Dentists Skip the Website More Than Almost Any Trade I Checked
76.5% of the dental practices I sampled have a website, against 83% of small businesses. The rest are still getting described, just not by them.
You’re braced for a lecture from a web guy. Every dentist I meet is. I can feel it through the screen, and honestly, I’d be braced too.
You’ve been hearing this one since about 2009, mostly from people who wanted a monthly retainer out of you, and your schedule stayed full through every year of it.
So I’ll skip the lecture and tell you about one practice instead.
I do owe you the number that sent me looking, though, because it’s the reason I ended up on their doorstep.
76.5% of the dental practices I sampled have a website, 42nd of the 47 industries I checked, where 83% of small businesses in general do.
I ran that check twice. A medical trade sitting that low wasn’t a result I expected, and it’s the worst placing dentists take on anything I grade.
What makes it stranger is that the practices who do have a site keep a closer eye on theirs than most trades manage, so dentistry comes out careful and absent at the same time.
The practice
Call them Ridge Road Dental. Two dentists, one hygienist, a good building on a road that thousands of cars use twice a day.
No website. Never had one. Thirty-one years of referrals, an insurance plan that listed them, and a sign.
Why would anybody in that building have bothered? Three arrangements that had never once failed them were still delivering patients every week of the year.
Every owner who turns me down has a reason that solid, and I’ve been collecting the six I hear most often since long before I audited anything.
They found me the way most dental practices do, which is that another dentist handed over my number. Their hygienist had moved out of state in the spring, and for the first time in a decade there was room in the book on a Thursday.
What I found when I looked
Before anybody talked about building anything, I borrowed a phone that had never searched for them, turned the location setting off, and looked them up the way a stranger would.
First result: an insurance directory, with one of the dentists’ names spelled wrong.
Second: an aggregator page assembled by a company that had never met them, with a “claim this listing” button sitting at the top of it.
Third: a Facebook page a former office manager set up in 2016 and lost the password to.
Which of those three would you want a frightened stranger reading first?
Nobody without a website is invisible. That would almost be easier to fix. You get described, thoroughly and permanently, just never by you.
Their Google listing was the best thing on the screen, and it still only held hours, a pin on a map and a handful of photos. Every practice’s listing resembles every other practice’s listing, because directories are constructed that way deliberately.
A listing can’t hold why they bought the scanner, or how they handle a terrified eight year old, or what happens when a family can’t pay for all of it at once. Those are the questions a mother is trying to settle long after your phone line has gone to voicemail, and when the screen has no answer she goes back to the results and taps the practice underneath yours.
The goodwill was real, mind you. Practices I opened carry 162 Google reviews on average, at 4.6 stars, and Ridge Road was in fine company there.
Not every practice gets even that far. I found 85.3% holding at least one review, 39th of 47, against 88% of small businesses.
The part that actually costs you
The stranger with the toothache isn’t what convinced them. It was the referral they’d already earned.
A patient recommends you at a barbecue on a Saturday afternoon. The person she’s talking to nods, says thank you, and looks you up in the car before they’ve reached the end of the street.
That recommendation is the most valuable advertising a dental practice will ever receive, it arrives completely free, and it expires in a parked car if there’s nothing on the screen to confirm it.
Dentists are hardly alone in letting that happen, because Anaheim owners lose the same referral in the same parked car every day of the week.
So they read a misspelled directory entry, or a Facebook page nobody has touched since 2016, and they book with the practice that had photographs of its office and a page about nervous patients.
Would you have decided differently, standing in a supermarket car park with a phone in your hand and a sore tooth of your own?
You did the hard work of earning that. You handed the result to whoever showed up better on a phone.
What we changed
Five pages. Who they are, what they fix, what it costs to walk through the door, where to park, and a way to ask for an appointment without picking up the phone.
The picture in an owner’s head is always a custom build with a booking engine, a six month timeline and a number that makes them wince. Ridge Road got none of that.
Those shares don’t add up to a hundred, because a site can match two of them and plenty match none the check can name.
Ordinary tools, in other words. The same ones the bakery down the road runs, and picking dentists in the market explorer hands you that list back with the number of sites behind every share, if you’d rather not take my word for any of it.
The build itself took less time than the deciding did, which is how these things generally go.
What happened after
Six weeks in, the front desk stopped explaining the fee policy over the phone, because callers had already read it.
A patient told them she’d booked because of the parking page, which nobody in that building expected and I still find funny.
And their reviews started arriving with sentences in them that had come off their own website, which is my favorite evidence that a site is doing its job.
None of that is a miracle. It’s a practice finally being described by the people who run it, on ground that belongs to them.
Because a listing is rented ground. Google decides what appears on it, when the layout changes, and which competitor gets to sit beside you. Would you run a practice out of a room where the landlord rearranges your furniture on a Tuesday and never mentions it?
If one new patient came out of a five page site in its first month, would you call that worth doing? That’s the size of the thing I’m suggesting, and what it takes to get one built tends to surprise the dentists I talk to.
Tell me I’m wrong
Maybe you think dentistry is the exception. Plenty of owners do, and a few of them have made a decent case at me over the years.
A salon owner made the best version of it I’ve heard, and about forty minutes in we both worked out what she was really saying.
So make it. Send me your practice name and I’ll go and look, the same way I looked at Ridge Road, and if the first three results on your own name already do the job a website would do, I’ll say so out loud and we’re done.
I’ve lost that argument before. Not often. But it’s happened, and I’d far rather lose it than have you take my word for anything.
