SEO · Dental Groups & DSOs
Local pack, organic rankings and the structured content AI engines extract from. Built once, working on both surfaces.
Dental Groups & DSOs specifically
The method below is the same whichever industry you are in. These are the parts that are not — and they are usually what decides whether the programme works.
The same page with the city swapped is the exact pattern Google treats most harshly in multi-location dental. Team, hours, insurance accepted, parking and neighbourhood are the differentiators — and they have the advantage of being true.
"Dental implants [city]" and "Invisalign [city]" are where the case value sits. A homepage that mentions both ranks for neither, and a services page that lists twelve procedures ranks for none of them.
Several state boards restrict outcome language, which limits what a page is allowed to promise. Markup for services, accepted insurance, hours and location carries the ranking weight without going near the restricted ground.
The method
The local pack is still the highest-intent surface in search. Location pages, Business Profile optimisation for every practice, and the entity consistency that lets engines resolve which practice is which. Practices routinely lose local visibility not because their content is weak but because their name, address and phone appear three slightly different ways across the directories engines actually read.
Pages lead with direct answers, use headings phrased the way people actually ask, and carry real specifics — device names, session counts, published pricing. Research on generative engines consistently finds that citations and statistics lift visibility while keyword stuffing actively reduces it. Content that reads well to a patient and extracts cleanly to a model is the same content.
Schema on every location and service page so engines can resolve the entity behind it. This is groundwork for both classic rankings and AI citation, which is why we never treat them as separate projects. It does not make an engine recommend you; it makes an engine able to tell which practice a page is about.
Not keyword volume for its own sake, and not head terms a young domain cannot win. The order is winnable long-tail first, then commercial terms once there is authority to spend. Publishing thirty pages targeting terms you will not rank for inside two years is a common and expensive mistake.
Scope
Partly, and it is worth being exact about which part. A full dental digital marketing engagement usually bundles a website rebuild, email, social posting and brand design alongside search. We do not do those, and we would rather say so now than three weeks in.
What we do is the search half, on two surfaces instead of one: the local pack and organic rankings a dental group needs in Google, and the listings, reviews and third-party presence that decide whether an assistant names you at all. The second surface is the one almost no dental digital marketing agency measures — and for a patient asking an engine for a recommendation, it is the only one that returns a name.
So if you need the full bundle, you need an agency of record and we are not it. If you need to be found — in Google and in the answers — that is the whole job here.
Category specifics
The method does not change between industries. The questions your patients actually ask, the sources the engines trust, and the rules you have to advertise inside all do.
Prompts we run for this category
Rules this category advertises inside
Citation layer
Each engine resolves a local recommendation through a different set of sources. These are the ones that decide whether a dental group gets named — and most of them are not your website.
Scope
Specifics rather than adjectives — and an equally specific list of what it does not cover, because unclear scope is the most common cause of a bad first quarter.
Included
Not included
What to expect, when
4 questions
Usually, yes. Most engagements start with the site you have. A rebuild is occasionally the right call but it is rarely the fastest path to results, and it delays everything else by a quarter.
They share infrastructure — schema, Business Profile, reviews, extractable content — and diverge in what they optimise for. Running them together is materially cheaper than buying them separately.
For a domain with existing authority, three to six months on long-tail terms. For a new domain, closer to six to twelve. Anyone quoting faster on competitive local terms is either lucky or not being straight with you.
Yes, against briefs you approve. Every page carries a named author and credentials, because expert attribution is one of the higher-lift signals for both search and AI citation.
Before any retainer, we run fifty prompts across four engines and show you exactly where you stand against the operators being named instead.
Request your audit