A dental marketing agency scored on appointments kept, not clicks.

Gets more of the right patients into the chair, and proves which spend did it. In practice that is four jobs: tracking that follows an enquiry through to a kept appointment in the practice software; Google Ads for the treatments people search for; dental SEO and the Google Business Profile for patients who compare practices before they call; and the front-desk numbers, such as answer rate and booking rate, that decide whether any of it pays. We run all four with the same senior operators, week to week.

Skip the question of who is best and ask who can show their work. A good dental marketing agency can tell you how it will measure kept appointments rather than leads, who will work in your account each week, how its fee is set (a percentage of spend rewards spending more), how it writes ads under Ahpra's rules, and who owns the ad accounts and data if you leave. If the answers come back as leads, a junior account manager, a percentage of spend, no sign-off process and 'the agency owns them', keep looking.

Two costs. The media, paid to Google and Meta, which depends on your suburbs and the treatments you promote. And the management fee: Australian agencies commonly charge 10 to 20 percent of ad spend, falling as spend rises, or a flat retainer of about $1,500 to $3,000 a month for small accounts and $3,000 to $8,000 for mid-sized ones. The practice pays us a fixed fee for the agreed scope, never a percentage of its spend, and the number comes in a written proposal after the free audit call. If the practice's spend is too small for the fee to pay for itself, we will say so on the call.

Dental Google Ads work when the account is built around treatments rather than one campaign for the whole practice. Emergency, general and family, implants, clear aligners and cosmetic work each get their own campaign, budget and landing page, because the value of a patient differs so much between them. Location targeting follows the suburbs your patients actually travel from, call assets run only while the front desk answers, and the negative list keeps out job seekers, students and free-treatment searches. The conversion is the appointment kept, imported from the practice software, not the form fill. Profit Geeks is a Google Partner agency, and the senior operators who build the tracking run the account.

Usually, when the tracking can see past the form fill. Paid search tends to earn its keep fastest on treatments where one patient is worth many clicks, such as implants, clear aligners and emergency care; check-up campaigns only pay when the practice counts recall value. The way to find out is a tight campaign per treatment, measured on cost per kept appointment against what that patient is worth over their recall cycle. If the number does not clear margin, we will tell you and move the budget.

Yes. Dental SEO runs on the same account as the ads: the Google Business Profile, a page for each treatment and suburb you serve, technical foundations, structured data, and content that answers what patients ask before they book, written so AI search tools can cite it too. Reviews matter, but Ahpra's rules stop a practice republishing reviews about clinical care or results as testimonials on its own website or in its ads; comments about things like parking, communication or the front desk are not testimonials. Daily social posting stays with your team or a specialist we recommend.

Start where patients already look. Complete the Google Business Profile and ask patients for a review on Google. Answer the phone: missed calls in business hours are often the cheapest new patients a practice is not getting. Make online booking work on a phone. Then add paid search for the treatments with the most value per patient, and dental SEO for the questions people research first. Measure each step on kept appointments and recall bookings, so you know which one to do more of.

Procedure-mix economics differ wildly (a $250 check-up and a $9,000 implant case can't be optimised on the same campaign). The conversion is usually a phone call, not a form. Patient lifetime value depends on a recall cycle most practices don't model. And the Google Business Profile and review flow often do more than the paid spend itself.

High-intent Google search dominates for most practices (general, emergency, cosmetic, ortho). Meta works for cosmetic and clear aligner work, within Ahpra's rules on images and claims. The Google Business Profile and review flow are often the best return of all, and the most neglected. The mix depends on procedure focus; we model it together on the call.

Praktika, D4W, Dentally, EXACT, Centaur, Open Dental, and HubSpot Health are all routine. If your practice is on something less common (LiveDDM, ChartMinder, custom), we'll confirm on the audit call whether a direct connection is feasible or whether a Zapier middle layer is required.

We set up and check the review-request flow during the rebuild and watch it in the weekly reporting. The requests themselves usually go out from your practice software or a review tool (Birdeye, Podium, NiceJob and Reputation are common). The flow is built so reviews land on the review platforms, rather than being republished as testimonials, which Ahpra's rules do not allow.

Rough heuristic: established practices spend 3 to 7 percent of revenue on total marketing, with 60 to 80 percent going to digital. A $3M practice is spending $90K to $210K a year on marketing, $54K to $170K on digital. Cosmetic and ortho-focused practices typically run higher; established general dentistry on the lower end.

Dental advertising is covered by section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law and by the Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, which took effect on 14 December 2020 and are still the current version. An ad must not be false, misleading or deceptive, offer a gift, discount or inducement without stating its terms, use testimonials, create an unreasonable expectation of beneficial treatment, or encourage indiscriminate or unnecessary use of health services. Ahpra reads a testimonial as a positive statement about the clinical side of care. Specialist titles are protected, and words like specialist or specialises in imply specialist registration, so a general dentist offering clear aligners cannot be advertised as an orthodontist. Practices that advertise higher-risk non-surgical cosmetic procedures also have separate guidelines, in force since 2 September 2025. We write the ads to these rules and the practice signs them off. For anything borderline, check Ahpra's advertising hub or ask the Australian Dental Association.