Dental Website Must-Haves: What Patients, Google and the Rules Expect

The short answer: the must-have list

Procedure pages that answer patient questions

Write each page for the patient first. Google's own advice is to "use words that people would use to look for your content, and place those words in prominent locations on the page, such as the title and main heading of a page" [3].

Match the pages to your Google Business Profile. Google says a profile may let you add services with a description and a price [4]. Giving each of those services a matching page on your site is our practice, not a Google rule, but it keeps the profile and the site telling one story.

Say what treatment costs and which plans you take. Cost holds back more people from dental care than from other care: in 2023, 13% of the US population reported cost barriers to dental care, against 4-5% for other health services, and 62% of adults had private dental insurance in 2022, according to the ADA Health Policy Institute [5].

Keep every claim provable. The ADA's Code of Professional Conduct, 2025 edition, binds ADA members. It says dentists have an ethical obligation to keep their websites truthful, and that SEO techniques should comport with the Code (section 5.F.6) [6]. It lists statements "likely to create an unjustified expectation about results the dentist can achieve" among misleading ones (5.F.2), and asks general dentists to "avoid any communications that express or imply specialization" (5.I) [6].

Booking, forms and tracking

That guidance is the HHS Office for Civil Rights bulletin on online tracking by HIPAA covered entities and business associates, first issued in December 2022 and revised on March 18, 2024 [7]. On June 20, 2024, a federal court in Texas vacated one position in it: that HIPAA obligations are triggered when a tool connects a visitor's IP address with a visit to an unauthenticated public page about specific health conditions or providers [7][8]. The court said the vacatur should not be construed as limiting "the legal operability of other guidance" in the HHS document [8].

The guidance on booking pages, business associates and cookie banners still stands. HHS says a website banner asking visitors to accept or reject tracking does "not constitute a valid HIPAA authorization" [7]. The simplest setup keeps ad pixels and analytics tags off booking and form pages until counsel has reviewed the arrangement. Our guide to HIPAA marketing rules covers the ruling in full.

Speed, mobile and accessibility

Keep speed in proportion. Google says "Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems," but also that "Google Search always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par" [9]. It adds that other page experience aspects beyond Core Web Vitals "don't directly help your website rank higher in search results" [9]. Test every template on a phone, not just a desktop.

The accessibility rules are uneven. The statute lists the "professional office of a health care provider" as a public accommodation [11]. The Justice Department's guidance of March 18, 2022 says it "does not have a regulation setting out detailed standards" for web accessibility, and that businesses can currently choose how they ensure it [12].

HHS's Section 504 rule is more specific for the organizations it covers: it requires WCAG 2.1 of recipients of HHS funding. On May 11, 2026, HHS extended its compliance dates. Recipients with 15 or more employees now have until May 11, 2027, and those with fewer than 15 until May 10, 2028 [13]. Whether a practice counts as a recipient is a question for your counsel. Either way, WCAG 2.1 gives your designer one published standard to build and test against.

The notices the rules put on your website

The privacy notice rule is 45 CFR 164.520(c)(3)(i): a covered entity that maintains a web site that provides information about its customer services or benefits "must prominently post its notice on the web site" [14]. Link it from the footer and from every form.

The good faith estimate rule is 45 CFR 149.610. Paragraph (b)(1)(iii)(A) says the information must be "prominently displayed (and easily searchable from a public search engine)" on the convening provider's or convening facility's website [15]. In a clarification the ADA received from CMS, reported by ADA News on February 28, 2023, dental providers are "generally not required to provide a good faith estimate" to someone enrolled in an excepted benefit plan such as a limited-scope dental plan [16]. Ask your counsel how that applies to your patients.

Trust: dentists, reviews and patient photos

Google also encourages "adding accurate authorship information, such as bylines to content where readers might expect it" [17].

Under the FTC's Endorsement Guides, updated June 29, 2023, a testimonial "will likely be interpreted as representing that the endorser's experience is representative" of what others will achieve [18][19]. Choose stories that reflect typical results, in line with the ADA Code's limit on unjustified expectations [6].

Treat patient photos as patient information. HIPAA lists "full face photographic images and any comparable images" among its identifiers [20], and its marketing rule requires a covered entity to obtain authorization for any use or disclosure of protected health information for marketing, with narrow exceptions [21]. We found no HHS statement on marketing photos specifically, so ask counsel before a patient's face goes on your site.

Write down how the practice replies to reviews. The ADA advises replying in very broad "all patient" terms and says: "Never reference a specific person or incident." [22] See how patients choose a dentist for what reviews do to the decision.

Local SEO basics on the site

Link the profile to the page that best matches it. Whitespark's experts rank keywords in the title tag of that landing page fourth among local organic factors [2]. The map side of the work is in our guides to the Google Business Profile for dentists and to dental local SEO.

Build the site against what already ranks

Every item on this list can be measured, and so can your competitors. Before we build a practice's site, we measure the pages and profiles already on page one for your treatments, then match and exceed them: see our web design services and dental SEO work. Our first page guarantee is offered after an assessment, for a phrase list agreed in writing, and its written terms measure the share on page one separately in each of the three places: the map results, the organic results and Google's AI answers. A free SEO audit shows where your site stands today.

This is general information, not legal advice.