Multi-location dental groups: one website or one site per office?

A dental group with two to six offices should almost always run one website with a genuinely strong page for each office, rather than a separate site per location. One site concentrates everything the group earns in search instead of dividing it into several weaker sites, it costs a fraction of the effort to keep current, and it lets a patient move between offices without leaving. Separate sites are the right answer in a narrow set of cases, and this article covers both.

It is written for owners, operations leads and office managers at growing practices. It is about websites rather than dentistry.

The case for one site

Search credit does not split evenly

Everything a website earns in search accumulates against a domain: links from other sites, the history of the content, the trust built over years. A group that runs four separate sites is running four separate accumulations, each a quarter of the size, each starting again.

One site with four office pages puts all of it in one place. The office pages still rank locally, because local ranking is driven by proximity, the business profile and the specifics on the page, not by having a separate domain.

One site is one job

Four sites means four sets of hours to update at the holidays, four privacy policies, four sets of treatment pages drifting apart, four hosting bills, four certificates to renew, and four opportunities for one of them to be a year out of date. In practice the fourth site is always the one nobody remembers.

Patients move between offices

A patient who cannot get an appointment at the office near work will happily take one near home, if they can see it in one click. Two separate sites make that a new search.

Growth is easier

Adding a fifth office to an existing site is a page. Launching a fifth site is a project.

When separate sites are genuinely right

Four situations where the default does not apply.

Genuinely different brands. Two practices that were acquired, kept their own names, their own signage and their own patient base, and are not being merged. Forcing them onto one site makes both weaker.

A specialty practice serving referring dentists. An oral surgery or endodontic practice whose primary audience is other dentists rather than patients is a different website with a different purpose: referral forms, case criteria, imaging instructions. It can live as a section, but it often works better standing alone.

Offices in different countries or languages, where the legal and linguistic separation is real.

A group large enough to have a marketing team. Once there are fifteen or twenty offices, the calculus changes and the group usually wants a platform rather than a website. That is a different conversation from the one this article is having.

Note what is not on the list: wanting each office to “have its own site” for reasons of internal fairness. That is an organisational preference being paid for in search visibility, and it is worth naming as such before the decision is made.

Structuring the one site

The shape

A structure that works for two to six offices:

• Home page, for the group. What it is, where the offices are, what it does, one booking request that asks which office.
• A page per office, at a clear address such as /locations/[office name]. This is the most important page in the structure.
• A locations index, listing all offices with addresses, hours and a map. Short, useful, and the page people land on when they search the group name.
• One page per treatment, for the group, each listing which offices offer it.
• Shared pages: about, team, new patients, insurance, financing, careers, blog, legal.
• A booking request that exists in one form and carries the office as a field.

What must be different on each office page

This is where most groups fail, by producing four pages that differ only in the town name. An office page has to be written as if that office were the whole practice:

• The street address, formatted as an address, with a map link.
• That office phone number, as a tap target. Not the group number.
• That office hours, including which providers are in on which days.
• The team who actually work there, with photographs. Patients care about this more than anything else on the page.
• Parking. Which lot, whether it is validated, where the entrance is, what floor.
• Directions in words from the two or three directions people arrive from, mentioning the landmarks locals use.
• The treatments available at that office, if they differ, with links to the group treatment pages.
• What is specific to that office: a scanner, a sedation option, evening hours, a language spoken by the team.
• Its own booking request, preset to that location.
• Its own structured data, with that office name, address, phone and hours, matching what is visible on the page.

Write four of those honestly and they will not read alike, because the offices are not alike.

What should not be duplicated

Do not write an implants page for each town. Four near-identical treatment pages compete with each other, dilute the group, and read as exactly what they are. Write one implants page that is the best page on the subject the group can produce, and link it from the office pages that offer it, with a sentence on the treatment page naming which offices do.

The same applies to the insurance page, the financing page, the new patient page and the blog. One of each, written once, kept current once.

Naming the offices

Use the name patients use, which is almost always the neighbourhood, the town or the street. “Riverside” beats “Location 2” and beats “North Office” if nobody local calls it that. Use the same name on the website, the business profile, the phone greeting and the signage.

Business profiles for a group

Each physical office with its own address, its own phone number and staffed hours needs its own Google Business Profile. This is not a website decision and it is not optional: it is how each office appears in the map results for the people near it.

A few points that come up repeatedly for groups:

• The name on each profile is the real name of that office, consistently formatted. Adding the town to the name when it is not part of the real name is against the guidelines, even though every competitor seems to do it.
• Each profile website link points at that office page, never at the group home page. This is the single most common misconfiguration in multi-location dental groups and it is a two minute fix.
• The appointment link points at the booking request for that office.
• Hours are maintained per profile, including holiday hours. A group that updates three profiles and forgets the fourth has created the worst possible version of this problem.
• Reviews are per office, and so is responding to them. Decide who owns each office reviews.

Booking and routing for several offices

Ask, and default

The booking request asks which office. When the request comes from an office page, that field is already filled in, because the person has told you by being there. When it comes from a treatment page or the home page, they choose, and the choices are described in a way that helps: the town, and the nearest landmark or major road.

Route to the office, not to the middle

Each office requests should land in the queue that office actually watches, whether that is a location in the practice management system or a tagged list in a CRM. A central inbox that someone forwards each morning is where multi-location booking goes wrong, because forwarding is a manual step and manual steps are skipped on busy days.

Let offices see each other

If one office is booked out three weeks and another has space on Thursday, somebody should be able to offer that on the call back. That is a process decision rather than a website one, but the website should not make it harder by pretending the offices are separate businesses.

Content across a group

One blog, with location tags

The group has one blog. Individual posts can be about an office, and can be tagged that way, but the blog itself is shared. Four thin blogs is the same mistake as four thin treatment pages.

Neighbourhood pages, carefully

Groups are often sold the idea of a page for every surrounding town. The test is the same as for a single practice: can you write four paragraphs that are true only of that area and useful to someone living there. Which office serves it, how long the drive is, what the parking is like at that office for someone coming from there, which providers see patients from that area. If you cannot, the page is a liability rather than an asset.

Keep the treatment pages singular and good

The advantage a group has over a single practice is that it can afford to write genuinely good treatment pages, because the cost is spread over more chairs. Use it. One excellent implants page shared by four offices beats four mediocre ones, on every measure.

A practical order for a group that is consolidating

1. Decide the office names, and make them consistent everywhere.
2. Claim and complete every Google Business Profile, and point each website link at the office page.
3. Build one site with a real page per office.
4. Consolidate the treatment pages into one good set, redirecting the duplicates from the old sites.
5. Redirect the old office sites page by page to the corresponding pages on the new one, and keep those redirects permanently.
6. Route booking requests per office, and test each route with a real submission.
7. Assign an owner per office for reviews and for hours.

Step five is the one that gets rushed. Consolidating several sites into one is a migration for each of them, and each needs its own redirect map.

What we do

On a multi-location plan, every office gets a real page with its own hours, team, directions, structured data and booking request, and requests route into the practice management system or CRM tagged by office. Treatment pages are written once for the group and linked from the offices that offer them. When an office changes its hours or gains a provider, that is a revision request and it goes live within a couple of working days, on the one site rather than on four.

We are a website design and management company for dental practices. We do not treat patients and nothing we publish is dental or medical advice.