Guides

AI visibility for dental practices

Patients ask about cost, pain, waiting times and who is nearby. Most practice sites are organised around treatments instead.

The four questions patients actually ask

How much does it cost. Does it hurt. How soon can I be seen. Who near me does it. Almost everything a prospective patient types into an assistant is a variation on one of those four, and the last one is the one that decides whether a practice is on the shortlist at all. A practice site built as a catalogue of procedures can contain every relevant fact and still answer none of those questions in the form they were asked.

Rewrite the heading, keep the content

The highest-value change on most practice sites is also the smallest. A page headed Teeth Whitening, with three paragraphs of perfectly good information underneath, becomes considerably more useful headed Does teeth whitening hurt, and how much does it cost in your town. Nothing about the underlying content has to change. What changes is whether the page matches a question somebody asked.

Publish the things practices are shy about

Prices, waiting times and whether you are taking NHS patients are the three facts patients most want and the three most often left off the site. A price range with the conditions attached is more useful than no price, and it is far more useful than a PDF fee guide that nothing can read. If the answer is that it depends, write down what it depends on.

The basics still count

Opening hours, a practice name and address that match everywhere they appear, and named clinicians with real detail all stay in the check set when the site publishes them. These are not exotic requirements. They are the things a local business is assumed to have published and frequently has not, or has published three different versions of across a website, a directory listing and a footer.

How a practice is compared

A percentile compares a practice against other practices in the same industry, counting each site once however many ways it can be written. Verticals are never mixed, because a comparison against software companies would describe nothing real. A percentile is only published once the peer pool is large enough to carry it, and until then the report says how many peers exist rather than printing a comparison it cannot support.