Found vs. Chosen

Aside from my work as a Dental SEO Specialist, I don’t think about going to the dentist very often. 

Sorry to all our clients - it’s nothing personal! It's just a fact, and I'd bet it's true of most of your patients too. I only think about dentists when I absolutely need to; when something hurts, when I move somewhere new, or when I finally admit it's been 2 years since anyone looked at my teeth. Then I think about them intensely for about forty-five minutes researching the perfect dentist for my Invisalign, and then I don't think about them again for a long time.

This is what happened when I thought about dentists for the first time in a while: I Googled "dentist near me," opened 6 different tabs from 6 different dental websites around me, checked ratings and reviews, looked at photos to see if the office felt like a real place, and read their Google Business Profile descriptions to get a sense of who they were. Then I picked one, booked, and closed the tabs.

Working at a dental marketing agency has been an interesting experience because I wake up every day trying to answer the same question: How do I get people to notice our clients?

I want to look at what happened in that hour from an SEO Specialist's perspective. All of the practices I looked at had enough of an SEO foundation to show up in front of me, but only one got my appointment. Being found and being chosen are two very different things, and knowing the difference changes what is actually worth your time and money when making marketing decisions. So what makes a dental practice stand out during that one hour of research?

Looking back, I was running the same thought process on every tab. 

• Can I trust these people?
• Do they know what they're doing?
• Is there proof, or am I just taking their word for it?
• And do they sound like humans or like a brochure?

Google's quality raters are actually also trained on these same questions, with Google emphasizing that trust is the foundation for everything else.

I read 21 dental websites and couldn't tell them apart

So why did so many practices doing the right thing for SEO fail to capture patients’ attention?

I did the thing every curious nerd does. I Googled 21 independent dental practice websites across different states and specialties. I read all the taglines. Ten promised personalized care. Fifteen claimed excellence. With the logo and business name removed, I couldn't tell any of the 21 sites apart.

Then I found two dental websites in North Carolina. Different practices, owners, buildings, and direct competitors in the same city. However, both used the same tagline, the same website structure, and this sentence on their homepage: “Our entire team is dedicated to providing you with the personalized, gentle care that you deserve.”

I'm not frustrated with those dentists. Somebody sold them each a website and filled it with words out of a drawer while they were busy doing dentistry. But the effect is that anyone searching for a dentist has nothing to compare. Everybody sounds kind, experienced, and up to date.

So the decision comes down to what other people have said about them, like in local reviews, and I think that carries more weight than most practices realize.

Harvard Business School research compares Yelp ratings with state tax revenue and found that a one-star increase in rating was associated with a 5 to 9% increase in revenue. The effect came entirely from independent businesses. For chains, it was insignificant.

That makes sense. The less familiar your name is, the less a patient has to go on. So they look for what other people have said.

For an independent practice, that can be the difference between being one of the many tabs in someone’s browser and the one they actually choose.

Where Brand Identity Supports You In Search

E-E-A-T is the framework Google uses to measure whether a website provides genuinely helpful, reliable, and high-quality information to searchers. In 2022, Google added a second E to E-A-T. The new one stood for Experience, meaning first-hand knowledge from someone who has actually done something, used something, or been there themselves. You can read Google's explanation here, but I think this was very good news for smaller dental practices.

For years, the belief was that the largest, most informative websites would always win. While that is true for general dental information—where you're competing against massive health publishers and universities—it's easy to get lost in the noise. 

But Google isn't asking you to become the internet's biggest encyclopedia. Its own guidance says it wants to encourage creators to make it clear who created their content, and telling their story does, in fact, matter. And that is where I think smaller practices have an advantage they don't always realize they have.

Mayo Clinic can explain what a root canal is. A big health publisher can explain what Invisalign is. But they cannot talk about the patient who came into your office after avoiding the dentist for ten years and what your team did to make them feel comfortable enough to come back. They cannot show your cases, speak from your clinician's experience, or explain what you've learned after treating hundreds of patients.

And the best part, those details aren’t something you need to manufacture (or pay a lot for). You already have them. The problem is, a lot of practices leave them out because they think a service page is supposed to sound neutral and generic, like anyone could have written it. But if anyone could have written it, anyone could use it.

Lily Ray, a respected SEO expert, looked at 2,076 websites that gained or lost search visibility during Google's March 2026 core update. She found that the sites that did well were much more likely to have content written by real subject-matter experts.

The takeaway is that you don’t need to hide the person behind the page. Give patients a reason to trust the information they’re reading by showing who wrote it and why they’re qualified to help.

That could mean including:

• Your degree and training
• Your specialty or areas of focus
• How long you've been practicing
• Your experience treating the types of patients you're writing for
• If someone else helped write the page, say who reviewed the clinical information.

Your practice doesn't need to win by being the most generic answer on the internet. The things that make you harder to copy are the ones that make you stand out, and they’re probably the things you've been doing for so long that you've stopped noticing them.

Make Your Reputation Visible Where People Are Looking

Of course, having something to say doesn't help much if nobody sees it. This is where the SEO part comes in.

A patient doesn't experience your reputation in one place. While I was searching, I moved between Maps, reviews, photos, the Business Profile, and eventually the website.

Reviews matter more in healthcare than almost any other industry, and the reason is structural: a patient can't evaluate your clinical work. All they can judge is what other patients said about their own experience.

This means that sometimes their most valued information comes from: 

• The local Facebook group where somebody asks who's good with anxious kids
• The neighborhood subreddit thread
• The group chat you'll never see
• AI tools, which pull mostly from review platforms and community threads rather than your site

You can't control any of that. What you can do is become the practice worth naming.

💡 There is one thing you can do today, and it takes two minutes. Open Google Search Console and look at how many people typed your practice name into Google. It isn't a perfect brand awareness metric, but it's one of the signals to understand if your brand awareness is growing in the digital space.

Five Questions to Help Define What Makes Your Practice Different

So here's the honest division of labor. I can help with the website, your profile, and keeping an eye on what AI tools are saying about your practice. An agency can do all of that. But those things can only amplify what's already there. If what's underneath isn't distinct, all I've done is help more people find something forgettable a little faster.

If you're not sure yet how to communicate what’s special about you, you don't need a branding workshop. Start by sitting with these five questions and answering them as honestly as you can.

1. Why did you open this practice? Not “why dentistry” in general, but why this practice, in this town.
2. Which patients leave your office happiest?
3. What do your patients say about you that they wouldn't say about the practice down the road?
4. What do you do differently that you've stopped noticing?
5. If a patient only remembered one thing about you, what would it be?

That's what I was looking for during my search. It's what a typical patient also looks for. And it's what your neighbor is looking for when somebody asks if they know a good dentist.

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