Search engine optimization earns the patient who is ready today. Dental PPC reaches the one who is ready this hour, and it starts working the afternoon the campaign goes live.
That speed is the entire argument for paid search, and it is also how most practices lose money on it. A dental account that has never been structured properly will happily spend a month’s budget on people searching for dental assistant jobs, free clinics and dentistry degree courses. The platform does not care. It bills either way.
We run Google Ads for dentists and for nobody else, which means the account starts from a template built out of dental search behaviour rather than a generic setup with your treatments pasted in.
SEO reaches them. Slower to build, compounds for years, does not stop when you stop paying.
Paid search reaches them. Live this afternoon, stops the day the budget does.
Most practices need both, weighted toward ads early and toward organic as it matures.
Google Ads, the platform Google retired the AdWords name for in 2018, sells position at the top of a results page. You pay when somebody clicks, and what you pay is set by an auction that weighs your bid against your Quality Score, which is Google’s read of how relevant your ad, keyword and landing page are to each other.
Two clinics bidding identically on the same implant keyword can pay very different amounts per click, because one sends every click to the homepage and the other sends implant searches to an implant page. In dental PPC management that is not a nicety. It is money.
Not every chair is worth a paid click, and dentistry has some of the highest cost-per-click keywords in local services. The economics only work where the case value carries the acquisition cost.
The highest intent in the entire industry. Somebody in pain at 8pm is not comparison shopping, and they will call the first practice that answers.
Expensive clicks, but a single accepted case can cover a quarter of the ad spend. This is where careful landing pages pay for themselves.
Long consideration, strong search volume, and a treatment patients research by name before they ever search for a dentist.
Referral-adjacent, high case value, and genuinely underserved in paid search compared with how often it is searched.
Sleep apnea appliances sit in a category almost nobody bids on properly, which keeps the clicks cheap for the practices that do.
Routine hygiene rarely justifies paid search. We will tell you that before you spend, not after.
Google Local Services Ads are a separate product from Google Ads. They appear above the standard search ads, and they are billed per lead rather than per click.
It lives in a different interface from Google Ads and it requires paperwork. So it gets left empty. It is frequently the cheapest patient acquisition available to a practice, and we treat it as part of the same campaign rather than an afterthought.
“Managing” an account is not logging in monthly to adjust bids. In a dental account it means this.
Dental advertising is health advertising. Google’s personalised advertising policies restrict how audiences can be built around health conditions, which limits remarketing on treatment pages in ways that surprise most marketers.
Separately, protected health information must never reach analytics, conversion tracking or remarketing audiences.
Tracking is configured so call and form data supports attribution without pushing patient information into ad platforms. It is the boring part of PPC for dentists, and it is the part that becomes expensive when it is wrong.
Five questions that separate the field faster than a pricing conversation will.
If the agency does, you cannot take your history, your conversion data or your learning with you. It should be your account, with them granted access.
Percentage models reward spending more, not booking more. The incentive should not sit against you.
Cost per booked patient and case value. Click-through rate is a diagnostic, not a result.
Refusal means the wasted spend is being hidden. That report is where you see exactly what you paid for.
If they have not heard of it, they are leaving the cheapest slot on the page empty.
It depends on your area, your competition and which treatments you want. Implant and emergency keywords carry some of the highest costs per click in local services, while general dentistry terms are far cheaper. We give you a number on the call, after we have looked at your market, not before.
Calls usually start in the first week. Reliable data on cost per booked patient takes about 30 to 60 days, because the account needs enough conversions before optimisation decisions are anything other than guesswork.
Most practices should. Ads produce patients while the SEO work compounds, and the search terms report from a live campaign tells you which treatments genuinely convert, which then shapes the SEO content plan. Many practices start heavier on ads and shift budget as organic bookings grow.
In dental accounts it is nearly always one of four things: broad match with no negative keyword list, every click landing on the homepage, conversions counting form views rather than answered calls, or budget spread thinly across treatments instead of concentrated on the ones with real case value. An audit identifies which before anything is rebuilt.
Only if you ask us to. It is permitted, it is often cheap, and it occasionally starts a bidding war with the practice down the road that costs you both more than it earns. We will explain the trade before running it.
Yes. PPC for oral surgeons, orthodontists, implant specialists and dental sleep medicine clinics runs on the same principles but very different keyword sets, case values and referral dynamics.
If you are already running ads, we will pull the search terms report and show you where the budget is going and what it is producing. If you are not running yet, we will show you what the treatments in your area cost before you commit a dollar to them.
Dental practices only. No contract. Reply within one business day.
