEO” as a slide title is selling 2019. You do not need them to be theorists. You need them to notice when a page they wrote stopped being quoted.
Dental fluency is the other filter. Insurance language, clinical risk, a parent in the waiting room: a generalist learns those on your book. Ask what they have ranked in this vertical, on sites they run.
When to fire them
You do not owe a retainer to a process you cannot inspect. Fire them when:
- Three months in, they still will not open Search Console with you on the call
- The site is not yours in writing
- The report is activity — posts published, citations submitted — and the phone is the same
- The work stopped after the first quarter and the invoice did not
Keep the content. Keep the profile. Keep the analytics. Then either give someone in the practice the hours, or hire a company that will do the month described above. The jobs themselves are listed in SEO for dentists. Local, specifically, is local SEO for dentists.