Named for a neighbourhood in a different city, four miles from another client
Midtown Dental Care · Columbus, GA · audited September 1, 2026
Who they are
Two-dentist preventive and family practice on 14th Street in Columbus, Georgia, operating as Georgia Dental Professionals PC. Cleanings, checkups, comprehensive exams, imaging and pediatric care.
What we verified
Online booking and a payment options page, on a Yext-style vendor-hosted CDN with a Demandforce listing. No blog. The narrowest service menu in the Georgia book — no implants, cosmetic, orthodontic or emergency pages at all. Two important geographic facts: the practice is in Columbus GA, not Atlanta's Midtown, and it sits roughly four miles from Rivertown Dental Care.
The problem
A practice named 'Midtown' in a city whose Midtown is 100 miles away, with the shortest service list in the book, four miles from another practice in the same portfolio.
Two problems stacked. The brand name pulls Atlanta-Midtown search intent that this practice cannot serve and does not want — an entity mismatch that misdirects both traffic and assistant answers. And a preventive-only service list caps revenue per patient structurally: no implants, no cosmetics, no emergency means no high-value case can enter the practice through search at all.
Portfolio conflict flagged: Rivertown Dental Care is four miles away in the same book. Keyword and geographic separation between the two is mandatory before either scales spend.
What we did
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.
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.
How it was sequenced
Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier.
Treatment landing pages shipped, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place.
Budget reallocated on booked-patient data rather than lead data; same-week seating offer live.
Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup.
Symptom and decision content shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave.
Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on clinical and service pages.
The numbers
These are not reported results. Midtown Dental Care's own reporting has not yet been reconciled against these rows — see how we define a target versus a result.
| Metric | Baseline | Target | Change | Scope |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per lead by intent tier | $95 | $65 | -32% | USD, blended across intent tiers |
| Call-to-appointment conversion rate | 44.0% | 58.0% | +14 pts | percentage of leads and calls converted |
| Cost per booked new patient | $216 | $112 | -48% | USD per acquired patient |
| AI assistant mention rate | 4% | 24% | +20 pts | share of the practice's patient-question prompt set naming it, across 4 assistants |
Where these targets come from
| Published figure | What it measures | Source |
|---|---|---|
| $72.97 | Dental Google Ads cost per lead, $8.00 CPC, 10.67% conversion rate (13,474 US campaigns) | WordStream / LocaliQ (2026) |
| 55% / 72% | Dental call-to-appointment conversion: industry average vs top decile (12.5M interactions) | Patient Prism (2026) |
| 30-38% | Share of dental practice calls unanswered during business hours; 60-65% are new-patient calls | Dental Economics (2026) |
| $850-$1,300 | New dental patient first-year production | Dental Economics (2026) |
| 47% / 36% | Patients who used AI to research providers, and who say AI influenced their final choice | rater8 Patient Choice Report (2026) |
| 11% vs 93% | AI Overview coverage: local health queries vs conditions/symptoms queries | Search Engine Land / BrightEdge (2026) |
Objections this answers
- “We tried Google Ads and got price shoppers.”
- “Patients find us by referral. Search doesn't matter for dentistry.”
The proof behind every figure
These are the raw exports Midtown Dental Care receives, and the ones any number on this page reconciles against. Ask any agency for the equivalent.
- Google Ads export by campaign tier
- Call recordings with booking outcome scored
- Practice management new-patient export matched to source
- Appointment lead-time report
- Scriblr prompt-set exports, before and after
- Local grid screenshots
- GBP insights
- Review dashboard
- Mention log with live third-party URLs
Systems used
- M.A.R.S. for call tracking, missed-call recovery and booking attribution
- Scriblr for AI citation tracking
- LinkersPro for earned mention acquisition
Questions about this engagement
A practice named 'Midtown' in a city whose Midtown is 100 miles away, with the shortest service list in the book, four miles from another practice in the same portfolio. Two problems stacked. The brand name pulls Atlanta-Midtown search intent that this practice cannot serve and does not want — an entity mismatch that misdirects both traffic and assistant answers. And a preventive-only service list caps revenue per patient structurally: no implants, no cosmetics, no emergency means no high-value case can enter the practice through search at all.
Audited September 2026: Online booking and a payment options page, on a Yext-style vendor-hosted CDN with a Demandforce listing. No blog. The narrowest service menu in the Georgia book — no implants, cosmetic, orthodontic or emergency pages at all. Two important geographic facts: the practice is in Columbus GA, not Atlanta's Midtown, and it sits roughly four miles from Rivertown Dental Care.
Days 0–14: Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier. 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.
Days 0–14 — Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent tier. Days 15–45 — Treatment landing pages shipped, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place. Days 46–90 — Budget reallocated on booked-patient data rather than lead data; same-week seating offer live. Days 0–30 — Citation baseline across four assistants, GBP rebuild, page architecture and entity cleanup. Days 31–90 — Symptom and decision content shipped, review engine live, first off-site mention wave. Days 91–180 — Mention velocity sustained, citation rate compounds, freshness cycle running on clinical and service pages.
The programme was run against four targets: Cost per lead by intent tier from $95 to $65 (-32%); Call-to-appointment conversion rate from 44.0% to 58.0% (+14 pts); Cost per booked new patient from $216 to $112 (-48%); AI assistant mention rate from 4% to 24% (+20 pts). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from Midtown Dental Care's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.
No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.
Midtown Dental Care runs at the Essential tier — $1,500/mo, covering PPC and AI SEO. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.
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