Zero countable inquiries.
Then 821.
This practice had the reviews, the reputation and good clinical work. What it did not have was any way of knowing whether its website had ever produced a single patient. Nothing had been installed to count. Fifteen months later, here is the number.
How this was actually done.
The same walkthrough I give on a first call. What gets built in month one, what moves in month two, and why the number at the top of this page is the only one worth reporting.
Zero is not the same as unknown.
The practice's own team could say honestly that the website had never produced a traceable lead. That was not because it produced none. It was because nobody had ever installed anything to find out.
The phone rings and nothing records it
Almost every new patient calls the office before they book. No call tracking existed, so every one of those calls was invisible to every report anyone had ever been shown. A practice can be busy and still have no idea which half of the marketing is working.
A site built to be looked at, not found
No analytics installed. Broken links. A speed score of 53 out of 100. 94% of images oversized and 100% of them missing alt text. Not one page written around what a patient in that town actually types into Google.
Ten years behind on authority
Four practices within a few miles had been investing in search for a decade. The nearest was pulling around 1,200 visitors a month. This one had 185 in fifteen months. That is not a gap you close with four blog posts.
We weren't losing to better dentists. We were losing to better websites that had a ten year head start.From the project brief, May 2025
What the market looked like on day one
Estimated monthly organic visitors at the start of the engagement.
Fifteen months, measured in their own account.
Figures compare 1 Jun 2025 to 25 Aug 2026, since the engagement began, against 7 Mar 2024 to 31 May 2025, the last comparable period before it, benchmarked from the practice's prior analytics report. Source: the practice's own Google Analytics 4 and Semrush, pulled 26 Aug 2026.
127 times as many people. The bar for 185 is drawn to scale, which is why it is barely visible.
The 821 inquiries, by how the patient reached out
821 is the sum of those three. A further 376 people started a form and did not finish it, up from 1. Those are deliberately excluded from the 821, because somebody who abandons a form is not an inquiry and counting them as one is how agency reports stop meaning anything.
And the behaviour behind it
Five of five at number one.
A mix of branded and procedure searches, all of them terms a patient actually types before they book an implant. The site is now also being surfaced inside ChatGPT answers and Google AI Overviews for dental queries, which was not a thing anybody was optimising for two years ago.
| Search term | Position | Monthly volume |
|---|---|---|
| the practice's own brand name | 1 | 90 |
| implant restoration | 1 | 1,600 |
| permanent teeth implants | 1 | 880 |
| how long does it take for dental implants to heal | 1 | 590 |
| how long does a dental implant take to heal | 1 | 260 |
The best performing page on the site did not exist before this
It is a blog post answering the exact question somebody asks the week before they commit to an implant. It now pulls more traffic than the entire site did in the previous fifteen months, eleven times over.
City names in the two landing page URLs are masked to protect the client's NDA.
Authority, climbing more slowly than traffic
Backlinks always lag. What matters is that the profile is clean: no purchased links, no low quality directories, nothing that has to be disavowed in two years when the rules change again.
We waited for something true to say.
A paid backlink campaign was budgeted and then deliberately shelved. Instead we waited for a real story: the practice's lead dentist being named to a respected regional Top Dentist list for several consecutive years. That one genuine piece of news was syndicated nationally. 960 placements, 7,000 article views and 900 new backlinks, none of them manufactured and none of them bought.
960 verified placements from one campaign. Shown by outlet name only, with no links, to protect this client's NDA.
What actually got built.
Get it counted
GA4, Search Console and Tag Manager built from scratch, with conversion tracking wired straight into the practice's booking widget. 25 technical faults fixed, including insecure URLs and a broken blog structure. Images compressed, alt text added everywhere it was missing. The Google Ads account audited, where calls were found being routed to other practitioners entirely.
Rewrite what sells
Keywords mapped against five named local competitors, then 16 pages rebuilt around what patients search. Six core service pages taken past 1,500 words with FAQ schema. New landing pages for implants, veneers, Invisalign and crowns, each titled for the target city. A blog built from nothing and 8 articles published. Meta titles and descriptions rewritten sitewide.
Own the map
Google Business Profile rebuilt end to end: hours, services, NAP consistency and a description written with local keywords rather than stuffed with them. A 10 mile service area defined across Montgomery County and the DC border. A genuine review generation workflow, with nothing purchased and nothing incentivised, in line with Google's local quality guidelines.
The counting was the hard part.
Once every call, form and booking click was landing in the practice's own analytics, the argument about whether the marketing works ended. The number is either there or it is not. For fifteen months it has been there, and it is still going.
Book a CallFree 30 minutes. I look at your site, your competitors and your search volume, then tell you the number I think I can hit for your market and what it costs. You keep the plan either way.