Google Business Profile for dental practices.

Your category decides which half of the market you can win

Dental search is really two markets that barely overlap. The first is pain: an unplanned, often out-of-hours search where someone looks for relief before they look for a dentist, and where you compete with an emergency department and a helpline rather than the practice down the road. The second is planned care, booked days ahead under a treatment name rather than dentist near me, usually on a phone, usually outside your opening hours.

Google offers separate categories for these. Dentist, Dental Clinic, Emergency Dental Service, Cosmetic Dentist, Orthodontist and Paediatric Dentist are not interchangeable labels for the same practice. The primary category does not only influence where you rank, it decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all, which makes it the highest-leverage single field on the profile.

The common mistake is picking the broadest category available on the theory that it covers everything. It does the opposite. A practice that is genuinely strong on emergency work and sets a general category is invisible in the searches it would win most easily.

What you may quote from a review depends on where you practise

Reviews are the second-largest signal on a dental profile, and the rules governing what you can do with them differ by market more than most practices realise.

In New Zealand, the ASA Therapeutic and Health Advertising Code has applied to all advertising since 1 July 2026. Its rule on testimonials means a practice may quote a review about the experience and may not quote one about the clinical outcome. In practice that separates the reviews you most want to use from the ones you are allowed to use.

In Australia, the position is stricter still: National Law section 133 makes the use of clinical testimonials in advertising a statutory offence, with a maximum of AUD 60,000 for an individual and AUD 120,000 for a body corporate.

This does not mean reviews stop mattering. They matter enormously, because Google reads the words inside them and matches those words against what people search. It means the review strategy has to be built around asking for the right kind of review, and being careful about what you republish on your own site.

The fields most dental profiles leave empty

The services list is the one that costs the most. A profile listing dentistry as a single service tells Google almost nothing. A profile that lists the individual treatments a practice actually wants more of gives Google the vocabulary to match against treatment searches, which are the higher-value half of the market.

Hours are the second. An emergency search at 9pm filters on what is open, and a profile whose hours do not reflect reality either loses the enquiry or wins it and then disappoints the patient.

Then the ordinary things that get skipped: photos that are actually of your practice, a description that reads like a human wrote it, and replies to reviews that say something specific rather than thanking everyone identically.

What we do on a dental profile

• Category audit against the treatments you want more of, and the emergency work you can take
• Services list built out treatment by treatment, in the words patients search
• Hours, attributes and booking links checked against how your practice actually runs
• A review approach that fits your market's advertising rules rather than a generic template
• Review replies written to be specific, and compliant where testimonials are restricted
• Photos and description rebuilt, then monitored for the edits Google makes on its own
• Monthly reporting on calls, direction requests and which searches you surfaced for

Questions

Sources

• ASA Therapeutic and Health Advertising Code (NZ)
• AHPRA — Advertising a regulated health service
• Google — Manage your Business Profile categories

Guides for dentists