Dental marketing: how clinics fill the schedule without living on Instagram

Nobody searches "dentist near me" and books the first result

The query that ends in a booking is almost never the first query. A patient starts with the problem, not the profession: a cracked filling, a child's first cleaning, a tooth that hurts when they drink something cold. They search that. They get a map with three clinics in it, open two of them, read the recent reviews, then search the clinic name plus "reviews" to see whether anything ugly is hiding on another site. Somewhere in there they ask whether their plan covers it. Only then does anyone call.

That is five separate moments, and most clinics have built for one of them. Google says local results are ranked mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed — you are where you are. Relevance is what your profile and your pages actually say about what you do. Prominence is reviews, mentions and links. Two of the three are work, and the work is spread across those five moments rather than concentrated in one.

What patients type, and the page that answers it

Write for the moment, not for the keyword. Here is the same patient across a single week.

The middle three are where clinics lose people, and all three are questions about money and trust rather than dentistry.

The insurance page most clinics don't have

The Canadian Dental Care Plan has been running since 2024, and its eligibility rules are narrower than an applicant would guess. To qualify a person must have no access to private dental insurance, an adjusted family net income under $90,000, a filed Canadian tax return, and Canadian residency. Access counts even if the plan was never used, even if they declined to enrol, even if it covers only part of the cost.

A patient with a small top-up plan they have never once used is not eligible, and will not find that out until somebody tells them. A page that lays this out in one screen answers the call before it becomes a call. Say whether your clinic bills Sun Life directly, because participation is a choice each provider makes and patients cannot tell from the outside. Name the private plans you direct-bill. Explain what happens when a treatment plan runs past what a plan covers, and roughly how long a pre-authorization takes. That is the page, and almost nobody has written it.

Before you publish a single fee, read the fee rule

Ontario's college is explicit that there is nothing preventing a dentist from advertising a fee. The catch is what publishing one commits you to. Under the RCDSO advertising guidelines, unless the advertisement says otherwise, the fee you publish is the maximum, inclusive of all services and lab costs, and it applies to every patient — whether or not they ever saw the advertisement, and whether or not they have insurance.

That is a real commercial decision, not a formatting one. It is also why most clinics publish a range with the variables named ("a single crown, $1,100 to $1,600 depending on material and whether a build-up is needed") rather than one number. A range with reasons attached still answers the search. A page that says "call for pricing" answers nothing and loses to the clinic down the street that wrote three sentences.

What a college will not let you say

Dental advertising is regulated advertising, and the regulator's list is longer than most marketers assume. Ontario's rules bar testimonials and any statement that can only be verified by a person's feelings or views. They bar claims of superiority or uniqueness. They bar superlatives such as "state of the art" and "cutting edge". They bar incentive programs — giveaways, contests, draws, free products or services. They bar references to your continuing education, your society memberships and any degree beyond the one your registration required. And if an advertisement mentions a procedure, it has to disclose whether you are registered as a general practitioner or a specialist.

Read your own college's version, because they differ province to province. The pattern holds everywhere: the more a claim leans on how someone felt rather than what happened, the more likely it is off-limits. This is less restrictive than it sounds. It rules out the whitening giveaway and the "best dentist in town" headline, and it leaves you the entire category of plainly useful information, which is what patients were searching for anyway.

Reviews, under two rulebooks at once

Every clinic knows reviews matter. Fewer know how much of the standard advice violates Google's own policy. Google prohibits offering any incentive for a review, discouraging negative ones, and selectively soliciting the happy ones. It prohibits pressuring someone to leave a review while they are still on the premises. It prohibits asking for specific content, and it names asking a patient to mention a staff member as an example. It also prohibits telling your team to collect a set number of reviews.

So the tablet at the front desk with the hygienist's name on the card is two violations in one gesture. What survives is duller and works: ask every patient the same way, after they have left, through one link that opens in a tap. No filter, no target, no script for what they should write. Our guide to getting more Google reviews covers the mechanics.

The line you cannot cross in a reply

Replying to reviews is one of the few places a clinic can create a privacy problem in public, in writing, in thirty seconds. The moment you write "thanks for coming in for your cleaning on Tuesday", you have confirmed that a named person is your patient and disclosed something about their care. Consent under Canadian privacy law has to be meaningful and specific, and nobody consents to that by leaving a star rating.

The reply that works says nothing clinical and nothing that confirms a visit. Thank the person for the feedback, state the general standard you hold, and give a phone number and a name for anything specific. Same for a bad review: no version of the story, no correction of their facts, no defence. "We'd like to understand what happened. Please call the office and ask for Sarah." It reads as calm to every future patient reading it, which is the only audience that matters. There is more on tone in our guide to review replies.

The same rule governs content. A patient in a photo or a video is personal information. Get written consent that names where it will be posted, and tell them they can withdraw it later.

Recall and reactivation, and the law that governs both

Most clinics are sitting on several hundred patients who were active two years ago and have not been called since. That list is the cheapest new-patient channel in the practice, and it has a clock on it.

Canada's anti-spam law gives you implied consent to send commercial messages for two years from the last transaction and six months from an inquiry. So the patient last seen eighteen months ago is reachable. The chart from 2021 is not, unless you hold express consent. Texts count as commercial electronic messages the same as email, which surprises a lot of front desks. Every message needs sender identification, a mailing address that stays valid for at least sixty days, and an unsubscribe that is honoured within ten business days.

Worth separating in your own head: a reminder about an appointment somebody already booked is a different thing from "it's been a while, come back". Treat the second as marketing, run it against the consent list, and keep the record of where the consent came from. The burden of proving consent sits with the sender.

Then do the arithmetic with your own numbers rather than an industry average. Take the count of patients due for recall, your own historical response rate to a reactivation email, and the average value of a hygiene appointment plus whatever it typically uncovers. Multiply. Compare that to what a new patient costs you through ads. Run that comparison before you decide the answer is a bigger ad budget.

What a sustainable month looks like

The list below is not ambitious. It is what a clinic can actually hold for a year, which matters more than what it can hold for three weeks in January.

• One page written or rewritten a month, starting with insurance, fees and the two procedures you most want to book
• Review requests going out on every completed appointment, same link, no filtering
• Replies inside two business days, generic in content, warm in tone
• Two short videos a month — the space, the team, what a first visit is actually like — captioned, because most of them are watched with the sound off
• One recall email a month to the patients still inside the consent window, with one useful thing in it and one gentle reminder
• Profile updated whenever hours, services or staff change, which is more often than anyone remembers

Every item is simple on its own. Together they are a part-time job, and the front desk already has one. That is the actual problem in dental marketing, and it is not a knowledge problem.

What we'd run for a clinic

We sell four things, each on its own, in Canadian dollars, with no discount for taking more than one.

Organic Growth is $1,000 a month: ten designed posts, five reels, five search-built articles and one newsletter, plus your website, your reviews and your local search. Paid Growth is $1,000 a month with the ad budget separate and in your own account, which realistically needs about $1,000 a month of media to learn anything and covers up to $10,000. B2B Sales is $2,000 to set up and $1,000 a month after. Automation starts at $1,500 to build and $500 a month to keep running, which is the line the recall and reactivation sequences live on.

The constraint, stated before you ask: search takes about 90 days to move. Ads are the only line built to move a number inside a month. On the others, the first month is work you can look at, not a result you can bank. We make the content, run it past your college's rules, and nothing publishes until you approve it. There is more on sizing the spend in our small business marketing budget guide, and more on the practice side on our dental marketing page.