SEO for Dentists, Run by the Two People Who Do the Work.
Patients pick a practice before they call.
They search, they read the map pack, they count the reviews, and increasingly they ask an AI assistant. We find out why your practice is not the one that comes back, then fix it.
A free three-page audit of your practice’s search visibility. Not a sales call.
Opens WhatsApp. Rather email? contact@mersa.biz
Four People Read This Page. Which One Are You?
The objection that stops you is not the one stopping the others.
You Own the Practice and Also Run It
"I do not have time to manage another supplier, and the last one sent me a dashboard I never opened." Two people do the work. One written page a month, no meeting to chair.
See the four stepsYou Manage the Practice and Have to Justify It
"I have to defend this to the principal against a $2,800 quote from a Sydney agency." Flat published pricing, no lock-in, and a written monthly report you can forward without editing it first.
See the comparisonYou Run Two to Six Locations
"Our locations compete with each other in search and nobody has ever explained why." A profile per location, suburb pages written not to cannibalise each other, one report. A group counts as one client.
See what lands each monthYou Are a Specialist Practice
"I do not want more general enquiries." Implants and orthodontics are treatment-page problems, not traffic ones. The monthly page goes to the query that names the treatment.
See the treatment-page workHow a Patient Picks a Dentist, and Where You Drop Out.
Three moments, all of them decided before anyone dials.
They Type "Dentist Near Me" and Never Scroll.
On a phone, the map pack and one paid result fill the screen. Whoever holds those three slots gets the call. What puts a practice there is the profile behind the pin, not the website.
Dental Local SEO Is Decided in the Map Pack.
Then they count. Eleven reviews lose to a hundred and forty, and clinical quality is not what separated them. Volume and recency both move local ranking, so local dentist SEO is a standing job.
Or They Ask an Assistant, and It Names Somebody Else.
Increasingly the question goes to ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI summary. An assistant can only name practices whose treatments, suburbs and hours it reads as plain text. Anything locked inside images is invisible.
What Not Being There Costs You Today.
Four inputs. We will not fill two of them in for you.
| The input | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| What one new patient is worth to you, first visit plus the year after | Yours. Your practice management software knows it and we do not, so we are not going to publish an average and pretend it is yours |
| How many new patients a month you actually want | Yours. It is a chair-capacity question, not a marketing one |
| How many people a month search your main term in your suburb | Ours. Pulled for your suburb in the audit |
| Where you appear for that term right now | Ours. Measured, with the practices above you named |
The audit fills the bottom two rows for your suburb. The top two stay yours because only you can source them honestly.
Multiply the first two: that is what a month of the patients you want is worth. Set it beside the bottom two and you have the position you do not hold, priced in your own money.
It describes where you stand today, not a forecast. We cannot know what the work will return, and the advertising guidelines restrict the claim anyway.
What it does tell you is whether $1,200 a month is a serious number for you, or a rounding error.
What Dental SEO Actually Is.
Before anybody sells you a package with a name.
Dental SEO is the work of making a practice the one a search engine or an AI assistant names when somebody nearby searches for a dentist. It is four things: a site that can be read, a maintained Google Business Profile feeding the map pack, a real page per treatment and suburb, and current reviews.
The other names for itDental search engine optimization is the longer name for it. Dental SEO services sell under a dozen labels; every dental SEO agency is doing some subset of those four things.
Read a Real Dental Audit Before You Pay Us.
Published in full, findings and all.
Not a case study written backwards.
Sample audit · KYND Dental Care
Dental Practice Invisible to New Patients
Ranks on page three for "dentist near me". New patients find competitors first.
No Google Business Profile, so the practice is missing from Maps entirely.
Services and prices live only in images. Search engines and AI cannot read them.
Reviews are genuine and positive. They just are not surfaced anywhere useful.
This is the exact audit we would run on your practice.
Read the full dental auditWhat We Can Show You, and What We Cannot
Every agency page you are comparing this one against opens with results. Here is the honest version of ours, because you will find it out anyway.
- What we will not show you
- Patient testimonials, ranking screenshots or revenue figures. AHPRA restricts the first, and the other two are trivial to stage.
- What we will show you
- Two complete audits published in full, the method we used, and a free one of your own before you pay anything.
- Two complete audits, published as pages not a gated PDF behind an email form
- Every finding shown including the ones we ranked low
- A free audit of your own practice first before you pay us anything
What Lands in Your Practice, Every Month.
Six things. Hold this list against the other quote on your desk.
Technical Fixes to the Site
Speed, crawlability, broken pages, duplicate titles and the schema that tells a search engine what you treat.
- What you get
- Fixes shipped, not just listed in a PDF
Google Business Profile and the Map Pack
Categories, services, hours, photos and posts, checked against the three practices sitting above you.
- What you get
- A profile maintained, not set once and left
Most practices lose the patient in the map pack.
Every page is checked against the AHPRA guidelines.
One Treatment or Suburb Page
A real page for implants, or for the suburb next door, written to rank on its own. It is where the SEO keywords for dentists that convert live.
- What you get
- One more page that can rank by itself
AI Assistant Visibility
Whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI name your practice when someone asks them for a dentist, and whether they can read your site at all.
- What you get
- Plain text and schema an assistant can quote
Reviews and Reputation
Volume and recency both move local ranking. We show you where yours stopped and give you an honest way to restart them.
- What you get
- A steady ask, and every review replied to
A Written Monthly Report
What we did, what moved, what is next, in a page you can read. Not a dashboard export with forty charts and no sentence in it.
- What you get
- A page written by the person who did the work
They are not better dentists. Just easier to find.
See what it costsFour Steps, and the First One Is Free.
Nothing starts until you have seen what is actually broken.
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Free Three-Page Audit
Send us your practice name and we send back a three page written audit of what a patient and an AI assistant find when they search for you, within two working days.
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The Full Audit, $350
One week across search, AI visibility, social and reviews, ending in a written fix list ranked by impact. Buy it on its own and walk away if you want to.
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We Scope the Work
The fix list decides what the months actually contain, so you are agreeing to named work rather than a package. If the list is short, we say so.
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Build and Report, Monthly
We ship the fixes and write you a page each month saying what was done and what moved. You can stop at the end of any month.
We Are in Bali. You Are Not.
Every dental SEO agency you are comparing us against has an Australian address.
| What you are comparing | A Sydney agency | Mersa |
|---|---|---|
| Who does the work | An account manager, then whoever is free | The same two people, every month |
| Time-zone overlap | Full working day | Two to three hours behind the east coast |
| Ongoing cost | Commonly $2,000–$5,000 a month | $1,200 USD a month, flat |
| Contract | Often six or twelve months | Month to month, stop whenever |
| An Australian office | Yes | No, and we will not pretend otherwise |
Agency retainer ranges are what Australian practices tell us they have been quoted, not a surveyed figure.
Saeed has spent six years running SEO remotely, most recently leading organic growth for North American markets from here.
Search work runs in the same tools whether you sit in Denpasar or Darlinghurst, and the parts that genuinely need a local, like walking into your practice or meeting your team, are not part of it.
What Bali changes is the price, and we have passed that on. If having someone down the road matters more, hire the Sydney agency. That is a fair reason.
The Rules a Generic SEO Agency Will Write Past.
Your advertising is regulated. Most marketing copy quietly is not.
| What the advertising guidelines restrict | What that means for the pages we write |
|---|---|
| Testimonials about regulated health services | No patient testimonials, and no review quotes lifted onto your site |
| Misleading or unsubstantiated claims | Every claim traces to something you can show, or it comes out |
| Superlatives without evidence | No "best", "leading" or "number one" without a source behind it |
| Imagery creating unrealistic expectations | No before-and-after treatment galleries, anywhere |
| Anything promising an outcome | No promised positions and no patient-number targets, from us either |
Restrictions as published in AHPRA's advertising guidelines, checked 2026-07-29. This is how we write, not legal advice.
Compliance is yours as the registered practitioner, and we will not claim we assume it for you.
What we will do is write so it is not put at risk, and say no when a page would need one of the things above to work.
That is why this page carries no testimonial and no ranking promise: we are held to the line we would hold your pages to.
The same restrictions bite hardest on Instagram and TikTok. Testimonials and before-and-after posts are the two formats dental social usually runs on, and both are out.
We do content and social work, scoped separately. It is not part of the monthly search work, and we will not post something that puts your registration at risk.
Two Numbers.
Both of Them Published.
No tiers, no setup fee, no lock-in.
The same price for every practice.
The Audit
Start here. One week across search, AI visibility, social and reviews, ending in a written fix list ranked by impact, with an effort estimate and an owner on every line.
$350 USD, once. Yours to keep, whether or not you ever hire us for the fixes.
- All four areas audited, not a sample
- A ranked fix list you can hand to anyone
- A call with us to walk through it
- No obligation to continue afterwards
Ongoing SEO
The six things above, every month, once the audit has told us which of them your practice actually needs. Month to month, so the work has to be worth renewing.
$1,200 USD a month. No setup fee, no minimum term, cancel at the end of any month.
- All six monthly deliverables included
- One practice per suburb, no exceptions
- Everything we build stays yours
- No promised positions, ever
Prices are in US dollars, which is how we bill every client. Google Ads spend is not included and is not something we mark up.
Three Practices We Would Turn Away.
You Opened Under Three Months Ago
No reviews, no profile history, no pages with any age. Run ads until there is something to rank; we will say so rather than bill you for the wait.
You Want a Position or a Patient Number Promised
We will not write one. Nobody can hold it, and the advertising guidelines restrict the claim. A figure in a proposal is what an agency needs to close, not what it knows.
You Need Somebody in the Building
Named in the table above as a fair reason. If in-person matters more than who does the work and what it costs, the Sydney agency is the right call.
Two people, one calendar. Better now than month two.
Two people. One studio.
We are Mersa, a two-person studio in Bali. We handle brand, web and content ourselves, and keep it small on purpose, so you always talk to the people doing the work.
Our studio in Bali
Before You Ask.
What practice owners ask while they are comparing two quotes.
How much does SEO for dentists cost in Australia per month?
The audit is a flat $350 USD, once. Ongoing SEO is $1,200 USD a month, month to month, with no lock-in and no setup fee. Those are the only two numbers, and they are the same for every practice. We do not quote a higher price because a practice looks like it can pay one.
What does a dental SEO retainer actually include each month for $1,200?
Technical fixes to the site, Google Business Profile and map pack work, one new or rewritten treatment or suburb page, structured data so AI assistants can read your services, review and reputation work, and a written monthly report. The report names what was done, what moved and what is next, in plain English rather than a dashboard export.
How long does SEO take to move a dental practice's Google rankings?
We will not put a date or a position on it, because nobody can and anyone who does is guessing with your money. What we can tell you is the shape of it: listing and profile fixes tend to show up fastest, page and content work takes longer, and the first month is mostly repair rather than growth. You get a monthly report either way, so you can see the work whether or not the graph has moved yet.
Can a dental practice outside Australia work with Mersa?
Yes. This page is written for Australian practices because that is where most of the enquiries come from, and the AHPRA rules shape how we write. We also work with clinics in Bali and Southeast Asia, which has its own page. Message us with where you are and we will tell you honestly whether we are a good fit.
Will you take on a practice competing with ours in the same suburb?
No. We work with one practice per suburb, and we will tell you at the first message if the suburb you are in is already taken. A group counts as one client, so if you run several locations every suburb you operate in is held. We are two people, so the constraint is real rather than a sales line. If we are already working with somebody near you, we will say so instead of taking the money.
What happens if the dental SEO does not work and rankings stay flat?
You stop. There is no contract, no notice period and no exit fee, so you can end it at the end of any month. Everything we build stays yours, including the pages, the schema and the listing work. We would rather you leave after four months than stay for twelve because leaving is expensive.
Do you handle Google Ads for dentists as well as SEO?
Not as part of this. The $1,200 a month is organic search only, so nothing in it is ad spend. If you want ads run alongside it we can scope that separately, but we will usually suggest fixing the site and the listing first, because paid traffic landing on a slow page is an expensive way to find that out.
Do you build the website too, or only do the SEO?
Both, but not in the same line item. If the audit finds the site itself is the problem, we scope a rebuild separately and tell you what it costs before you commit. Plenty of practices only need the ongoing work, and we will say so rather than sell you a rebuild you do not need.
Do you keep a dental practice's website and advertising AHPRA compliant?
Yes, and it shapes what we will write. AHPRA's advertising guidelines prohibit testimonials about regulated health services, misleading or unsubstantiated claims, and anything that creates an unreasonable expectation of benefit. So we do not put patient testimonials or before-and-after treatment imagery on the pages we write for you, and we do not promise outcomes. Compliance is your responsibility as the registered practitioner, and we write so it is not put at risk.