Google Ads gets a dental practice in front of patients this week; dental SEO gets it in front of them for years without paying for every click. That is the whole trade in one sentence. Ads (Search, Performance Max and Local Services Ads) buy speed, control and precise targeting by treatment, but the leads stop the day the budget stops. Organic rankings and the Google Maps local pack take months to build, then produce new patients at a falling marginal cost. Most practices should run both, with the split set by practice stage, treatment mix and how many new patients the chairs can actually absorb.
Below: what each channel charges, how fast it books patients, cost per new patient worked both ways, the Google healthcare policies that limit dental ads, a tracking setup that credits each channel fairly, a decision matrix and a budget-split formula.
Request Dental SEO Quote
Ad Clicks Cost $8 While SEO Patients Fall to $173 by Month 24
- Dentists paid an average of $8.00 per click and $72.97 per lead on search ads in LocaliQ’s 2026 benchmarks, so a cost per lead is not a cost per new patient until booking and show rates are applied.
- In our worked example, ads deliver new patients at about $190 each from month one, while SEO costs over $1,100 per patient in the first six months and drops to about $173 cumulative by month 24.
- Local Services Ads charge per lead, and Google says lead credits are not available for health care verticals, which changes how you should judge LSA for dentistry.
- Health is a sensitive category in Google Ads: remarketing lists and Customer Match are not supported for health ads, so organic content has to do more of the nurturing.
- Set the ads budget as the gap between your new-patient target and what organic already delivers, multiplied by your proven cost per new patient, and shrink it as SEO matures.
Where Ads, the Map Pack and Organic Listings Sit on a Dental Results Page
Search “dentist near me” or “emergency dentist” on a phone in a US city and you will usually see four layers, each sold or earned differently:
- Local Services Ads (LSA): the “Sponsored” cards with a Google verification badge that typically sit at the top of the page in markets where they run. Pay per lead. Google added dentists as an LSA vertical in January 2023, according to Search Engine Land’s report.
- Search ads: text ads labelled “Sponsored”, bought in an auction on keywords such as “dental implants cost” or “Invisalign near me”. Pay per click.
- The map pack (local pack): three Google Business Profile listings with a map. Earned, not bought. Google states in its Business Profile help on local ranking that results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and that “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Ads can appear inside Maps, but the organic pack positions cannot be purchased.
- Organic results: your website’s homepage, treatment pages and location pages, ranked through classic dental SEO: content, technical health, links, E-E-A-T signals.
On top of these sits a newer layer, AI Overviews. A Pew Research Center analysis of March 2025 browsing data from 900 US adults found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of Google visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% without one. Google also announced at Google Marketing Live in May 2025 that it was expanding ads in AI Overviews and testing ads in AI Mode. Paid and organic now compete for a smaller pool of clicks on informational queries, which is one reason high-intent local searches (where the map pack and LSA dominate) matter more than blog traffic for dentists. Our guide to getting a dental clinic cited in AI Overviews covers the organic side of that shift.
How Search, Performance Max and Local Services Ads Bill a Practice
“Google Ads” is three different products for a dental practice, and they behave differently enough that lumping them together leads to bad budget decisions.
| Campaign type | You pay for | Targeting control | Best dental use | Main risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search | Each click | Keywords, match types, negative keywords, radius, schedule | Implants, Invisalign, emergency, sedation, specific procedures | Wasted spend on broad or job-seeker queries without tight negatives |
| Performance Max | Clicks and views across channels, optimized by Google’s AI | Asset groups, search themes, brand exclusions, account-level negatives | Practices with clean offline conversion data and enough volume | Spend drifting to Display or YouTube placements and to brand searches you would win anyway |
| Local Services Ads | Each valid lead (call, message, booking request) | Service area, job types, hours, weekly budget | General and emergency demand in US markets where available | Price set by Google’s market, limited query control, no lead credits for health care |
Search campaigns remain the most controllable. Your cost per click comes from an auction, and Google’s Quality Score documentation describes a 1 to 10 diagnostic built from expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google is explicit that Quality Score “is not an input in the ad auction”; it is a diagnostic. The underlying factors it summarizes still shape what you pay, which is why a dedicated implant landing page usually beats sending implant clicks to the homepage.
Performance Max runs across “Search, Display, YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and Maps” from one campaign, according to Google’s Performance Max best practices for lead generation. The same page recommends feeding it “lead scores, predicted lifetime value, or clearly defined conversion actions”, bidding on the conversion goal “closest to a sale or closed deal”, adding brand exclusions if you do not want it to serve on your practice name, and adding irrelevant terms as negative keywords. For a dental office, that translates to one rule: do not launch Performance Max until you can import booked appointments or completed treatment as conversions. Optimized to form fills, it will find cheap form fills.
Local Services Ads are priced per lead. Google’s How leads work page (Local Services help) counts answered calls, missed calls during business hours where the caller stays on more than 20 seconds, messages, voicemails and, in the US and Canada, booking requests. Repeat contact from the same number within 15 days of a charged lead is not charged again. The line most dental marketers miss is this one: “Credits are not available for health care verticals.” A plumber can get credited for a junk lead; a dental practice generally cannot. LocalU’s January 2023 write-up of the dental launch reported minimum bids of roughly $106 to $119 at the time, varying by location, so test LSA with a capped weekly budget and score every lead in your practice management software.
What Organic Rankings and the Local Pack Actually Cost to Win
SEO has no media cost, but it is not free. The spend goes into people and assets: Google Business Profile optimization, review generation, treatment and location pages, technical fixes, schema markup (Dentist, LocalBusiness, MedicalProcedure, FAQPage), citation and NAP consistency, and links from local organizations. The bill arrives as a retainer, a freelancer, or staff hours.
Pricing varies widely. Ahrefs’ SEO pricing poll of SEO providers (published December 2023, across all industries) found the most common monthly retainer band was $501 to $1,000, chosen by 20.4% of respondents. Competitive dental markets usually need more than that, especially for multi-location groups. Our dental SEO cost breakdown explains what drives the range so you can compare proposals line by line.
Three properties make SEO economics different from ads:
- Front-loaded cost, back-loaded return. You pay from month one; patients arrive later. Google’s own guide to hiring an SEO suggests asking any provider “What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe?” and warns that “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”
- Assets keep working. A well-ranked implant page or a Business Profile with hundreds of recent reviews keeps producing calls if you pause the retainer, though rankings decay if competitors keep investing.
- Reviews compound. BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (1,002 US adults) found 68% of consumers require at least four stars and 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews. Reviews lift map pack prominence and improve conversion on ad clicks that land on your profile, so review work pays twice.
For the step-by-step on the map pack itself, see our guide to ranking a dental practice on Google Maps.
Speed to First Booked Patient: A Realistic Month-by-Month View
Speed is where ads win outright. A Search campaign can be live within days of account setup and ad review; Local Services Ads take longer because of verification, which Google requires before dentists can advertise. SEO timing depends on the starting point, which is why the table below shows ranges rather than promises.
| Period | Google Ads (Search / LSA) | Dental SEO (organic + map pack) |
|---|---|---|
| Week 1 to 4 | Clicks and calls start once ads are approved; first data on search terms and cost per lead | Audit, Business Profile fixes, tracking, review requests begin; little change in patients |
| Month 2 to 3 | Negative keywords and bids tuned; cost per booked patient becomes measurable | Treatment and location pages published; early movement on long-tail and branded terms |
| Month 4 to 6 | Stable cost per new patient if tracking is clean; scaling limited by budget and capacity | Map pack gains for nearby searches; organic leads become visible in call tracking |
| Month 7 to 12 | Same economics, often rising CPCs as competitors join | Compounding: more terms ranking, lower marginal cost per new patient |
| Year 2+ | Still paying for every click | Maintenance plus expansion into new treatments and neighborhoods |
A brand-new practice with no reviews or links sits at the slow end of every SEO range; an established practice that has neglected its Business Profile can often see map pack movement soon after fixing categories, services, photos and review flow.
Cost per New Patient, Worked Both Ways With Real Benchmarks
Cost per lead is the number agencies like to report. Cost per new patient who actually sat in the chair is the number that matters. The worked example below is an illustration with stated assumptions, not a forecast; swap in your own figures.
Google Ads Side of the Ledger
Benchmarks: LocaliQ’s 2026 search advertising benchmarks (WordStream by LocaliQ data across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads) put Dentists and Dental Services at a $8.00 average CPC, a 10.67% conversion rate and a $72.97 cost per lead. The 2024 edition (data April 2023 to March 2024) showed $6.82 per click and $86.49 per lead. Across the two editions, CPC rose 17.3% while cost per lead fell 15.6%, as the reported conversion rate rose from 8.36% to 10.67%. Clicks got dearer; converting them got better.
Assumptions for the illustration: $4,000 monthly ad spend, $750 management fee, the 2026 benchmark CPC and conversion rate, 55% of leads booking an appointment and 85% of booked patients showing up. Show rates matter more than most owners expect; our dental no-show rate statistics show why.
| Step | Calculation | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Clicks | $4,000 / $8.00 | 500 |
| Leads (calls + forms) | 500 x 10.67% | 53.4 |
| Cost per lead (media only) | $4,000 / 53.4 | $74.98 |
| Booked appointments | 53.4 x 55% | 29.3 |
| New patients who show | 29.3 x 85% | 24.9 |
| Cost per new patient (media only) | $4,000 / 24.9 | $160 |
| Cost per new patient (with $750 fee) | $4,750 / 24.9 | $190 |
Dental SEO Side of the Ledger
Assumptions: a $2,500 monthly SEO retainer and an organic ramp from zero incremental new patients in months one and two, rising to 16 per month by month 12 and 25 per month by month 24. Both the fee and the ramp are illustrative; your market’s competition decides the real curve.
| Point in time | Cumulative SEO cost | Cumulative new patients | Cumulative cost per new patient | That month’s cost per new patient |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 6 | $15,000 | 13 | $1,154 | $417 |
| Month 12 | $30,000 | 88 | $341 | $156 |
| Month 18 | $45,000 | 205 | $220 | $114 |
| Month 24 | $60,000 | 346 | $173 | $100 |
The ads line is flat at about $190 per new patient for as long as you pay. The SEO line starts far above it, crosses it in the second year on a cumulative basis, and keeps falling. That crossover is the real answer to “which is cheaper”: ads are cheaper for the next six months, SEO is usually cheaper over a two-to-three-year horizon, provided the practice survives the ramp and the work is good. You can run your own version in our SEO ROI calculator for dental clinics.
Break-Even CPC: The Ceiling That Tells You When Ads Stop Paying
Before you argue about whether $8 or $15 a click is expensive, calculate the most you can afford to pay. The formula:
Break-even CPC = allowable cost per new patient x lead rate x booking rate x show rate
Allowable cost per new patient should come from contribution margin, not gross production. Illustration: if a new general patient produces $1,000 in first-year collections and 35% of that is left after clinical costs, the allowable acquisition cost on a first-year basis is $350. Multiply by 10.67% x 55% x 85% and the break-even CPC is about $17.46. At the 2026 benchmark of $8.00 there is room; in a metro where “dentist near me” runs well above that ceiling, Search ads lose money on first-year value and only work if you count patient lifetime value.
Run the same formula for implants with different assumptions: $4,500 case value, 45% margin (allowable $2,025), a 6% lead rate, 30% of leads becoming a booked consult that converts, 90% show rate. Break-even CPC comes out near $32.80. That is why implant keywords can carry much higher bids than hygiene terms and still pay.
Implants, Invisalign and Hygiene: Why Treatment Mix Changes the Answer
A blanket “ads or SEO” decision ignores the biggest variable in dental marketing: the value and urgency of the treatment being searched.
| Treatment type | Search behavior | Lean toward | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency dentist, toothache | Urgent, mobile, call-first, often out of hours | LSA + Search call ads, plus a strong Business Profile | Patients pick from the top of the page within minutes; hours and phone answering decide the winner |
| Implants, All-on-4, full-arch | High value, long research cycle, price comparison | Search ads for bottom-funnel terms, SEO for cost, candidacy and financing content | High break-even CPC supports ads; long research favors in-depth organic pages |
| Invisalign, clear aligners, veneers | Comparison shopping, brand terms, before-and-after interest | Both, with strong treatment pages and reviews | Aligner brands and DSOs bid heavily; organic proof (cases, reviews) lifts conversion |
| Hygiene, checkups, new family patients | Local, price-sensitive, insurance-driven | Map pack and local SEO first; Search ads on tight radius | Low first-year value caps your CPC; proximity and reviews win |
| Pediatric, sedation, sleep apnea | Niche intent, smaller volume | SEO treatment pages, small Search budget | Lower competition makes organic rankings reachable faster |
Implant consults show why tracking deeper than the lead matters. In an illustration with a $15 CPC and $3,000 monthly spend, 200 clicks at a 6% lead rate give 12 leads; if half book a consult and 35% of consults accept treatment, you get about 2.1 cases, or roughly $1,429 in ad cost per accepted case. Judged at cost per lead ($250), that campaign looks terrible. Judged per case against a $4,500 treatment, it can be the best money the practice spends. Split your keyword list along these value lines before any budget is set.
How Paid and Organic Search Feed Each Other
The two channels share one results page, one set of patients and one Business Profile. Run them in isolation and you pay twice for the same knowledge.
- Search terms report becomes the SEO roadmap. Ads show you, within weeks, which exact queries produce booked patients. Export converting search terms every quarter and assign each to an existing or new treatment page. Search Console then confirms whether organic impressions follow.
- SEO pages lower ad costs. The same treatment pages that rank organically make better ad landing pages. Google lists landing page experience as one of the three Quality Score components.
- Negative keywords protect both. Terms such as “jobs”, “school”, “free”, “assistant salary” and “DIY” waste ad spend. They also tell you which informational topics deserve an organic article rather than a paid click.
- Reviews serve both. Profile reviews improve map pack prominence and the conversion rate of every ad click that checks your rating before calling.
The Brand Search Question
Should you bid on your own practice name when you already rank first organically? Google’s 2011 Search Ads Pause studies, based on over 400 paused accounts, reported that on average 89% of paid clicks were not replaced by organic clicks when ads were paused. That is Google’s own research, from 2011, averaged across verticals, so treat it as a hypothesis to test, not a rule for your practice. Two dental-specific reasons to bid on brand anyway: competitors and DSOs may bid on your name (Google’s trademark policy does not restrict trademarks used as keywords, only in ad text), and brand ads let you control the message, such as “Now accepting new patients”.
Run a simple brand holdout test: record four weeks of total brand clicks and calls (paid plus organic, from call tracking and Search Console), pause brand ads for four weeks, then compare. If total brand calls hold steady, the brand budget was buying clicks you already owned. If they fall and competitor ads appear on your name, turn brand ads back on. For Performance Max, use brand exclusions so it cannot claim credit for patients who searched your name.
Google Healthcare Ad Policies That Limit Dental Campaigns
Dental services are not a prohibited category in Google Ads, but several policies narrow what you can do, and they push practices toward organic channels for retargeting and nurturing.
- No remarketing lists or Customer Match for health ads. Google’s personalized advertising policy lists health as a sensitive interest category. For ads in such categories, “Your data segments” (remarketing) and Customer Match are not supported because these audiences “may inadvertently contain sensitive user signals.” Google’s predefined audiences, such as in-market segments and demographics, can still be used. Practical effect: you cannot reliably chase implant-page visitors around the web, so your website and email (sent from your own systems) do the follow-up.
- Prescription drug terms. The Healthcare and medicines policy restricts prescription drug terms in ads, landing pages and keywords. If your practice offers Botox for TMJ or facial aesthetics, expect disapprovals on that vocabulary.
- No speculative or experimental treatments, and no claims that unapproved products are safe or effective. Keep stem cell, “regrow your teeth” or unproven whitening claims out of ad copy and the pages ads link to.
- Trademark limits in ad text. Under the trademark policy, Google may restrict a trademark used in ad text by a direct competitor or in a confusing way, while ordinary descriptive use is not restricted. Keep competitor practice names and DSO brands out of your headlines.
Professional advertising rules apply to both channels. The ADA Code of Ethics, Section 5.F says dental advertising must not be “false or misleading in any material respect”, including creating an “unjustified expectation about results”, and Section 5.H governs specialist claims. State dental boards add their own rules. On the SEO side, the FTC’s fake reviews rule (finalized August 2024, effective October 2024, civil penalties up to $51,744 per violation per Davis Wright Tremaine’s summary) bans fake reviews, incentives conditioned on positive sentiment, and undisclosed insider reviews, so review generation has to be clean.
Tracking Setup So Neither Channel Gets Credit It Did Not Earn
Most dental marketing arguments are really tracking failures. If ads report “conversions” from button clicks and SEO reports “traffic”, you cannot compare them. The setup below lets you report cost per new patient by channel. Your website conversion rate benchmarks will mean more once this is in place.
- Call tracking with source-level numbers. Use dynamic number insertion so ad visitors, organic visitors and Business Profile callers each see a different tracking number, with call recording or outcome tagging where your state’s consent rules allow. Inside Google Ads, the phone call conversion options include calls from ads, calls to a Google forwarding number on your website, and imported call conversions from another system. Forwarding numbers are only available in certain countries, and you set the minimum call length that counts as a conversion. Pick a threshold that filters out wrong numbers and quick hang-ups, then check it against recorded call outcomes.
- GA4 key events. Google defines a key event as an event that “measures an action that’s particularly important to the success of your business”. Mark form submissions, online booking completions and click-to-call taps as key events, and create Google Ads conversions from them so both tools count the same actions.
- Offline conversion import. Capture the GCLID in a hidden form field and pass booked or completed appointments back to Google Ads. Google’s offline conversion import FAQ says GCLID conversions can be uploaded up to 90 days after the click, enhanced conversions using personal data up to 63 days, and recommends daily uploads for Smart Bidding. It calls enhanced conversions for leads “an upgraded offline conversion import that is easier to set up.” Google’s Salesforce integration guide shows the same pattern for CRM-based setups.
- UTM tags on the Business Profile. Add UTM parameters to the website link in your Business Profile so map pack visits are not lumped into generic organic in GA4.
- A monthly source reconciliation. Ask every new patient how they found you, record it in the practice management system, and reconcile that against call tracking and Ads data. Self-reported source is imperfect, but it catches what tags miss.
HIPAA Boundaries for Dental Tracking
Google states in its HIPAA and Google Analytics help article that it “does not offer Business Associate Agreements in connection with this service”, that authenticated pages are likely to be HIPAA-covered and should not carry Analytics tags, and that regulated customers “must refrain from exposing to Google any data that may be considered Protected Health Information.” HHS’s 2024 tracking technologies bulletin was partly vacated in June 2024 in American Hospital Association v. Becerra, but, as Holland & Knight’s analysis explains, only the part about unauthenticated public pages; guidance on authenticated pages such as patient portals stands. In practice: no tags on patient portals or intake forms that collect health details, no treatment details or appointment reasons in conversion uploads, a BAA with your call tracking vendor if it records calls, and a privacy policy that describes what you actually run.
Google Ads or Dental SEO: Decision Matrix by Practice Stage
Use this as a starting position, then adjust with your own cost per new patient data after 90 days.
| Situation | Ads share of digital budget | SEO share | Priority moves |
|---|---|---|---|
| New practice or de novo (months 0 to 12) | 60 to 75% | 25 to 40% | Search ads on core treatments and emergency, test LSA, build Business Profile and reviews from day one, launch treatment pages |
| Established single practice, strong reviews | 25 to 40% | 60 to 75% | SEO for treatment and neighborhood pages; ads only for high-value treatments and brand defense |
| Practice with empty chairs this month | Shift up temporarily | Hold steady | Raise Search and LSA budgets for the gap; do not cut SEO, it is the cheaper source next year |
| Fully booked practice | Cut to brand and high-value terms | Maintain | Use ads only for treatments you want more of (implants, aligners); stop paying for hygiene leads you cannot seat |
| Multi-location group or DSO | Per location, by maturity | Central SEO plus local pages | One Business Profile per real location, location pages with unique content, ads budgets set per office capacity and cost per patient |
| Specialist (ortho, perio, oral surgery) | 30 to 50% | 50 to 70% | Referral SEO and condition content, ads for consult-intent terms, parent targeting for ortho |
These percentages are a framework, not a benchmark. The point is direction: new practices buy time with ads, mature practices buy assets with SEO, and every practice should base the next quarter’s split on measured cost per new patient rather than on which agency pitched best.
A Quarterly Budget-Split Formula You Can Rerun
Instead of picking a percentage, size the ad budget from the patient gap. Rerun this every quarter:
- Set the target: new patients per month the schedule can actually absorb (check open hygiene and doctor hours, not just ambition).
- Measure organic delivery: new patients last month from organic search and the Business Profile, using call tracking plus self-reported source.
- Find the gap: target minus organic delivery.
- Price the gap: gap x your measured all-in ads cost per new patient. That is the ad budget.
- Fund the asset: keep SEO funded at a level that grows organic delivery each quarter, so the gap, and the ad budget, shrinks.
Illustration: a practice targets 40 new patients a month, organic delivers 15, and ads cost $190 per new patient all-in. Gap = 25, so the ad budget is 25 x $190 = $4,750 a month. If SEO lifts organic delivery to 30 a year later, the gap falls to 10 and the ad budget to $1,900, freeing $2,850 a month for expansion or profit. If organic delivery is not growing after 12 months, that is a signal to review the SEO provider, not to keep raising ad spend. Compare providers in our US dental SEO agency directory or read our full dentist SEO guide for the organic playbook.
Notes for UK, Canadian and Australian Practices
- United Kingdom: the CAP Code applies to ads and websites alike. The ASA’s dental advertising advice (March 2022) requires evidence for objective claims, genuine and representative before-and-after photos, and notes that some facial injectables are prescription-only and cannot be advertised to the public. GDC guidance on specialist titles also applies to ad headlines.
- Australia: the Australian Dental Association’s advertising compliance page summarizes National Law rules administered by Ahpra, including that advertising must not use testimonials about the service or create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment. Check ad copy, review extensions and organic pages against these rules before launch.
- Canada: Local Services Ads booking-request leads are listed for the US and Canada in Google’s lead rules, but confirm the dentist category is offered in your area during sign-up. Provincial dental regulators set advertising rules, so have your regulator’s guidance checked before writing ad copy.
- Everywhere: Google’s health policies, sensitive-category audience limits and location option settings apply globally. Set location targeting to “Presence” rather than the default “Presence or interest” so a dental ad budget is not spent on people merely interested in your city.
Choosing Between PPC and SEO: Budget, Timing and LSA Answers
Is SEO or Google Ads Better for a New Dental Practice?
Google Ads first, SEO from day one. A new practice needs patients before organic rankings mature, so Search ads and LSA carry the early months. Start Business Profile, review and treatment-page work at the same time so the ads budget can shrink in year two.
How Much Should a Dentist Spend on Google Ads per Month?
Size it from your patient gap and measured cost per new patient rather than a flat figure. With LocaliQ’s 2026 dental benchmarks ($8.00 CPC, $72.97 cost per lead), a $4,000 media budget produces roughly 50 leads before booking and show rates are applied.
How Long Does Dental SEO Take Compared With Google Ads?
Ads can produce calls within days of approval. SEO depends on competition and your starting point: Business Profile fixes can move map pack visibility within weeks, while competitive treatment terms in large cities can take many months. Ask any provider for a timeline and what it is based on, as Google’s hiring guide suggests.
Are Local Services Ads Worth It for Dentists?
They can be for general and emergency demand, because you pay per lead and appear above Search ads. The catch is that Google does not offer lead credits for health care verticals, so score every LSA lead in your practice software and compare cost per new patient with your Search campaigns.
Can Dentists Use Remarketing in Google Ads?
Not in the usual way. Health is a sensitive interest category, and Google does not support remarketing lists or Customer Match for health ads. Predefined audiences such as in-market segments are still allowed.
Should I Stop SEO Once Google Ads Is Working?
No. Ads cost the same per patient every month you run them, while SEO’s marginal cost per patient falls as rankings mature. Stopping SEO locks you into paying for every future patient, and rising CPCs make that more expensive over time. See our dental SEO pricing guide for typical fee structures.
Your First 30 Days: The Order That Avoids Wasted Spend
- Days 1 to 7: install call tracking by source, GA4 key events, GCLID capture and a “how did you hear about us” field in the practice management system.
- Days 8 to 14: fix the Business Profile (categories, services, hours, photos, UTM link) and start a compliant review request routine.
- Days 15 to 21: launch Search campaigns for two or three high-value treatments and emergency, with Presence targeting, a negative keyword list and dedicated landing pages.
- Days 22 to 30: publish or rebuild those same treatment pages for SEO, set up offline conversion import, and book a 90-day review where you compare cost per new patient by channel.
After 90 days you will have your own numbers, which beat every benchmark in this article. If you want help on either channel, use the quote form near the top of this page to hear from dental marketing agencies that handle both paid and organic.