Many of the people reading your reviews are parents deciding who gets two years of their child's schedule and a payment plan they cannot easily walk away from. They are not reading for clinical skill, because they have no way to judge it. What follows covers the invitation when a case runs for years, the details a public reply may never contain, and the places an orthodontic practice gets rated besides Google.
Book a free consultation →An orthodontic review gets read by two people, and they are not looking for the same thing.
The first is a parent, or an adult patient paying for it out of their own account. They cannot evaluate the orthodontics, so they evaluate everything around it. They are about to hand a practice a long relationship: visits every few weeks for a year or more, a contract, and a balance that outlives the excitement of the first appointment. They read for whether the office runs on time, whether the consult number is the number that gets billed, and whether the front desk is still pleasant in month fourteen.
The second is the office that referred them. Referrals matter here in a way they do not for a trade people find by searching, and a general dentist's front desk often looks you up before saying your name out loud. Nothing recent on the profile, or a complaint nobody answered, gives that person a reason to say the other name instead.
Both read in roughly the same order.
The general case for this service is on the reputation management hub, and the wider pitch for this audience is on the orthodontist page. This one stays on reviews.
Asking is not what gets a practice in trouble. Forgetting to ask is what leaves a rating set by whoever was angriest two years ago.
The rule underneath everything we build is short. One invitation to every patient, identical in wording, with no reward of any kind attached to it. Not the families who seemed pleased. Not the ones a treatment coordinator has a good feeling about. Everyone who reaches the same point in treatment, in the same words. Filtering the list before it goes out, so the public invitation only reaches families you expect to be happy, is gating, and it breaks Google's review policy. The FTC's 2024 rule on consumer reviews bans fake reviews, rewards tied to a positive review, and the suppression of honest ones. Some state dental boards limit patient testimonials on top of that, so read what your board allows before a message goes out.
Then comes the part that makes orthodontics unlike a roofing job. Most businesses ask when the work ends, because the work ends. Here it runs for months and usually years, and the only obvious ending is the day the appliance comes off.
So the milestone gets picked on purpose and then applied to everybody. Say a practice finishes ten cases in a month. If debond is the only trigger, that is ten invitations out of a schedule packed with bonding days, adjustments, retainer checks and consults. Pick one or two moments in a case and send the same message to every patient who reaches them, whether you expect a kind review or not.
Once it is built:
For most local businesses the review is the risk. In a practice, the reply is, because confidentiality binds you and not the reviewer. A parent can publish anything they like about their own family. The practice typing underneath cannot, and the reviewer having gone first does not change that.
Five things stay out of every public reply, no matter how the review is worded.
What is left is short and a little dull, which is correct. Acknowledge that someone took the time, give a role and a phone number, move the rest offline. We draft them in your voice and you post every one, so nothing appears under the practice name that nobody at the practice has read.
Silence gets read too. A one-star from eight months ago with no answer under it tells the next family the office does not keep up, which is usually the worry the review was about in the first place.
Google carries the most weight for an orthodontic practice. It is still only one of the places a family checks between a dentist's referral and a booked consult.
Reviews are also part of the raw material an answer engine has when it is asked to name an orthodontist somewhere, which is its own line of work, covered under AI search. How much any of that counts is not something the companies doing the answering publish, and we are not going to invent a number for it.
Monitoring is there so a fresh review is in front of whoever answers for the practice while it is still fresh, not raised at a staff meeting a month later. The report behind it is deliberately dull: how many invitations went out, what came back, what is still sitting without an answer, broken out by office. No patient detail goes in it, because a report gets forwarded.
Nothing begins until the scope is written down and priced. You see the list of what you are buying before you buy it, and no open-ended monthly reputation fee sits on your statement with a vague description beside it. In practice the work lands in one of two budgets.
Work that fits neither shape, say a one-time read of every reply the practice has ever posted, gets a flat quote once the free consult has shown what is there. Ongoing work runs month to month with no long-term contract, and the reviews, the profile and the logins stay with the practice the entire time, because they were always its own.
If you want the cost picture for the search side in more detail before you talk to anyone, how much SEO costs walks through what drives the number. The review number comes after scoping.
No practice names appear on this page and none will. In this field a client roster is a list of who treats whom, and it is not ours to publish.
If that is the version you wanted, start with a free look at the practice, use the quote form, or call or text (407) 694-2055 and ask where in a case your invitation should fire.
No, it usually makes it stricter. A parent writing about their own child is under no obligation to hold anything back, and you are. Confirming that a minor is a patient, in your own voice on your own listing, is the disclosure, whether or not the family published the details first. Answer the parent without confirming that anyone is a patient, give a name and a number, and take the rest to the phone.
Pick a milestone and apply it to every patient who reaches it. The day the appliance comes off is the obvious one, and plenty of practices add a second earlier point so they are not inviting only the handful of families who finish in a given month. What matters far more than which moment you choose is that the same invitation goes to everyone who hits it, every time.
Not by itself. The problem is conditioning anything of value on leaving a review, or on leaving a good one. A gift every patient receives regardless of what they do afterward is not payment for a review. It becomes one the moment the handoff sounds like a trade, so keep the two separate: give the bag, and send the same invitation you send to everybody, with nothing attached to it.
Do not. A denial discloses too: it tells the public you checked your patient list and what you found there, and you rarely know from a screen name which chart a reviewer belongs to. Reply the same careful way you would to anyone: acknowledge the frustration, offer a person and a number, confirm nothing. If the review genuinely violates a platform rule, report it and let the platform decide.
Not on the strength of the review alone. Someone publishing a photo on Google has not given your practice permission to use it in marketing, and a treatment photo is health information about a named person, often a minor. If you want it on the site, get a signed authorization that says exactly where it will appear. Without that, quote nothing and show nothing.
The same way as any other, and with more restraint than usual. Explaining that the case arrived partly finished, or that they left before it was done, is a statement about their treatment and their history with you. The public reply stays short and generic. The context belongs in a phone call, and often in a letter your attorney has looked at first.
It is common, and usually a symptom of who runs the consults. Reviews left on the practice listing count toward one practice rating whichever doctor they name, though an individual practitioner listing, if either of you has one, keeps its own. Where it matters is a parent working out whether they will actually see the doctor they met. That is a scheduling and expectations question more than a review one, and the honest fix belongs in the consult and on your site, not in a public reply.
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Send us the practice name and we will read your listings the way a parent does: the newest reviews, the ones nobody answered, and anything already sitting in a reply that should not be there. 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.