01One clinic, several dentists: the profile question
This is where dental practices get tangled in a way a café never does. Google's guidelines for individual practitioners are specific. When several dentists work at one location, the practice should have its own Business Profile, separate from any practitioner's, and a practitioner's profile title should carry only their name. When one dentist is the only public-facing professional at a branded practice, Google recommends sharing one profile in the format brand: practitioner name. A practitioner should not have several profiles to cover different specialisations. Get this wrong and reviews end up split across duplicates.
- Several dentists at one address: one practice profile plus separate practitioner profiles
- A single dentist at a branded practice: one shared profile, brand: name
- One profile per practitioner, never one per specialisation
02Patients search for treatments, not for clinics
Someone with a broken tooth on a Sunday and someone comparing clear aligners in March type very different searches, and a single services page answers neither of them well. Each treatment you want to be found for needs its own page: what it involves at your practice, which dentist does it, how the first visit works and your price policy if you choose to publish one. Describe, do not promise. Words like painless or guaranteed make a health page less credible, not more, and a patient comparing three clinics notices. Relevance, the first factor Google names, is built here.
- One page per treatment you want to be found for
- Name the dentist who does it and explain the first visit
- Describe the treatment plainly; skip promises about outcomes
03Named dentists, structured data and careful review replies
Schema.org has a Dentist type that sits under both LocalBusiness and MedicalBusiness, so a practice can be described as exactly what it is, and each dentist can be marked up as a Person with the credentials the practice can actually verify. Reviews carry more weight than most owners think: Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, and that replying shows you value feedback. A dental reply has one extra rule. Never confirm that the reviewer is a patient or mention their treatment, because GDPR treats data concerning health as a special category. Thank them, and move anything specific to a private conversation.
- Mark the practice up as Dentist, not as a generic LocalBusiness
- Each dentist as a Person, with credentials the practice can verify
- Reply to every review without confirming anyone is a patient
04Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice
We have not written up a dental practice at /work, so we will not pretend to a specialism we have not shown. Our FOUND plan covers local SEO for five target keywords, and a clinic that wants to rank for twelve treatments across three neighbourhoods needs more than that. A group with many locations needs a dedicated multi-location setup, which is a different job. And if the chairs need filling this month, search is the slow route; paid ads are the faster one. Local SEO works for a practice willing to wait a few months for it to build.
- No dental case study at /work yet, and we say so
- FOUND covers five target keywords, which is small for a clinic with many treatments
- Need patients this month: start with ads, not SEO
A named person and a page per service, on a real address
Our closest parallel is a salon, not a clinic. For SCP Shine & Style on Strada Baba Novac in Sector 3, Bucharest, we gave every service its own page with its own copy and media, added Person schema and had the blog posts signed by the owner. For a dental practice the same pattern means a page per treatment and a real dentist's name on the work, which is what a patient comparing clinics looks for.
See the build: SCP Shine & StyleQuestions, answered
Should each dentist at our practice have a Google Business Profile?
Only dentists in a public-facing role who can be contacted at the verified location during stated hours, according to Google's guidelines. The practice keeps its own separate profile.
How long before local SEO brings new patients?
Profile fixes can show within weeks. Rankings built on treatment pages and reviews take months. We do not promise a position or a date, because nobody controls either.
Where PROOF48 fits
Local SEO for a dental practice is the general local checklist plus three things specific to dentistry: getting the clinic and practitioner profiles right, a page per treatment written without promises, and review replies that protect patient privacy. PROOF48's FOUND plan, at 297 EUR a month, covers the profile, schema and keyword work for a single-location practice.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.