Ranking implant, aligner and emergency pages inside the GDC’s advertising rules — including the one page the CAP Code says you cannot publish.
Dentistry is the most heavily advertised corner of UK healthcare and one of the most tightly governed. A good deal of what a practice wants to put on its website is not allowed to be there.
A practice competes on a smaller map than almost any other business. Patients choose from what is within a short drive, and usually from whatever Google shows them first. Most of the work is in that one result and in four or five treatment pages behind it.
For “dentist near me” the three map results take most of the clicks before anyone reaches a website at all. Hours, treatment list, photos and a steady flow of reviews move that listing. A redesign does not.
Implants, clear aligners, veneers, whitening and emergency care are five different searches made by five different people. One combined “Treatments” page competes for all of them and wins none.
Every dentist named on the site, with their qualification, the country that awarded it and their GDC registration number. Here the compliance requirement and the trust signal happen to be the same thing.
Botox is a prescription-only medicine and cannot be advertised to the public. We write the consultation page instead, which is permitted and brings in much the same enquiries.
We also do SEO for doctors and medical practices, and the two are often assumed to be the same job. They are not. A GP practice is frequently not competing for patients at all. A dental practice almost always is, it advertises far harder, and it answers to a different regulator with its own rules about what may appear on a page.
Every named dentist needs three things. The GDC expects the professional qualification, the country it was awarded in, and the GDC registration number alongside each professional named as providing care. Its advertising checklist asks for precisely that, which makes this the easiest thing on the list to get right and the most common one to find missing.
“Specialist” is not a marketing word. It is reserved for dentists on a GDC specialist list, and so are the titles that imply it — orthodontist, periodontist. Without a listing the permitted phrasing is “special interest in”, “experienced in” or “practice limited to”. This breaches most often in page titles, where nobody thinks to look and where an SEO has usually put it on purpose.
A prescription-only medicine cannot be advertised to the public. CAP Code rule 12.12 puts Botox and every other POM out of reach, and the ASA reads almost any mention as promotion. The consultation may be advertised; the product may not. The ASA and CAP have published an enforcement notice covering these ads on social media.
Braces and aligners have a notice of their own. The GDC and the ASA have issued enforcement guidance on how braces and dental devices are advertised, which becomes relevant the moment a practice writes its clear-aligner page — usually the most commercially valuable page on the site.
None of this stops a practice ranking. It decides which pages get written, and how.
Dental search divides cleanly into three kinds, and only two of them are worth paying for.
The emergency search is urgent and local. The treatment search is considered and lucrative. The NHS search is enormous and, for most practices, worthless — because the people making it need capacity the practice does not have. Pointing that traffic at closed lists produces turned-away callers and the reviews that follow them. The same discipline applies to any small business: the right enquiry is worth more than more enquiries.
Google Business Profile, opening hours, treatment list, photographs and a review routine the front desk can actually keep up. In the first month this outranks anything we could write.
A page that loads quickly, states the hours and puts the telephone number above everything else. Someone in pain does not read.
Implants, aligners, veneers, whitening — each with the price, what the procedure involves, who carries it out and the recovery. Checked against the GDC rules before it goes live, not after a complaint.
Not sessions and not rankings. New-patient appointments that were kept, counted by treatment, so you can see which page paid for itself.
No, and it is the most common breach we find on dental sites. Botox is a prescription-only medicine, and rule 12.12 of the CAP Code prohibits advertising prescription-only medicines to the public. The ASA treats almost any reference as promotion — a price list, a before-and-after, a social post. What you may advertise is the consultation. A practice offering both botulinum toxin and fillers can use a collective term such as “anti-wrinkle injections”, but only where nothing else on the page implies which product is used. The ASA and CAP have issued an enforcement notice about these ads on social media, so it is being looked at rather than ignored.
The GDC expects every dental professional named on the site as providing care to be shown with their professional qualification, the country it was awarded in, and their GDC registration number. The GDC’s own advertising checklist asks whether that number appears for each named professional. It is a small change and the first one we make, because a team page missing it is both a compliance problem and a wasted credibility signal — those are exactly the credentials a search engine wants to see on a health page.
Only if you are on the relevant GDC specialist list. A dentist on a list may use the title “Specialist” or say they are a “specialist in…”. A dentist who is not on one must not use titles that imply it, which includes orthodontist and periodontist. The permitted wording is “special interest in”, “experienced in” or “practice limited to”. Dental care professionals have no specialist lists at all, so “denture specialist” and “smile specialist” are out. We check body copy, page titles and image alt text, because this breaches in title tags more often than anywhere else.
Only if you have NHS capacity to take the patient. It is one of the highest-volume dental searches in the country and, for a practice with closed lists, almost all of it converts into a phone call you have to turn away — which costs reception time and earns the review that follows. If your lists are closed, say so plainly on the site and compete for private and treatment terms instead. Fewer enquiries you can accept beats more you cannot.
Emergency and treatment terms with a place attached. “Emergency dentist” plus a town is the highest-intent search in the sector — the person is in pain and calls whoever answers — and it is won with the map listing, the opening hours and a phone number near the top, not with a long page. After that come the treatment terms: implants, clear aligners, veneers, whitening. Each needs a page of its own carrying the price, what the procedure involves, who carries it out and what happens afterwards.
The GDC permits dentists to use “Dr”. CAP and the ASA advise making immediately clear that it is a courtesy title and that no general medical qualification is held. One line on the team page settles it. It is worth the line: a complaint about your website is a slow and expensive way to discover the rule.
Tell us the practice and the postcode. If your Google Business Profile would do more for you this quarter than any page we could write, we will say so — and we will tell you which pages on your current site are a compliance risk before we quote for anything.
Talk to usFill out the form below and our team will get back to you within 24 hours.
Tell us about your project — no commitment required.
