A parent looking for an orthodontist books two or three consultations, compares them, and starts treatment once. If your practice was not in front of them during the week they were looking, there is no second pass. Paid search buys that week, which is why the account has to be built around consultations booked rather than clicks bought, and why we quote a flat monthly fee after a free consult.
Book a free consultation →An orthodontic account wastes money in a way that is easy to miss, because the traffic looks right. The clicks are dental, the searches mention braces and aligners, and plenty will never sit in your chair.
Paid search is a stack of small, unglamorous jobs, and skipping one does not stop the account from spending. For an orthodontic practice, these decide the outcome.
What we do not control: what a competing practice or corporate group bids, what Google charges on a given Tuesday, and whether the front desk picks up. The Google Ads hub covers the channel more broadly.
Two numbers decide most of what happens in this account, and most practices have never set either next to a cost per click: the share of consultations that turn into started cases, and what a started case is worth over the life of the treatment. That is division, not strategy. A practice that converts a strong share of the families who sit down with it can afford terms a practice booking price shoppers cannot.
Drive time is the second constraint, and it binds harder here than in nearly any other local service. Treatment means returning every few weeks for a year or two, so families pick the office they can reach after school without rebuilding the afternoon around it. Buying a whole metro because the metro has volume produces consultations that no-show.
Those two numbers also set the exit rule. Once a term costs more than the case behind it returns, the move is to stop buying it, not to raise the budget and wait for the average to fix itself. If the math does not clear anywhere in your market, we would rather say so on the call. Our free what should you pay tool is a fair place to start before you speak to anybody, us included.
Almost nothing about orthodontic demand is spread evenly across the year, and paid search is the only channel you have that can answer that inside a week.
Healthcare advertising carries more constraints than most trades, and in paid search they land in the two places you would most like to be clever: the copy and the tracking.
None of this is legal advice or compliance sign-off. It is how the account gets built, so your own counsel has less to clean up later.
Plenty of agencies run a practice's ads off a skeleton: the same structure as the last dozen dental accounts, a reused keyword list, and a fee set as a percentage of whatever you spend. It is why so many owners have exactly one bad story about Google Ads.
The organic side is a different job, including how the practice gets described by AI answer engines, which no ad budget reaches. It sits under SEO for orthodontists and local SEO for orthodontists. If the website is the bottleneck, websites for orthodontists is the honest starting point, and the orthodontist page has the full picture.
Four steps, in this order, every time.
There is no published management fee here, and that is deliberate. Some agencies take a percentage of your ad spend, which quietly pays them more every time they talk you into a bigger budget. Others charge a flat monthly fee whatever the budget. We use the flat model and quote it after the free consult, once we know how many offices and campaigns the account covers.
Your ad budget is separate from that fee, goes to Google on the practice's own card, and is never marked up. Everything runs month to month. Organic work alongside the ads runs $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most practices, and $3,500 to $7,500 in competitive metros or for practices running satellite offices. A custom-coded site, if the site is the real bottleneck, is $3,500 to $12,000 or more, one time. How much SEO costs covers what moves those ranges.
A flat monthly management fee, quoted after a free consult. There is no published number, because the right fee depends on how many offices, treatments, and campaigns the account has to cover. We do not take a percentage of ad spend, so the fee does not climb every time your budget does. Everything is month to month, with no long-term contract.
There is no honest generic answer. Click prices in this category swing by metro, by treatment, and by how many general dental practices near you advertise aligners. Rather than quote a range from memory, we pull the real numbers for your area on the free consult and tell you the floor: the spend below which an account cannot produce enough data to manage.
No. Paid search is a live auction, and what a click costs can move the week a corporate group changes a regional budget. Anybody willing to put a fixed cost per started case in writing is guessing. Once the account has real data we will give you honest ranges, manage toward them, and show you the actual numbers each month.
On Invisalign, usually yes, but in its own campaign, with tight matching and a landing page about aligners specifically, because that term pulls a lot of research traffic alongside real intent. Competitor names are a separate question. Bidding on them is permitted, using someone's name inside your ad text can draw a trademark complaint, and the clicks tend to be expensive and slow to convert.
No. They are separate systems, and a larger ad budget does not lift your listings. Anyone implying otherwise is selling you something. Where ads genuinely help is data: the search terms report shows which phrases actually turn into booked consultations, which is worth a great deal later when deciding what to write. That organic work is a separate engagement.
Yes, and it is the main reason an orthodontic account is more work than it looks. Each office needs targeting drawn around a realistic drive, its own landing page, and often its own ad schedule matching the days the doctor is actually in that building. One campaign spread across every town treats the offices as interchangeable, and a family committing to a year of appointments does not.
Yes. The account is opened in the practice's name, or handed over to you if we build it. You own the account, the campaign history, the conversion data, and the landing pages, the same way you own your site and content in everything we do. If we stop working together you keep all of it and can pass it to anyone else.
Google Ads services · Orthodontists: industry overview · SEO for orthodontists · Local SEO for orthodontists · Websites for orthodontists · What should you pay? (free tool)
Book a free consult and we will go through your offices, your real drive radius, and what a consultation is worth to the practice before a dollar goes to Google. Call or text (407) 694-2055, or email [email protected].
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.