Dental Website Audit Checklist: 35 Checks You Can Run Yourself

The checklist on one page

Get found locally

1. 1Dental-specific

   Claim your Google Business Profile and set the primary category to Dentist

   Many patients compare practices on a map, with ratings and call buttons, before they read your site. An unclaimed or miscategorised profile keeps you out of that view.

   How to check: Search your practice name on Google. If the profile shows a "Claim this business" or "Own this business?" link, it is not claimed.

2. 2Seen in our audit

   Link your Google Business Profile from your website

   Link to it from the contact page or footer and add it to the sameAs list in your structured data. It ties the site and the profile together as one business. Make sure the profile links back to the right page of your site.

   What we found: All 5 homepages link to a Google Maps listing or Google reviews page (checked by hand on 9 November 2026).

   How to check: Open your homepage and contact page and look for a link to your Google profile or reviews.

3. 3Dental-specific

   Use one name, address and phone number everywhere

   Write your practice name, suite number and phone number the same way on your site, Google profile and the directories patients use, such as Healthgrades, Zocdoc and Yelp. Google asks that you represent the business as it really exists, so the aim is to avoid contradictions, not to chase exact character matches.

   How to check: Run your details through the NAP Consistency Checker and correct any listing that differs.

   NAP Consistency Checker →

4. 4Dental-specific

   Show your address as text and add a map

   Put the full address in the page text, not in an image, and add an embedded map on the contact page. Add parking notes and the nearest cross street, because patients travel to a fixed location.

   How to check: Try to select and copy your address on the page. If you cannot, it is probably an image.

5. 5Dental-specific

   Show real reviews and link to where they live

   Display genuine patient reviews and link to the profile that hosts them. Decorative five-star graphics with nothing behind them carry no weight. Google's review snippet guidelines do not allow self-serving reviews in LocalBusiness or Organization markup, so do not mark up reviews of your own practice as review stars.

   How to check: Look at any star rating on your site and ask whether a visitor can click through to the source.

Make it easy to contact and book

6. 6Dental-specific

   Make your phone number a tap-to-call link

   On a phone, a patient with a toothache should be able to call with one tap. The number needs to be a tel: link, in the header and on the contact page, and it should dial the right number.

   How to check: Open your site on a phone and tap the number. View the page source and search for href="tel:".

7. 7Dental-specific

   State your hours as text, including emergency arrangements

   Show opening hours in the page text and say what a patient should do out of hours. A patient looking for a dentist that is open now needs to see your hours without making a call.

   How to check: Find your hours on the homepage or contact page without scrolling past a slider or image.

8. 8Dental-specific

   Put the booking route on the first screen of a phone, and test it

   A patient should reach the booking button without scrolling, closing a pop-up or opening a menu. Keep the form to what you need (name, contact details, a short message) and confirm on screen when it is sent. Then send a test enquiry through every route and check that it reaches a person and how long the reply takes.

   How to check: Open your homepage on a phone and find the booking button. Submit a test enquiry and note where it lands.

9. 9Dental-specific

   Say whether you are taking new patients and show the way in

   State it in words and give a path that does not depend on a phone call: an online form, a booking link, and a short "what to expect at your first visit" section.

   How to check: Pretend you are a new patient and count the steps from the homepage to a booking or request form.

10. 10Dental-specific

    List the insurance plans you accept as visible text

    Whether a practice takes a patient's plan is often the deciding question. Name the plans you work with, say how to confirm coverage, and avoid promising what you cannot guarantee. Keep this in the page text so that people and AI tools can both read it.

    How to check: Search your own site for the name of your most common plan. If nothing comes up, patients cannot find it either.

Structured data

11. 11Seen in our audit

    Keep one structured data block that parses, with one consistent business name

    Use a single Dentist block (Dentist is a subtype of MedicalBusiness and LocalBusiness). A block that fails to parse is skipped without any warning, and two blocks naming different things leave machines unsure which name is real. Google requires name and address for local business markup and treats the rest as recommended. If several plugins each add markup, keep one.

    What we found: 3 of 5 homepages had structured data that parses. One had none, and one had a JSON-LD block that fails to parse together with two Organization blocks naming different things.

    How to check: Paste your homepage address into validator.schema.org and Google's Rich Results Test. Fix any parse error first.

12. 12Dental-specific

    Add the dental fields: medicalSpecialty, paymentAccepted and isAcceptingNewPatients

    These are defined by schema.org and tell a machine what kind of practice you are, which payment methods you take and whether you are open to new patients. Google's local business documentation does not list them, and we have no evidence on how Google or AI tools use them, so treat them as clear labelling and not as a ranking lever. Only mark up what is true and visible on the page, and update or remove isAcceptingNewPatients when your status changes. Schema.org defines paymentAccepted for payment methods, so keep plan names in the visible text as the insurance check says.

    {
      "@context": "https://schema.org",
      "@type": "Dentist",
      "name": "Example Dental Practice",
      "url": "https://www.example.com/",
      "telephone": "+12125550100",
      "image": "https://www.example.com/images/office.jpg",
      "address": {
        "@type": "PostalAddress",
        "streetAddress": "100 Example St, Suite 4",
        "addressLocality": "New York",
        "addressRegion": "NY",
        "postalCode": "10001",
        "addressCountry": "US"
      },
      "openingHoursSpecification": [
        {
          "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
          "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday"],
          "opens": "09:00",
          "closes": "17:00"
        }
      ],
      "medicalSpecialty": "https://schema.org/Dentistry",
      "paymentAccepted": "Cash, Credit Card",
      "isAcceptingNewPatients": true,
      "sameAs": ["https://www.google.com/maps?cid=YOUR_PROFILE_ID"]
    }

    How to check: View the source of your homepage, find the Dentist block and see which of these fields are present.

    Schema Markup Generator →

13. 13Dental-specific

    Use openingHoursSpecification for hours in your markup

    Google's own local business example uses openingHoursSpecification, so use that form and make sure it matches the hours shown on the page.

    How to check: Compare the hours in your markup with the hours on the page. They should say the same thing.

Treatment pages and trust

14. 14Dental-specific

    Give each main treatment its own page

    Searches for dental implants, Invisalign or an emergency dentist are separate questions. A single services page cannot answer them all. Give each treatment its own indexable page with its own title, one H1 and real detail, and link to it from your menu.

    How to check: List your top three treatments and check that each one has its own URL.

15. 15Dental-specific

    Name your dentists, with credentials and a real bio

    Medical searches call for visible expertise. Show each dentist's name, DDS or DMD, the school and any real memberships, and a photo. Only state credentials that are true and that a patient could verify.

    How to check: Find the page that names the dentist who would treat you. If there is none, add one.

16. 16Dental-specific

    Say what treatment costs, or what affects the cost

    Cost is a common question and a page that says nothing gives visitors a reason to look elsewhere. Show prices or starting prices where your practice is comfortable doing so. At minimum, say what changes the price and how payment plans or financing work.

    How to check: Open your implants or Invisalign page and look for any cost information.

17. 17Dental-specific

    Use genuine before-and-after photos, with patient permission

    Show real, unedited results that are typical of what patients can expect, and keep patient consent on file. Check the advertising rules that apply to you, for example from your state dental board, before publishing claims or wording like "specialist".

    How to check: Look at every result photo and wording claim on your site and confirm you could support each one.

18. 18Seen in our audit

    Back up "best" and "top" or replace them with something checkable

    AI tools treat a business's own superlatives as marketing and look to third parties. Link to the review profile that supports the claim, or use years in practice or the number of reviews instead.

    What we found: 4 of 5 used "best" or "top" in the title, headline or description, and 3 of 5 were flagged for self-praise with no link to an outside review source.

    How to check: Search your title, headline and description for "best" and "top" and see whether a link backs each one.

19. 19Seen in our audit

    Open the homepage with a plain sentence saying who you are and where

    Start with a definition-style sentence: "[Practice name] is a family dental practice in [neighbourhood], [city]." AI tools often lift a sentence like this when asked what a business is. Then give the homepage enough real content to answer a patient's questions.

    What we found: 2 of 5 lacked a definition-style sentence near the top, and one homepage had only about 165 words.

    How to check: Read the first two sentences of your homepage. Could someone quote them to describe you?

20. 20Seen in our audit

    Add a LinkedIn link for the practice

    It is a cheap entity signal that connects the practice to a real organisation profile.

    What we found: 2 of 5 had no LinkedIn link.

    How to check: Look for a LinkedIn link in the footer or on the About page.

Indexing and crawlability

21. 21General check

    Confirm your key pages are indexed and nothing blocks them

    Rebuilt sites sometimes launch with the "discourage search engines" setting still on from the staging copy. Check that your homepage, treatment pages and contact page are indexed, that none carries a noindex tag, that robots.txt does not block pages or the files Google needs to render them, and that a sitemap lists the pages you want indexed and nothing else.

    How to check: In Search Console, open the Pages report and the reasons pages are not indexed. Inspect your homepage with the URL Inspection tool and look for noindex in the page source.

22. 22General check

    Serve one version of the site, with correct canonicals and clean redirects

    Your site should resolve to one address (https, and either www or non-www), with the others redirecting permanently to it. Each page should carry a canonical tag pointing to itself, not to the homepage or a staging address. After a redesign, old URLs should redirect with a 301 to the closest relevant page, not to the homepage, and not through chains.

    How to check: Type the four versions of your address (http and https, with and without www) and confirm they all land on one. Check the canonical tag in the page source of a treatment page.

23. 23General check

    Link every important page from relevant pages, and fix broken links

    A page with no internal links pointing to it is hard for Google to find and easy to treat as unimportant. Treatment and location pages should be linked from your menu and from related content, and sit within a few clicks of the homepage. Broken internal links waste visitors' time.

    How to check: Run a crawler such as Screaming Frog (free for small sites) and look for internal links returning 404 and for treatment pages with no links in.

24. 24General check

    Remove duplicate and competing pages

    Years of campaigns and add-ons leave old landing pages that cover the same treatment as your main page. Do not clone service pages for each neighbourhood with only the place name swapped, because Google treats near-identical location pages as doorway pages. If several of your pages appear for the same important query, merge or clearly differentiate them.

    How to check: In Search Console, filter queries for "dental implants" plus your city and see how many of your pages appear for it.

Speed, security and accessibility

25. 25General check

    Pass Core Web Vitals on a phone, starting with the booking page

    Google's published "good" thresholds are Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or less, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. The usual causes on practice sites are oversized hero images and heavy third-party scripts such as chat, review and booking widgets, so remove any that do not earn their place.

    What good looks like: LCP 2.5 s or less, INP 200 ms or less, CLS 0.1 or less.

    How to check: Run your booking page and top treatment page through PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab, using the real-user data where it is shown. Search Console's Core Web Vitals report shows groups of pages.

26. 26Seen in our audit

    Keep the homepage HTML light

    Inline scripts, embedded SVGs and page builder output bloat the HTML. Move what you can into separate files and ask your theme support what can go.

    What we found: 4 of 5 sent more than 100 KB of HTML, at 265, 420, 422 and 468 KB.

    How to check: View the page source and look at the file size. Under 100 KB is the line our audit used.

27. 27General check

    Serve every page over HTTPS and check Search Console for security and manual actions

    Confirm HTTPS works on every page, including the booking widget, with no mixed-content warnings. Keep your CMS, theme and plugins updated and remove unused plugins. A manual action is rare but serious and comes before anything else on this list.

    How to check: Open your pages in a browser and look for warnings. In Search Console, open the Security Issues and Manual Actions reports.

28. 28General check

    Cover the basics of accessibility

    Check colour contrast, alt text on meaningful images, labels on form fields, keyboard navigation and heading structure. This helps patients with disabilities. Automated checks cannot determine legal compliance, and the obligations that apply depend on the practice and where it operates, so get qualified advice where it matters.

    How to check: Try to complete your booking form using only the keyboard. Run an automated checker as a first pass, not a verdict.

On-page basics

29. 29Seen in our audit

    Keep titles to 50 to 60 characters and meta descriptions under 150

    Long titles are cut off in search results, and AI tools tend to read about the first 150 characters of a description. Give every page a unique title, and do not use the description to list every neighbourhood you serve.

    What we found: 2 of 5 page titles were 73 and 74 characters. 3 of 5 meta descriptions ran past 150 characters, including one of 401 characters.

    How to check: Count the characters in your title and description with the Meta Tag Generator.

    Meta Tag Generator →

30. 30Seen in our audit

    Use exactly one H1 and do not skip heading levels

    Headings should describe the structure of the page, not set its type size. One H1 that names the page, then H2s, then H3s.

    What we found: 3 of 5 had heading problems: one had no H1, one had two, and one had a two-word H1 with no action verb. All three also skipped heading levels.

    How to check: View the page source and search for "<h1". There should be one.

31. 31Seen in our audit

    Add alt text and width and height to every image

    Alt text describes the image to people who cannot see it and to search engines. Width and height stop the page jumping while it loads.

    What we found: 3 of 5 had images with no alt text (28, 16 and 12 images). 4 of 5 had images with no width and height set.

    How to check: Run Site Check on your homepage, which reports images with no alt text, then fix them in your page builder.

32. 32Seen in our audit

    Do not block AI crawlers by accident

    If you want to appear in AI answers, check that your robots.txt does not disallow the crawlers those tools use. Every practice we audited passed this check, so it is a quick one to confirm.

    What we found: All 5 allowed AI crawlers in robots.txt.

    How to check: Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and test it with the Robots.txt Tester.

    Robots.txt Tester →

Measure and compare

33. 33General check

    Track calls, form submissions and bookings

    If you cannot say which pages bring in patients, you cannot tell whether a fix worked. Confirm Google Analytics 4 is recording on every page and that taps on your phone number, form submissions and online bookings are recorded as key events, not just page views.

    How to check: Tap your phone number and submit a test form, then look for both in the Google Analytics 4 real-time report.

34. 34Dental-specific

    Ask AI tools the questions patients ask, and note who is named

    Patients now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews questions such as "who is a good implant dentist near me". For each answer, note whether your practice is named, which practices are named instead and which websites the answer cites. Answers change from day to day, so treat the result as a snapshot and repeat it every month or two.

    How to check: Write five patient questions for your city and treatments, ask each tool, and record the practices and sources it names.

35. 35General check

    Run these checks on three local competitors

    Pick the three practices that appear above you on the map and run the same checks on their sites. The gaps are usually plain to see: more reviews, a page per treatment, online booking you do not offer.

    How to check: Search "dentist near me" from your area and open the top three results in the map.

What to fix first

A long list is not a plan. Work through it in this order, and stop to record a baseline in Search Console before you change anything, so you can see what each fix did.

Dental website audit FAQ