Most dental marketing contracts are not written to trap you. They are written by the agency's attorney to protect the agency, which is normal, and nobody at the practice reads past the price. The problems surface eighteen months later, when you want to leave and discover you cannot take your own website with you.
You do not need a legal background to catch the terms that matter. Five questions cover almost all of the risk, and every one of them is negotiable before you sign and almost none of them are afterwards. This is a checklist for reading a proposal, not legal advice, so run anything unusual past your own attorney.
Ask who owns the website, and get the answer in writing
Plenty of agencies build the site on their own platform and license it to you for a monthly fee. That is a legitimate model as long as everybody understands it. The problem is when it is never said out loud, and the practice finds out at the end that the site vanishes when the invoices stop, taking years of pages and rankings with it.
The contract should say who owns the design, the content, the images and the domain, and what you receive if you leave. Ask for a plain sentence: on termination, the practice receives a full export of the site files, the content and the database. If the answer is that the site cannot be exported, price that in, because you will be rebuilding one day.
Your domain and your accounts should be in your name from day one
The domain registration, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, the Google Ads account, the Meta ad account, the call tracking and the Google Business Profile should all be owned by the practice, with the agency added as a manager. This is not a trust issue, it is an ownership issue, and any competent agency will agree to it without complaint.
The reason is history. Years of analytics data, an ad account with a long optimization record, and a verified profile with all your reviews attached are worth real money and cannot be recreated. If those live in the agency's accounts, changing suppliers means starting from zero, which is precisely why some contracts leave them there.
- Domain registered to the practice, with you holding the login
- Analytics and Search Console owned by you, agency invited
- Ad accounts in your name with the agency granted access
- Google Business Profile primary owner is the practice
- Call tracking numbers portable to another provider
The money is usually in the notice period and the auto renewal
A twelve month initial term is common and often reasonable, because real work takes months to show. What is not reasonable is a twelve month term that renews automatically for another twelve unless you cancel in a narrow window, which quietly turns a one year decision into a three year one.
Look for the notice period, whether renewal is automatic, and whether you can cancel for cause if agreed work is not delivered. Ninety days notice on a month to month arrangement is a lot for a single practice. Thirty is normal. Also check whether early termination triggers a fee, and what happens to work already paid for in advance.
Exclusivity clauses cut both ways, and one direction matters more
Agencies sometimes ask you not to hire another marketing supplier while under contract. That is worth resisting, because it stops you from testing a second option cheaply and it makes leaving harder than it should be. At minimum, carve out the things you already do yourself.
The more important direction is the other one. Ask whether the agency works with competing practices in your area, and get a defined radius or ZIP code list in the agreement if they say they do not. An agency running ads for two practices in the same town is bidding against itself, with your money on both sides.
Watch what is actually being promised as a deliverable
Vague scope is where budgets go quietly. Four blog posts a month is a deliverable. Ongoing content optimization is not. Ask for named outputs with quantities and a monthly report format agreed in advance, and make the report a contractual deliverable rather than a courtesy, so that stopping it becomes a breach rather than a habit.
Be suspicious of guarantees. Nobody controls Google's results, so a guaranteed first position is either meaningless, attached to a phrase nobody searches, or backed by tactics that create risk for your site. It also helps to write the brief yourself: a free leak check shows where inquiries are leaking today and who outranks you locally, which makes it much harder for anyone to sell you work you do not need.
- Named deliverables with quantities, not descriptions of effort
- A monthly report specified as a contractual obligation
- A named person responsible, not a shared inbox
- No guarantees of rankings or of a fixed number of patients
Keep the assets you can control outside the contract entirely
Some things should never sit inside an agency relationship, because they are yours by nature and cost nothing to hold. Your reviews, your patient list, your phone number, and your listings. Claiming your listing in the Dent-OX directory is free, puts your services, hours and fees in your own words, sends patient requests straight to your front desk by email, and gets the page indexed by Google, which unclaimed records are not.
Before you sign, read the scope back to yourself as a list of things that will exist at the end of each month. If you cannot picture them, the scope is not specific enough yet. A short agreement you understand beats a long one you do not, and the terms above are all cheaper to negotiate now than to argue about later.
The short version
- Get website, content and domain ownership stated in plain words before signing.
- Analytics, ad accounts and your Google profile should be in the practice's name.
- Check for automatic renewal and a notice window you could easily miss.
- Ask whether the agency works with competing practices, and define the radius.
- Prefer named deliverables over descriptions of effort, and refuse ranking guarantees.
How many patients is your practice missing?
The free New Patient Leak Check shows you where inquiries are slipping away, who is outranking you locally, and what to fix first. It costs nothing and it is yours to keep.
Already listed, but not claimed? Your practice is in our national directory, built from the federal registry. Claiming it is free, puts your services, hours and fees in your own words, sends patient requests to your front desk, and gets the page indexed. Claim your listing.
Frequently asked
Do we own our website if the agency built it?
Only if the contract says so. Many agencies build on their own platform and license the site monthly, so it disappears when you leave. Ask for a written statement that on termination you receive the domain, the site files and the content. If the site cannot be exported, budget for a rebuild eventually.
Is a twelve month dental marketing contract normal?
An initial twelve month term is common and often fair, because search work takes months to show results. What to watch is automatic renewal for another full year and long notice periods. Thirty days notice after the initial term is reasonable. Ninety days on a rolling arrangement is worth pushing back on.
Should we agree to an exclusivity clause?
Ask for exclusivity in your favor rather than agreeing to it in theirs. A defined radius or list of ZIP codes where the agency will not take a competing practice protects you from paying someone who is bidding against you. Being blocked from hiring anyone else mainly makes it harder to leave.
What should we do before giving notice to an agency?
Confirm you hold ownership of the domain, analytics, ad accounts and Google Business Profile, and export anything you would miss. Get copies of content, images and call recordings. Then give notice in the format the contract requires, in writing, and keep the confirmation. Do it in that order, not the other way round.