When you don't control the website, you win everywhere else

PPC playbook

The dental ad account is rarely the problem. The phone is. Buy intent correctly, then fix the call path that loses a third of it.

• Split campaigns by intent tier, because emergency ($75.19 CPL, 8.89% conversion), general ($84.77, 7.74%) and orthodontic ($71.52, 14.21%) demand behave nothing alike and should never share a budget.
• Rebuilt landing pages per treatment against the 10.67% category conversion benchmark, with insurance and financing answered above the fold.
• Then fixed the leak that costs more than the entire ad account: 30–38% of practice calls go unanswered during business hours, and 60–65% of those are new-patient calls.
• Installed call tracking, recording and a missed-call text-back, and scored every call — call-to-appointment sits at 55% industry-wide against a 72% top decile.
• Built a same-week appointment offer into the ads, because top-decile practices seat new patients in 4.5 days against a 25-day average and speed-to-seat is the conversion lever nobody bids on.
• Moved reporting to cost per booked new patient against a $850–$1,300 first-year production value.

AI SEO playbook

Local health queries only return an AI Overview about 11% of the time. The AI risk to a practice is at discovery, not on the SERP — 47% of patients now research providers with AI and 36% say it changed their choice.

• Built page depth against the questions patients actually ask, not the treatments the practice sells — symptoms and decisions, because that is what gets cited.
• Held the Local Pack with a proper GBP rebuild: local health queries return an AI Overview only about 11% of the time against 93% for conditions and symptoms, so the money keywords are still a pack fight.
• Ran the Scriblr citation baseline across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews on the practice's real patient-question set, tracked weekly.
• Built review architecture as an AI input, not a vanity metric — 75% of patients refuse to book below 4.0 stars, 44% require 4.5+, and 55% have cancelled or avoided an appointment over reviews.
• Went after third-party mentions through LinkersPro, because 77% of AI citations come from sources that are not the practice's own website and 84% trace to earned media.
• Kept every clinical page current, since AI-cited content runs 25.7% fresher than the organic top ten.

PPC timeline

1. Days 0–14

   Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier.

2. Days 15–45

   Treatment landing pages shipped, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place.

3. Days 46–90

   Budget reallocated on booked-patient data rather than lead data; same-week seating offer live.

AI SEO timeline

1. Days 0–30

   Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup.

2. Days 31–90

   Symptom and decision content shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave.

3. Days 91–180

   Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on clinical and service pages.

Targets this programme was set and measured against

These are not reported results. Dentists at Midtown's own reporting has not yet been reconciled against these rows — see how we define a target versus a result.

Where these targets come from