Most practice owners find an SEO agency the wrong way round. They wait for cold emails, take three calls, and pick whoever sounded most confident.
There is a better method: work backwards from practices that are already winning in search, find out who is behind them, and verify the agency before you ever speak to a salesperson.
Here is how to do it in an afternoon.
Start Where the Results Are, Not Where the Ads Are
Open an incognito window and search the way your best patients search. Use your city plus your highest-value treatment dental implants Sarasota, veneers Tempe, Invisalign Boise.
Ignore the ads. Look at the three practices in the map box and the top four organic results below it. Those seven businesses are being marketed by someone competent, and that someone is your candidate list.
Repeat the search for two or three neighbouring cities you do not compete in. Practices in non-competing markets are the ones whose agencies will actually take your call and whose owners will speak candidly.
How to Find Out Who Does a Practice’s SEO
Four methods, in order of speed.
Check the footer. Many agencies negotiate a credit link. “Website by…” or “Marketing by…” at the bottom of the page is the easiest answer available.
View the page source. Search the HTML for “agency”, “marketing”, or the tracking scripts. Call-tracking platforms, agency-specific analytics tags and third-party review widgets usually identify the provider.
Search the practice name plus “case study”. Agencies publish their wins. If a practice ranks well and appears in an agency portfolio, you have your match.
Ask the practice directly. A dentist two towns over has no reason to hide it. A short email — “you rank well for implants, who handles it, and are you happy?” — has a surprisingly high reply rate.
Five Places Worth Sourcing Candidates
- Study clubs and CE groups. The most honest recommendations in dentistry happen here.
- State dental association meetings. Vendors present, but peers talk in the hallway.
- Private practice-owner communities. Closed Facebook groups and forums where owners post what an engagement actually cost and delivered.
- Dental conference exhibitor lists. Agencies that invest in dental-specific events tend to be dental-specific businesses.
- Your own top-ranking competitors’ providers, sourced by the methods above.
Notice what is missing: paid directories and “top 10” blog posts. Those are placement inventory, and we cover why in our guide to comparing dental SEO providers.
Vet Them in Five Minutes, Before You Make Contact
Run these checks on every candidate before you spend a call on them.
Search their named clients. Take two practices from their portfolio and search that city plus a treatment. If the client does not appear anywhere near the top, the case study is old.
Read one content sample. Open any treatment page they have written. Is there a named author? A dentist credited as reviewer? Real cost information? Or 900 words of “maintaining good oral hygiene is important”?
Check the team on LinkedIn. How many people, in what roles, in what countries? A three-person front end with everything else subcontracted is a reseller, not an expert.
Look at the age of their own content. An agency whose blog stopped in 2023 has stopped investing in its own craft.
Check whether they name any client at all. Universal anonymity usually means either NDAs they invented or results they cannot show.
Does the Agency Rank for Its Own Terms?
This test gets misused, so use it carefully.
An agency that ranks nowhere for anything dental-related, and has no visible content, is hard to take seriously as a search expert. That is a fair signal.
But an agency ranking first for a hyper-competitive national term is not automatically better at local dental SEO those are different disciplines, and a large agency may simply be outspending everyone on its own brand. What you actually want to see is that they rank, and that their clients rank. The second matters more.
The Reverse Audit Test
This is the single most useful thing you can ask for, and almost nobody asks.
Instead of requesting an audit of your own site, ask a candidate to spend fifteen minutes on the practice currently ranking first in your city and tell you why it is winning.
An expert will answer structurally: profile categories and completeness, review velocity, which treatment pages exist, internal linking, page speed, and where the competitor is actually weak. A reseller will list generic issues from a scanning tool.
You learn more from that answer than from any proposal, because it shows you how they think when they cannot rely on a script. It also costs them almost nothing, so refusal is informative in itself.
Expert or Reseller? How to Tell
| Signal | Expert | Reseller |
|---|---|---|
| Client examples | Named, current, verifiable | Anonymous or years old |
| Content authorship | Named writer, dentist reviewer | No byline |
| First question they ask you | About your treatment mix and capacity | About your budget |
| Scope document | Specific deliverables per month | “SEO package — Gold tier” |
| Answer on timelines | Different by treatment | One number for everything |
| Google Business Profile | Central to the proposal | Mentioned once, if at all |
What “Expert” Should Mean in Dental Specifically
Dental search expertise is narrower than general SEO expertise, and the specifics matter.
It means understanding that a hygiene recall and a full-arch case are different conversions, and refusing to report them as one number. It means knowing that dental content is health content and that Google applies a stricter standard to it, so pages need a credentialed reviewer. It means treating the Google Business Profile as the primary asset for patient acquisition rather than an afterthought. And it means knowing which review practices put your licence and your FTC compliance at risk, not just which ones lift the star rating.
Specialisation is the whole reason we work only with dental businesses — but whoever you hire, ask them to demonstrate each of those four things rather than claim them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should this search take?
Two weeks is realistic: a few days sourcing candidates, a week gathering scopes and references, a few days deciding.
How many agencies should I talk to?
Three or four. Fewer gives you no comparison; more turns into a full-time job and every proposal starts sounding identical.
Should I hire a local agency?
Local matters far less than dental experience. An agency in another state that has ranked forty dental practices will beat a local generalist that has ranked none. What matters is whether they understand your market, not whether they can drive to it.
Is a big agency safer than a small one?
Not inherently. Larger agencies bring process and coverage; smaller ones usually give you senior attention instead of a junior account manager. Ask who does the actual work either way.
What if I have more than one location?
The requirements change substantially at scale, and we break them down by company size in our guide to choosing an SEO agency for dental companies.
Put a Candidate to the Test
The fastest way to end this search is to make each finalist show their thinking before you pay them anything.
Our audit comes back within 48 hours as a recorded walkthrough: where you rank across each treatment, how your Business Profile compares with the practices above you, the technical problems costing you visibility, and the three changes we would make first. Free, no obligation, and yours to keep whoever you hire.
Request your free audit and compare it against whatever else you receive.
Prefer to ask questions first? Get in touch and we will tell you plainly whether we are the right fit for your practice.
