SEO for dentists: how UK dental practices get found on Google

SEO for dentists is getting a dental practice found when people search Google for a dentist or a treatment nearby, such as "dentist near me" or "dental implants portsmouth". Google usually answers with a map of three practices, so it starts with your Google Business Profile, your NHS.uk profile, a page per treatment and steady reviews.

Before you change anything, see where you show today. A free Google Maps rank check shows where your practice ranks from 25 spots around it for one search, such as "dentist", with no sign-up.

Further down is a reading of seven real Portsmouth dental searches from 2 November 2026, and then what Google, the NHS and the General Dental Council (GDC) expect from a practice.

What is SEO for dentists?

SEO for dentists, also called dental SEO, is making your practice easy for Google to match to what patients search for in your area. It has two halves.

1. Local search. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews and your listings on other sites decide whether you appear in the map of three practices, the Google 3-pack, for searches such as "dentist" made near you.
2. Your website. A page for each treatment decides whether you show in the web results under the map, and for searches where Google shows no map at all.

Dental practices have one more layer than most local businesses: the NHS and the GDC both have rules about what you publish. Both are covered below. Solicitors face something similar, and our guide to SEO for solicitors covers the same practitioner rules from their side.

What Google showed for seven Portsmouth dental searches

We read seven Google searches on 2 November 2026 to see what a patient actually meets. Each was a search plus the town, such as "dental implants portsmouth", collected through DataForSEO's SERP API for the United Kingdom, on mobile, at about 09:50 UTC.

For each page we noted the map pack, who took the ten web results and whether Google showed an AI Overview. The practices are left out here.

KerbrankReal data

What the reading shows:

1. The map was on 6 of the 7 pages. The exception was "emergency dentist portsmouth", which had no map pack.

   Google showed an AI Overview instead, and four of the nine web results were NHS or regulator pages, such as the local NHS board's page on extra dental hours. Practices and dental groups still took four places there, three of them with pages written for emergencies.

2. Reviews didn't decide the order. The six maps had 18 places between them, filled by 11 practices. Every listing had 4.3 to 4.9 stars and between 17 and 902 Google reviews, and the practice with the most reviews came first in only 2 of the 6.

   The practice with the most reviews of all was in four maps and first in one, while a practice with 17 reviews made the implants map. Google's help page on local ranking says "Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity." Reviews are part of that, not all of it.

3. NHS.uk profiles ranked. The first web result for "dentist portsmouth" was one practice's profile page on NHS.uk, and another practice's NHS.uk page was tenth for "nhs dentist portsmouth". For some patients that profile is the first thing they read about you.
4. Listings sat above everything. Google's "Find results on" row of directory links appeared on all seven pages, at the top of six. Yell was in it on six pages and WhatClinic on five, with Doctify, Top Doctors and Cylex on some. In the web results, directory pages took 10 of the 68, six of them from one local community directory.
5. Own sites still took the most. Practices, dental groups and teeth whitening firms took 39 of the 68 web results with their own pages, often a page for one treatment rather than a home page. Facebook, Instagram and Reddit took 9, including two Reddit threads where people asked who to go to.
6. No ads. None of the seven pages had ads that morning, and Google's AI Overview showed on 2 of the 7.

This is one town on one morning, searched for the whole of the UK on a phone. A search made from a street in Portsmouth, on a desktop or on another day can show different practices, so run your own searches before you decide what to change.

To see who takes the map where your patients are, run a free rank check for your main search, such as "dentist" or "dental implants". It searches from 25 spots around your practice and shows where you come at each one.

What patients search for

Dental searches run into the hundreds of thousands a month in the UK. These are monthly averages from Google Ads keyword data (through DataForSEO, United Kingdom, checked 2 November 2026), with the lowest and highest month in the twelve months to September 2026.

January was the busiest month, or tied for it, for seven of these eight searches, and December was the quietest for the two biggest. About half of that volume says "near me" rather than a town, which means Google decides which practices to show by where the patient is standing when they search.

Set up your Google Business Profile as a practice

Google treats dentists as practitioners, with their own rules about who gets a profile. Its guidelines for representing your business say "Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners." What that means for a practice:

1. One profile for the practice. Where several dentists see patients at one address, Google says "The organisation should create a Business Profile for this location, separate from that of the practitioner."
2. Dentists can have their own, within limits. A dentist who sees patients and can be contacted at the practice during its hours can have a profile in their own name only. Google says a practitioner shouldn't have several profiles to cover different specialisms, and support staff shouldn't have one at all.
3. A single-dentist practice shares one profile. If you are the only public-facing dentist at a branded practice, Google says it is best to share one profile, named in the format "[brand/company]: [practitioner name]".

4. Pick one main category. Google says "Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business from the provided list." For most practices that is Dentist. Our guide to choosing your primary category explains how to check.

   Be careful with categories that name a specialism: the GDC's guidance says dentists who are not on a GDC specialist list "must not use titles which may imply specialist status such as Orthodontist, Periodontist, Endodontist". That rule is about titles rather than Google categories, but a category can read like one to a patient.

5. List treatments and add real photos. Add the treatments you want more of, from check-ups and hygiene to implants and aligners, with photos of your own rooms and team. Our guide to Google Business Profile optimisation goes through every field.

Keep your NHS.uk profile current

If you hold an NHS general dental services contract in England, your NHS.uk profile is part of the contract, not an extra.

The regulations say the practice must provide "a comprehensive and accurate profile" for the NHS.uk website, and must review it "at least once in every period of 90 days". If anything is wrong or missing, you send an updated profile.

The reading shows why that matters for search as well. An NHS.uk practice page was the first web result for "dentist portsmouth", above every practice's own website. Keep it in step with your Google profile: the same name, address, phone number, opening hours and treatments, and whether you are taking new NHS patients.

Give each treatment its own page

In the reading, many of the practices' web results were a page for one treatment, such as implants, Invisalign or whitening, rather than a home page. A single "Our treatments" page gives Google less to match.

A good treatment page says what the treatment involves, who it suits, whether it is available on the NHS or privately, how to book and who carries it out. The GDC's guidance on advertising, in force since 30 September 2013 and still listed on its site, applies to your website too.

It says "You must make clear in advertisements and other practice publicity whether the practice is NHS (or equivalent health service), mixed or wholly private", and that information carrying a dental professional's name must include their GDC registration number.

If you take emergency patients, give that its own page with clear hours and how to get an appointment. The emergency search had no map at all, so the practices that showed there did it with their own pages.

Reviews and listings

Google reviews. In the six maps every listing had at least 17 reviews and most had well over 100, so a practice with a handful will struggle. Ask every patient once their visit is done, with a direct link, and reply to every review.

Keep replies general: a reply is public, so never discuss anyone's treatment in it. Our guides cover how to get more Google reviews and how to respond to them.

Yell, WhatClinic, Doctify and local directories. They were the listings Google kept showing above the map. Some patients choose straight from those pages without reaching your website. Keep your name, address and phone number the same on each as on Google and NHS.uk. Our guide to local citations explains why matching details matter and how to check them.

Check where you rank across your area

Distance is one of the three things Google names, so a search from your own desk only shows how you look from the practice. A patient two miles away can see a different three practices.

Search for your main treatments from a few postcodes your patients come from, or use a grid that checks many spots at once. Our guide to ranking higher on Google Maps covers what to change when you find a gap.

Dashboard · Position mapExample

Kerbrank runs your dental searches, such as "dentist" or "dental implants", from spots across your area every week, and shows which practices hold the top three where you don't. You can try it with a 14-day free trial, no card needed.

Common questions