One of the most common questions we hear from practice owners is disarmingly simple: what am I actually paying for each month? It is a fair question, and the fact that it gets asked so often says something about how the industry communicates. You would not accept a lab invoice with no idea what was made.
So here is a straight answer. This is the work a dental marketing agency should be doing month after month, what it should look like from your side of the desk, and the tasks that tend to pad a report without moving a single patient into a chair.
Month one should look different from every month after
The first month is setup, and it should feel busy. A proper look at where you stand today: your website, your Google listing, your reviews, your competitors and what people in your area are actually searching for. Then tracking, so that from day one every call and form is counted and attributed. Then a written plan with an order of work and rough dates.
If month one passes without you seeing a document that explains what is wrong, what will be fixed and in what order, that is worth raising immediately. Everything afterwards depends on that plan existing. A dental marketing agency that starts publishing content before it has looked at your numbers is working on instinct, and your budget deserves better than instinct.
- A written audit you can actually read.
- Call tracking and form tracking switched on.
- Google Business Profile claimed and verified in your name.
- A prioritised plan with dates against it.
- Agreement on the one number you are both trying to move.
Ongoing work on your website
Your website should not sit still. Every month there should be something improving: a treatment page rewritten to answer the questions patients keep asking, a new page for a service you want more of, faster loading images, a clearer booking form, better internal links so visitors find the next useful page.
This is steady, unspectacular work, and it is where a lot of the long term value sits. A good sign is that the changes are explained in patient terms rather than technical ones. Instead of hearing that meta descriptions were optimised, you should hear that the implants page now answers the cost question in the first paragraph because that was the first thing everyone asked.
Keeping your Google listing alive
Your Google Business Profile, the free listing that shows your practice on Google Maps, needs regular attention rather than a one off setup. This is where most local calls originate, so a listing that has not been touched in six months is a real cost.
Monthly work here includes posting updates, adding fresh photos, keeping services and hours correct, answering the questions people leave, and watching for the unwanted edits that Google sometimes accepts from strangers. It takes an hour or two a month and it protects the single most valuable piece of digital property your practice owns.
- Regular posts and fresh photos of the real practice.
- Hours updated ahead of holidays, not after.
- Questions answered in your own words.
- Suggested edits from third parties checked and corrected.
- Calls and direction requests reported back to you.
Reviews handled as a routine, not a campaign
Reviews are one of the strongest signals in local search and the strongest signal for a nervous patient comparing two practices. They should never be left to chance or to whoever remembers.
Your agency should have set up an easy way to ask, usually a link sent by text soon after an appointment, and should be watching the flow each month. When it dries up, they should tell you and help your team restart it. They should also draft or prompt replies to reviews, especially the difficult ones. A calm, brief, professional reply to a critical review is read far more carefully by future patients than any of your five star reviews.
Ads managed properly, if you run them
Paid ads are the fastest lever available and the easiest to waste money on. If ads are part of your plan, they need hands on them regularly, not a set and forget setup that quietly drifts.
Every month someone should be reviewing which searches actually triggered your ads and blocking the irrelevant ones, checking that the money is flowing towards the treatments you want rather than the cheapest clicks, and looking at cost per inquiry rather than cost per click. You should know what a new patient costs you through ads. If your agency cannot tell you that number, they are managing spend rather than managing results.
- Irrelevant searches blocked so budget stops leaking.
- Budget weighted towards higher value treatments.
- Ad copy and landing pages tested, not left alone.
- Cost per inquiry reported, not just clicks.
A report you can read in five minutes, and a conversation
The monthly report is where most relationships go wrong. Forty pages of charts is not transparency, it is camouflage. What you need fits on one page: how many inquiries came in, where they came from, what they cost, how that compares with last month, what was done, and what happens next.
Alongside it you want a short conversation with a human being. Not a slide deck read aloud. A call where you can say the implant inquiries are not the right sort of people and have someone change the plan. In our experience the practices that get the most from a dental marketing agency are the ones on that call every month, feeding back what they see at reception, because that information never shows up in any analytics tool.
What should not be filling your report
Some tasks appear in monthly summaries mainly because they are easy to list. Impressions with no accompanying calls. Social posts nobody engaged with. Directory submissions to sites no patient has ever visited. Keyword position screenshots taken from an office fifty miles from your practice. Blog posts published on a schedule with no relation to what your patients ask.
None of these are harmful in isolation. They just should not be the bulk of what you are buying. A simple test works well: for each line on the report, ask how this helps someone choose your practice or makes it easier for them to book. Anything that cannot answer that in one sentence deserves a conversation. Ask the question at your next monthly call and see how comfortable the answer sounds.
The short version
- Month one should deliver an audit, tracking and a dated plan.
- Something on your website should improve every single month.
- Your Google listing needs ongoing attention, not a one off setup.
- Reports belong on one page, with inquiries and cost front and center.
- If a task cannot be linked to a booking, question it.
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
How often should I hear from my agency?
A proper monthly call plus quick messages as things come up is the healthy pattern. Weekly meetings are usually more than a single practice needs. Quarterly is too slow to catch a problem before it costs you a season of inquiries.
Is a twelve month contract a bad sign?
Not on its own. Search work compounds over time, and a longer term lets an agency invest properly rather than chasing quick wins. What matters is that the scope is written down, the reporting is honest, and there is a fair exit if the promised work is not delivered.
What should I be doing on my side?
Three things make the biggest difference: answer the phone reliably, tell your agency what the inquiries are actually like when they reach reception, and keep asking patients for reviews. Practices that do those three consistently get noticeably better results from the same budget.
How do I know if the work is any good without understanding it?
Watch two things. Can they explain what they did in plain English, without you needing to nod along? And is the number of new patient inquiries moving over a six month window? Those two together tell you nearly everything you need to know.
This guide is also written for Chicago practices and New York practices.