How to Get More Patients: A Growth Guide for Dental Practices

Every dental practice owner reaches the same point eventually. The clinical side is solid, the team is good, and yet the appointment book has more gaps than it should. The instinct at that point is usually to ask “how do we do more marketing?” That’s the wrong question, and answering it properly, section by section, is what this guide is for.

Patient growth for a dental practice is not really a marketing problem. It’s a visibility problem, a trust problem, and a systems problem, all at once. Get found by the right people, give them a reason to trust you before they’ve even called, make it easy for existing patients to send new ones your way, and keep the patients you already have.

To ground this in what actually works day to day, rather than general theory, we sat down with Chris O’Shea, Samera’s Head of Marketing. Chris oversees growth and marketing strategy across the group of dental practices Samera runs directly, as well as advising practices we work with more broadly, which means his comments below come from campaigns he’s actually run and results he’s actually seen, not a textbook.

What Actually Brings In New Patients

Before spending a single pound on adverts, it helps to be honest about where new patients actually come from for most practices.

Know Your Channel

There isn’t a single universal answer here, and it depends heavily on who you’re actually trying to reach.

• Match the channel to your audience. “Really that depends on your business model, and it depends on your audience,” says Chris. “If you’re in an area with lots of young people and professionals then you’re probably more likely to lean towards something like social media. If it’s going to be more families and an older crowd then you’re probably going to rely on traditional Google, maybe Facebook if it’s an older crowd for social media.”
• No visibility yet? Start with pay per click. “If you’re not getting onto Google, then I’d really recommend relying on pay per click advertising, because if you’ve got no visibility then you need to pay for visibility.” Paid visibility is a bridge rather than a destination.
• Organic is the real long term goal. “We would much rather be in the top three on Google for free, organically, with our SEO, than pay for it,” Chris says, “but it completely depends, and marketing is one of those things that can be done in house if you have the time and patience for it, but it’s also something I would recommend using an agency for if you don’t have the time and energy to do it yourself.” Organic rankings, once earned, keep working without ongoing spend, whereas paid visibility disappears the moment a campaign is paused.
• New practices need realistic expectations. A new practice is “almost certainly not going to suddenly become number one on Google, certainly not without any reviews or testimonials.” An established practice with existing brand awareness will find organic ranking considerably easier to earn.
• Word of mouth still counts. “As long as your front of house is really good, your service is really good, word of mouth can be a really good thing, especially if you have some sort of refer a friend program,” Chris notes. A structured referral process, covered in section four, turns this into something reliable rather than a happy accident.

Map Your Patient Journey

Most practices have never written down, step by step, what happens between someone searching online and someone sitting in the chair. A simple exercise reveals more about where leads are being lost than any amount of channel analysis:

• Search the practice yourself from a phone, on an ordinary data connection, as if you’d never heard of it.
• Look at what comes up, click through to the website, and try to book.
• Then call the practice and see how the phone is answered, and whether the person answering knows what a new patient needs to hear.

Emergency Patients as a Channel

This came up as one of the strongest points in our conversation with Chris, precisely because the economics work differently to almost every other type of lead.

“If you really want to dive deep into emergency dentistry, both organically and with pay per click adverts, that’s a really good option,” he explains, “because normally, if you’re just doing dental implant adverts, people are usually researching, they’re just looking around. No one is looking for a dental implant that day. But an emergency dentist, they’re looking for it there and then.”

“If they’re looking for an emergency dentist, they either don’t have a dentist or their current dentist can’t help them right now, so if you can be the one to help them, you can either grab a new lead who doesn’t have a dentist, or you can steal a patient from another practice. And with emergency dentistry there’s a very good chance they’re going to need quite a lot of expensive follow up, so you’re not just getting a quick hygienist patient, you might be getting thousands of pounds worth of treatment down the line over the next five years.”

Chris O’Shea
Head of Marketing

Put simply, an emergency appointment is often the cheapest, fastest converting lead a practice will ever see, and the follow up value can dwarf the original appointment. It’s a channel Samera’s own practices “really kind of lean on quite heavily.”

The right question isn’t “how do we get more marketing.” It’s “where, specifically, are we losing people who were already looking for a dentist like us.”

Your Website and Being Found Locally

For most patients, the first contact with your practice isn’t a phone call. It’s a Google search, usually on a phone, usually while they’re in some discomfort or at least in a hurry. What happens in the next few seconds decides whether they book with you or scroll to the next result.

Organic Search Comes First

Of everything covered in this guide, this is the area Chris was most emphatic about.

“This is what our biggest plan of attack always is, organic search. It’s all about having a really good website, having really good SEO, having really good local SEO.”

Unlike paid advertising, which stops delivering the moment you stop paying, a genuinely good website with strong local SEO keeps earning attention indefinitely, which is why he treats it as the foundation everything else sits on.

Who Should Build It

“More than anything else, what I would say is, do not get a friend or family member who’s good at computers to do this for you. The website is something you need a specialist for, you need an agency, you need someone who specializes in either dental or healthcare, or at least B2C. That’s really really important. Your website is probably the most important thing in marketing, so get a professional to do it.”

Chris O’Shea
Head of Marketing

A generalist web designer, however capable, tends to be missing a few specific things, and those gaps show up later as lost leads rather than obvious faults:

• What actually converts a nervous dental enquiry into a booking.
• What a properly compliant healthcare site needs to include.
• How patients specifically search for dental treatment.

Chris is careful to note this isn’t a pitch for Samera’s own services, since website design “is not something we offer much,” but the underlying point stands regardless of who builds it: “This is one thing you can’t do quick and cheap. You need an agency to do this one. Everything else can be done in house or by a friend or family member, but this one, no, get an agency to do it.”

What a Good Dental Website Needs

• Team qualifications and credentials – Team qualifications and credential, visible, not buried. Feeds directly into what Chris calls EEAT, meaning experience, expertise, authority, and trust, the signals search engines and AI use to judge a practice. “That’s the whole point of a website now.”
• Fees, answered plainly – Fees, answered plainly, plus a proper FAQ. Price uncertainty is one of the biggest silent reasons enquiries drop off before ever becoming a booking.
• Multiple contact options – Meaning a form, a phone number, WhatsApp, and email. “Some people only want a phone, some people never want a phone, some people only want to reach out on WhatsApp.” Every extra barrier loses a slice of interested traffic.
• A blog covering each treatment – A blog covering each treatment, at minimum. Its influence has softened over recent years, but it’s “still worth doing,” mainly for the credibility signals above and for giving search engines specific, indexable content on each treatment.

The single technical priority beneath all of this is straightforward: “Make sure your website is incredibly fast.” A slow site undermines everything else on this list, since most visitors never wait long enough to see any of it.

Speed, Mobile, and the Technical Basics

• Run a simple speed test through a free tool like Google’s own PageSpeed Insights, and raise anything slow with your agency.
• If you run more than one location, give each site its own accurate address, phone number, and opening hours. A shared generic page across multiple sites actively harms local search performance for every location involved.

Pay Per Click Ads

Paid advertising has a place, but it works best as a targeted tool for specific goals, not a blanket solution for a quiet appointment book.

Where to Start With Paid Campaigns

If you’re planning to run this yourself rather than through an agency, Chris’s suggested starting structure matches each campaign to a genuinely different type of buying intent, rather than running one broad campaign covering everything at once:

• A general “dentist near me” campaign, set to roughly three to five miles squared around the practice.
• An emergency dentistry campaign, for people looking for an emergency dentist right there and then.
• One or two campaigns around your highest ticket items, such as dental implants or Invisalign, wherever the profit margin is greatest.

From there, the approach to budget is simple and iterative:

“You can start off quite cheaply, and then if that’s not working just raise the budget. If it’s working really really well you can lower the budget until you get to a level you’re comfortable paying but you’re still getting leads in.”

Expect Trial and Error

Worth knowing before you start is quite how much trial and error sits behind even the platforms themselves, which should take some of the pressure off getting it perfect from the outset:

“I have calls quite often with Google, with Facebook, about our adverts, and it’s never a case that they say, “right, this is the right option, we’re going to do this, see you later”. It’s always, “okay, well maybe let’s try this budget and this strategy, and we’ll talk again in a month and see if that worked”. So even Google and Facebook, they don’t really know their algorithms perfectly. So much of it is automated behind the scenes that it’s going to take a lot of trial and error, it’s going to take testing, it’s going to take time.”

Chris O’Shea
Head of Marketing

A campaign underperforming in its first month isn’t a failure. It’s the normal starting point for a process that even the platforms themselves treat as ongoing experimentation.

Most ads platforms will either give you the option to A/B test your ads, or let their own algorithms do it for you to figure out which works best. Make use of it!

Practical Points Worth Adding

• The landing page an ad sends someone to should match the ad exactly. Sending someone who clicked an Invisalign ad to your generic homepage loses a large proportion of that traffic for no reason.
• Basic conversion tracking, even just tracking phone calls and form submissions from ad traffic, is the only way to know whether a campaign is actually working rather than just generating clicks.
• Keep a close eye on cost per lead relative to what a lead is actually worth. “If it’s costing you five thousand pounds to get a lead in, then you need everyone to either take Invisalign or need five dental implants just to break even, but if you can get a lead in for a hundred pounds each on pay per click, you’re going to make money.”

A Regulatory Note Worth Keeping in Mind

Dental advertising in the UK sits under both general advertising rules from the ASA and CAP, and specific guidance from the General Dental Council on what dental practices can and can’t claim. Claims about outcomes, comparisons with other practices, and any offer involving price need to be accurate and not misleading. Worth checking current guidance before running a campaign, particularly around before and after imagery and any claims about pain free treatment.

Referrals and Reviews

If website visibility and paid ads are about reaching people who don’t yet know you, this section is about the two channels that work because people already trust the person recommending you, and about keeping the patients you already have.

Reviews

• Reviews are a ranking signal, not just social proof. “The more reviews you’ve got, either text or video or before and after pictures, that’s brilliant for the customer, but also Google wants to see that as well. The more five star reviews you have, and the more reviews in general you have, and the more you respond to those reviews, the higher Google is going to rank you, because the more trustworthy you seem to it.”
• AI relies on reviews too. “AI loves reviews. It relies on reviews, probably more than what you say about yourself.” A practice with genuinely great service but few reviews is quietly losing visibility, both on Google and increasingly with AI assistants, to a competitor with more of them, regardless of clinical quality.
• Expect a low response rate. “It’s very hard to get reviews. Of the hundred people you ask, you’ll be lucky if five actually do it. I know better than anyone in the world how important reviews are, and even I forget to do them. When I’ve had an amazing service from someone, I go away thinking, right, these guys are amazing, I’m definitely going to give them a review. And then three months go by and I’ll think, oh no, I forgot to give that review.”
• Ask everyone anyway. “You’re not going to get a hundred reviews if you ask a hundred people, but you need to ask a hundred people.” A five percent response rate isn’t a sign your process is broken. It’s roughly what everyone experiences.
• Never cherry pick who you ask. Selectively asking only patients you expect to leave a good review and skipping everyone else undermines the honesty of the signal, and most review platforms actively penalise practices whose review patterns look filtered or gamed.

Video Testimonials

Video testimonials are harder still to collect, and worth attempting for a different reason than written reviews.

“Of the hundred people you ask, you’ll be lucky if one agrees to it, because people don’t have the time, they don’t want their faces out there, they get awkward, they get embarrassed. But if you can get a handful of people sat in the chair, smiling, looking gorgeous with beautiful teeth, saying I’m here at this practice and they were amazing, they helped me out, here’s what they did, then that’s gold dust. Get that on social media, get it on your website.”

Chris O’Shea
Head of Marketing

Because so few patients agree, a practice only needs a handful of these across an entire year to have a genuinely valuable asset. Treat it as an occasional, patient project rather than something you expect to build quickly.

Retention and Rebooking

Keeping an existing patient is consistently cheaper and more reliable than acquiring a new one, and Chris’s approach to lapsed patients is worth adopting wholesale.

• Check in with lapsed patients, especially former emergency patients, a few months after their visit. “Give them a call in a few months to say, is everything still okay, is there anything more we can do, how’s the service, we’re still here if you need anything out of hours.”
• Keep the tone light rather than salesy. “Just communication, don’t overdo it, because remember you’re a dentist. Not everyone wants to be friends with their dentist. But get that communication going, get that relationship going.”
• Book the next appointment before the patient leaves the building. This is the single biggest lever in this entire section, and it costs nothing to implement. A patient who has to take the initiative to rebook is a patient who might simply not get round to it.

The payoff for genuine retention can be significant. “People will travel for a dentist they love. If you’ve given a great service and they move ten miles away, there’s a very good chance they will still travel to you. I still do it to a dentist I’ve had for years, and I moved about ten miles away, I still go to them whenever I can because I love them, I’ve known them for years, they’re brilliant.”

Reminders

Chris rates the basics over anything fancier here:

• Text, email, and WhatsApp reminders all work well.
• Newsletters are a slightly different story. “It’s not always the most effective option, because not everyone really cares about their dentist’s newsletter, unless you’re doing discounts and offers and special topics, that kind of thing.” A newsletter that gives the reader something, such as a discount code, tends to be worth the effort. One that simply reminds them you exist usually isn’t.

Social Media

Organic social media, video, and content writing each deserve honesty rather than hype. Whether any of it is worth doing at all is entirely audience dependent, not a universal yes or no.

“It can be fantastic, it can be a waste of time, it just depends on how much effort you’re willing to put in and what your audience is. If you’re in a tiny village that’s mostly older patients and very few young professionals, social media probably isn’t worth your time, because how many of them are on TikTok and Instagram?”

Don’t Chase Reach for Its Own Sake

Reach and relevance are not the same thing, and it’s easy to mistake one for the other when a post does surprisingly well.

“Everyone wants to go viral, but what does it matter if a million people a hundred miles away saw your amazing TikTok post? They’re not going to travel a hundred miles to become a patient. What really matters is that the fifty people within three or five miles of you saw it.”

A viral post that reaches the wrong geography is, in commercial terms, closer to a distraction than a win, however good the numbers look on the day. Local reach, even if it looks unimpressive next to a big view count, is the only kind that actually feeds the appointment book.

The Real Bottleneck Is Capacity

“The biggest problem you’re going to have is making enough content. Your dentists, your nurses, your front of house are busy, and unless they really buy into it, they’re probably not going to have the time to make the content, and they’ll probably sidestep it as much as they can.”

Be realistic about what your team can actually sustain month after month, rather than designing an ambitious content calendar that quietly stops being followed after a few weeks.

A Minimum Floor Worth Maintaining Regardless

Even where social media isn’t the core strategy, a bare minimum presence is worth keeping up now. “A few years ago, social media, if you didn’t do it, it didn’t matter. But now Google, AI, their algorithms want to see your name in as many places as possible, and that does include social media now.”

Chris’s suggested floor for a busy single site team:

• A team bio for each team member.
• One post covering each treatment you offer.
• A little behind the scenes content.
• A post sharing any blog article you publish.

“That should be enough. Once a week, once a month is fine if it’s not your business model.” Practices that do lean into social media as a core strategy should expect a far bigger commitment, with daily posting and consistently high production value.

Getting Recommended by AI

A newer question is starting to matter alongside traditional search: when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or a similar AI assistant to recommend a dentist, does your practice come up?

This Is Still Forming, Even From the Inside

“This is a tough one, because AI is still relatively in its infancy. You can ask AI and even it doesn’t really know what it’s using to recommend people, and each AI is different.”

His read on the differences between platforms is useful, even while acknowledging it’s still developing:

• ChatGPT tends to rely more on reviews and Trustpilot.
• Gemini cares more about Google reviews and your website.
• Other assistants weight more general brand mentions across the web.

Because different assistants draw on genuinely different sources, a practice can’t optimise for “AI visibility” as a single target. The fundamentals below help across all of them rather than any one platform specifically.

Treat It as an Extension of SEO, Not a Separate Project

“Try not to treat it too differently to SEO. It’s going to be all about brand more than just your website.” In practice, that means:

• Getting your social media good.
• Getting your name out there generally.
• Making sure other websites and organisations mention you, whether that’s other local businesses or a blog post placed with a local school.
• “Still rely on reviews, get your website brilliant, get your EEAT out there, make sure you’ve got all your qualifications.”

A properly briefed agency should already have some AI expertise in house to support this, and it’s worth asking directly whether they do.

Check Where You Stand Today

Ask a few AI assistants directly. Try asking ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a dentist in your area and see whether your practice appears, and whether the information given about you is accurate. This costs nothing and is worth repeating every few months as this area develops further.

Common Mistakes Worth Avoiding

This is the same underlying mistake from section two, seen from the other direction, and Chris didn’t hesitate on naming it as the single biggest cause of downstream problems:

“Getting a friend or family member to do your website, getting someone who’s good at computers to do a website cheaply, that’s probably the biggest problem I’ve seen. Your website is a hundred percent an investment, it’s not a cost. If someone charges you a couple of grand for a website, it’s probably not going to be good enough, and it’s going to cost you even more down the line to solve that issue.”

Chris O’Shea
Head of Marketing

The expensive part isn’t the agency fee. It’s the cost of eventually rebuilding a website that was never fit for purpose, on top of the leads lost in the meantime.

Treat the Relationship as Ongoing, Not a One Off Purchase

• Keep the relationship going after launch. “Get ongoing help. Don’t just buy a website from someone and end the relationship there. Have an ongoing SEO relationship with them, have a meeting with them once a month just to go over the rankings, the traffic, the leads, the clicks.”
• Stay personally involved. “Make sure that they’re interviewing you for each blog, make sure that you’re involved in creating the videos behind the scenes, so that nothing’s generic, everything feels like you, feels like your practice, feels like your brand.” A generic site built without your input tends to read as generic precisely because it is.

A Few Further Patterns Worth Avoiding

• Running paid ads to fix a problem that’s actually happening on the phone or at the front desk. More traffic simply means more people experiencing the same weak conversion.
• Mismatching social media effort to your actual audience, whether that’s over investing for an older, local patient base or under investing for a younger, urban one.
• Avoiding pay per click purely because it costs money, while sitting off the front page of Google with effectively no visibility. Keep a close eye on cost per lead rather than avoiding the channel altogether.

A Simple Way to Measure Whether Any of This Is Working

The Old Metrics Are Quietly Breaking Down

“A few years ago it would all be things like website traffic and clicks and impressions and your ranking on Google. Now AI has kind of destroyed that paradigm. Everyone is losing traffic on their website, everyone is losing clicks, everyone is losing impressions, because all the questions that you were answering on your website are now being answered by Gemini and ChatGPT. I don’t have to go on someone’s website now to find out how much dental implants cost, Gemini will know it.”

Chris O’Shea
Head of Marketing

A genuine decline in website traffic no longer automatically means something has gone wrong. It may simply mean AI assistants are now answering the questions your website used to.

What to Track Instead

“At the end of the day it’s all about leads. If you’re getting more phone calls this month than you were last month, something you’re doing is working. If you’re getting fewer bookings this month than last month, something needs to change.”

Chris’s own shortlist, worth adopting as a genuine monthly habit:

• New enquiries and where they came from
• Calls received
• Bookings made
• Repeat bookings

“I like to keep things simple. I care about leads and calls and bookings and repeat bookings. If they’re all going down, something’s going wrong.”

What to Actually Do First

Reading a list of everything a practice could do is not the same as knowing what to do this month. When we asked Chris directly where to start, his answer depended on which situation a practice is actually in.

• Brand new practice: “Get your website sorted, make sure you find a good agency. To me, your website is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy.”
• Existing practice trying to fix a problem right now: “If things are bad at the moment, then just bulk up the pay per click until things improve. That’s probably the best stop gap there is. As long as you’re not paying more for leads than you’re making from those leads, then you’re fine.”
• Either way, think about lead value across the whole relationship, not just the first appointment. “Remember that people don’t just buy from a dentist and then go away, they’ll come back year after year after year, if you’re good. So if that lead costs you five hundred pounds to get, and they only spend three hundred pounds with you that year, if they spend three hundred pounds the next year then you’re up a hundred pounds, if they spend three hundred pounds the year after that, now you’re at four hundred pounds up.” Even a lead that looks like a loss in month one can become genuinely profitable within a couple of years of good retention.

If you run a single site practice, in order:

1. Get your website properly assessed by someone who actually specialises in dental or healthcare sites.
2. Start asking for reviews after every good appointment, and don’t be discouraged by a low response rate.
3. Fix the habit of booking a patient’s next appointment before they leave the building.
4. Build a simple referral ask into the patient journey and brief the whole team on it.

If you run a small group, in order:

1. Standardise your Google Business Profile and review process across every site.
2. Put proportionate PPC spend behind your highest value treatments in each location, watching cost per lead closely.
3. Build retention into how each site is measured, not just new patient numbers.
4. Assign clear ownership of reviews, referrals, and local visibility to one named person per site.

None of this needs a large marketing budget to get started properly. It needs the right people doing the foundational work, and someone who actually follows through on it.

If you’d like help turning this into an actual plan for your practice, our Grow a Dental Practice service is built exactly for this, starting from wherever your practice is right now rather than a generic template.

How To Market A Dental Practice FAQs