A dental search engine marketing agency runs paid ads on Google and Bing, sends the clicks to a page built for one purpose, and tracks whether the calls became booked patients. That’s the short version. What it should not do is “get you more patients” in general, because a practice never wants patients in general.
Before you hire anyone, decide which appointments you want. The agency can build a campaign around a specific chair, a specific treatment and a specific part of town. It can’t build one around a hope.
Which appointments are you trying to fill?
Picture a practice in Hatfield that added implants last year. The phone still rings mostly for cleanings, and the implant consultations are few. That practice doesn’t need more traffic. It needs the right searches.
A person with a broken tooth on a Friday afternoon searches for “emergency dentist” and wants to know who can see them today. A person thinking about implants may read for weeks before calling anyone. Different searches, different ads, different pages, and a different price per click. A campaign built for both at once usually serves neither.
Dental care is also local. Patients choose someone they can drive to, and many are comparing two or three practices when they search. That’s why paid search suits a practice so well: you’re paying to be seen by someone who already has the need and lives nearby.
Search engine marketing or SEO: which one do you need?
The terms get used two ways. Sometimes search engine marketing, or SEM, means everything that makes a practice visible in search. On our search engine marketing page, and in this article, it mainly means paid search ads such as Google Ads, plus the tracking and adjusting that go with them.
SEO is the unpaid side. Ads can bring inquiries sooner once the campaign and page are ready, and they stop when the budget stops. Search visibility takes longer to build and keeps paying after you stop working on it. Many practices use both. Our article on dental SEO marketing covers the unpaid side.
If you need the schedule fuller this month, start with ads. If you’re building for next year, spend on SEO. Most practices we talk with need a bit of each.
What a dental click costs, and why cheap clicks fool people
LocaliQ’s 2026 search advertising benchmarks put the average cost per click for dentists and dental services at $8.00, against $5.42 across all industries. Those averages come from LocaliQ’s own customers’ campaigns nationwide. They aren’t a quote for your town, and a lead in their data is a call or a form, not a booked patient.
The lesson we take from them: a low cost per click proves very little. If every inexpensive call is for a service you don’t offer, the cheap clicks were the expensive ones.
So the number to ask any agency about is cost per booked patient, for the treatment you care about. It’s harder to get, because the ad account can’t see your appointment book. We’d need you to tell us which calls became patients. That’s the part that can’t be automated.
Where dental campaigns go wrong
Running ads without tracking. If you can’t tell which ads led to calls and which calls led to which treatments, every budget decision is a guess.
Sending clicks to the home page. Imagine clicking an ad for Saturday emergency visits and landing on a slideshow with the phone number at the bottom. A landing page built for that ad says whether you see emergencies that Saturday, where you are and how to call, and it works on a phone.
Trusting the map settings. Google’s help page says ads can be aimed at regions, cities or postal codes, or at a radius around your office. It also says location targeting is Google’s best effort and perfect accuracy isn’t something it offers. So check where the clicks really come from.
Ignoring the health advertising rules. Google’s policy on health in personalized advertising treats health as a sensitive category. Its examples include cosmetic surgery, surgical procedures and injections. For that category, you can use Google’s predefined audiences, but not advertiser-curated ones such as an uploaded customer list. Whoever runs your account should know which of your services that touches. You can ask them to show you the policy page and point to the lines that apply. Policies change, and Google makes the final call, so confirm with the policy page itself and, for patient-privacy questions, with your own compliance advisor.
How to choose a dental search engine marketing agency
You don’t need to learn the vocabulary. You need straight answers to a handful of questions.
Ask how the campaign will be built and what happens in month two and month three. Ask what the report shows, and how the fee is separated from the advertising budget you pay Google. Ask who sees the data, and whether the ad account stays yours. Ask whether they’ve worked with practices like yours. Do they ask which treatments you want more of?
Experience with dental practices helps. What matters just as much is whether they ask about your practice in particular. An agency that quotes you a package before asking about your schedule is selling what it already has.
Be wary of impressions and click counts as proof. They’re useful signals. The test is whether calls, form submissions and booking requests arrive and become patients.
Know what no agency can promise, too. Nobody controls what Google charges, what other practices in your area are bidding, or how many people search this month. The first weeks usually go to learning which searches bring suitable inquiries, so judge the first month on what you learned, not on the total.
Your front desk matters as much. Who answers the phone at lunchtime, and how fast does someone reply to a booking request sent at eight in the evening? A good campaign can send you a call that your front desk then misses.
Send us the schedule you want filled
Here is one thing to do this week. Ask your front desk to tally, for seven days, how each new patient says they found you and which treatment they asked about. It costs nothing and takes a few seconds a call. That tally tells you which appointments are worth paying for.
Then tell us what you want the practice to do next and what you’ve tried. We’ll look at your website, any existing campaigns and how inquiries are handled, then explain what we’d recommend, including the management fee and the ad budget. Our guide to search engine marketing for local business explains the mechanics if you’d like to read first. Your first consultation is free. Send us a message or call (215) 368-8900.