Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

THREE-YEAR STUDY REVEALS SEO STRATEGIES OF AUSTRALIA’S TOP-RANKED DENTAL PRACTICES

A national study of search engine optimisation (SEO) results for Australian dental practices has revealed clear insights into the SEO practices of the top-ranked practices.

The latest analysis on November 6, 2025 showed:

A sizeable proportion – but not all – of the top-ranking dental practices held their position. This strongly suggests that the consistent application of evidence-based SEO strategies will continue to deliver results over the long term. Despite Google constantly changing its algorithm, many of the winners of 2022 were able to stay in the premium top three positions in 2025. This points to strategies that are grounded in quality but also flexible and able to adapt to shifts in the SEO landscape.
For the high-ranking practices in 2022, they remained the same three years later in Perth, Brisbane and Sydney. In Adelaide and Melbourne, loss of the map listing saw the first appearance for those practices fall to page 3 and page 2.
The first organic search listing (ie. not paid advertising, nor map listing) held a top position (first or second) in all cities except Sydney, where that practice dropped to page 4. The lesson is that good results can be held but are not guaranteed.
Top ranking practices continued to add to their online reviews and had substantially maintained their Google rating.
Analysis of dental practices that were at the top of page 2 in 2022 showed little movement. The top of page 2 moved to page 1 in only one city, the remained generally stayed on page 2. However, not too much should be read into this. The position we chose was arbitrary and it is quite possible that practices listed on page 2 three years ago are now appearing on page 1. This requires further analysis.
The practices that ranked at the bottom of page 5 were either no longer showing or had marginal improvement (eg. moved to page 4 or 3, which is still “out of sight, out of mind”). It is difficult to draw any meaning conclusions from this.

It gets worse. Most analytics platforms can’t even see this happening. AI-referred traffic gets bucketed as “referral,” “direct,” or just disappears into the noise, so you can be losing ground here and your dashboards will tell you everything’s fine.

We built our AI visibility service because we hit this exact problem with our own clients. It’s not theoretical.

Example of a business appearing in a ChatGPT AI answer after AI visibility optimisation.

What dental practices are doing to rank #1 on Google results

Questions: the questions we sought to answer included:

What are the top-ranking dental practices in Google search results doing to achieve number one status?
What mistakes are being made by dentists ranking on pages 2 and 5 by comparison.?
What is the quantitative benefit of page 1 versus other pages in potential new patients?
How can clinics bridge the gap?

We have decided not to name the specific practices, as it is not our intention to cause embarrassment.

Research Methodology:

We chose the search term “(city) + dentist”. For example, “Sydney dentist, “Adelaide dentist” etc for each State.
Results were taken from Google search results using independent tools to ensure results were not tainted by prior search behaviour of the computers being used by researchers. These included respected tools such as Moz, Pingdom, Agency Analytics (did we),
The websites we selected to analyse in each capital city comprised:

a. The top listing on Google Maps “three pack” (so-called because it normally displays three results for the location being searched).
b. The number one organic listing on page one.
c. The number one organic listing at the top of page two
d. The listing at the bottom of page 5. It had to be located in the CBD for each capital city and not have appeared in an earlier results page. For example, a strong site could have its home page appear on page one and a secondary page appear on page 5.
In 2022, Hobart, Darwin and Canberra did not have sufficient numbers of of dentists to extend to page 5 so they were left out of the survey.
We deliberately excluded paid advertisements. These are companies that are unable to achieve a prominent search result on page one through unpaid means and have been forced to pay for advertising. As such, their SEO is not best practice.

Tests Undertaken

We tested for:

Speed to load
Google speed rank score from Sydney for desktop and mobile
Number of backlinks
Number of linking domains
Anchor text they use for backlinks
Keywords on page 1 of Google search results
Keywords in top 3 of page 1
Top ranking keywords
Number of ranking keywords
Estimated organic traffic they receive
Estimated paid search traffic they receive
Social media (Facebook) : date of last post, posts this year/month?
Amount of content on Home Page
Page authority
Domain authority
Spam score
Home page meta description
Number of Google reviews received
Google Review rating out of five

What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It is the process of improving your website in line with quality standards set by Google etc to improve the position of a website page in search results. It does not include paid advertising and is often referred to as an “organic” ranking.

Google has an algorithm that auto-sorts what websites should rank in what position for each different search term (these are known as keywords). Exactly how it works is not 100% clear – because Google is not 100% transparent as it does not want organisations to “game” its process. It does not publish a definitive list of ranking factors, nor their importance.

However, SEO professionals have been able to determine over 200 ranking factors and make best estimates of what factors are the most important. These are confirmed by Google from time to time.

Why is ranking high on page one of Google so important?

Study after study, year after year, reveals the outsized advantage of ranking high on page one for search results pages.

First Page Sage has been conducting research into this for many years. Its most recent findings show that “The top 3 organic search results receive more than two-thirds (68.7%) of all clicks on the Google Search page”.

Analysis of four million Google searches by Backlinko found that “The #1 organic result is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in the #10 spot.”.

Less than one percent of users clicked on a link on page 2.

While new SERP features such as AI-overviews and changing user behaviour, being #1 doesn’t guarantee as much traffic as in previous years – but it is still an invaluable source of new business.

If you would like to see the specific observations for each capital city, please fill in the attached form and we will email you the full research document.

Key findings from detailed research in 2022

Practices with the top rankings on Google are attracting hundreds or thousands more visitors to their websites each month, when compared with lower ranked websites. This suggests they have a healthy new business pipeline. (To estimate the dollar value to a practice, albeit very roughly, we did the following exercise. HealthEngine has stated that the lifetime value of an Australian dental patient ranges between $17,000 and $35,000. This is a very wide range, so we have opted for the lower figure. In the case of Adelaide, the top ranked website received 1,952 more visits per month than the practice listed at the bottom of page 5. Allowing for a 4% conversion rate (neither very good, nor very bad), that equates to 78 extra patients per month sourced by ranking #1. Over the course of a year, that would be almost AUD$16 million in lifetime value, before attrition.)
There is a very clear correlation between ranking #1 and a short list of SEO techniques. However, there is no one, single solution – no magic bullet.
As well as implementing the handful of critical SEO techniques, the highest ranked clinics are generally undertaking a wide range of best practice SEO practices, while low ranked surgeries do not. This suggests a business culture that is dedicated to digital marketing excellence.
The more competitive the market, the greater the effort required to achieve page one success. For example, Sydney appears to require greater effort to rank on page one than is required in Adelaide and Perth.
Few users go to page 2 of search results. The dental practices in this position – quite good but not good enough – are doing many things correctly. In most cases, they led in one, two or three of the areas we measured, or scored close to the top ranked dentists. This reinforces the message that search result winners are generally the leaders across a range of ranking factors – and that the process of claiming the top positions does take time. We also know from experience that the more competitive the market, the longer it takes.
Including a geographic term (eg. “Adelaide Dentist”) in your URL or business name does NOT guarantee success. While many top ranking companies are employing this strategy, so too are dental practices ranking on page 10 (which nobody visits). Google says naming strategies are not a major determining factor in their indexing algorithm. It appears that dentists who choose a geographic identifier in their URL either have a well-developed understanding of SEO or are using a SEO agency. As such, using the naming technique is just one of many tactics they are implementing. So having a high competition geographic name, such as Sydney, in a business name and url is only beneficial if the business is implementing best practice in other key areas of SEO.
The Melbourne market may be skewed by “black hat” techniques, some of which have been the subject of “exposes” on television news and current affairs when we undertook the initial research in 2022. It was alleged that some dentists are paying people to give their business fictitious Google reviews to secure a higher search result ranking. There is evidence that some dentists have been caught using black hat techniques and have been penalised by Google.
Much is said about site speed – but speed alone will not win the day. Many low-ranking sites had good speed scores, while many high-ranking sites had average to poor speed results. It is clear that Google prioritises other aspects over a lightning-fast website.

RESULTS FROM 2022

The following are summaries of researcher notes, by city , in alphabetical order:

Adelaide

The top-ranked dental practice received 1,952 more visits per month than the practice listed at the bottom on page 5.
The top-ranking website (not including map results) won against most factors.

a. Top ranked on the map is actually outside the Adelaide CBD and the only factor it won was having the highest star ranking. However, it does have “Adelaide” and “dental” in its url.
The fastest site had the worst SERP result. You will not win on speed alone.
Lowest has lowest number of backlinks. Others have over 100.
#1 organic SERP (not maps) has highest traffic and not surprisingly, the highest number of ranking keywords. Page 5 is miles behind.
1 organic SERP (not maps) has the highest domain authority, while the page 5 clinic has the lowest domain authority.
Lowest has a Spam score above the industry average of 1%. It is 17%.
The meta description of #1 search result includes dental niche terms. The others are generic.
Social media: #1 result had the most recent social media post, while the lowest had not posted for two years.
Reviews: the top-ranking SERP result had 63 reviews and the first map result had 36 reviews. The page 5 result had one review – and it was for the lowest star rating possible – one star.
The practice ranked at the bottom of page 5 subsequently closed its operations.)

Brisbane

The benefit for ranking at the top of page one compared to the top of page 2 is an extra 7,308 visitors a year.
The top map results appears to rank top based on a combination of location, geographic location in business name and good reviews.
The best SERP result has good speed and backlinks, as well as active social media.
Page 5 result rates very well in many areas, strongly suggesting it has been penalised by Google (eg. spammy backlinks).

Melbourne

It is difficult to draw truly meaningful insights into why the top-ranked Melbourne websites are achieving their success, as they have been outranked in many areas by lower positioned sites. It appears that “wins” by lower ranked sites may be being achieved through black hat techniques, so while they tick boxes in those areas, Google can see through these frowned-upon strategies and lowers their SERPs.
The lowest ranked site we analysed had a lot of wins – but maybe with almost 4000 ranking keywords they indulge in Black Hat practices. It would also appear they have been reported to Google (not the practice in news stories but potentially using similar banned techniques). So, they are the poster child for the consequences of Black Hat practices. The shame is that they do a lot of good things: great links from other highly regarded websites, images are optimised for search … they just need to know not to cross the line.
However, Melbourne page 5 could also have been a blip day. We have seen days where rankings took a heavy hit, only to bounce back a week later. It can be very volatile. That’s frustrating for website owners because they want to see a clear cause and effect – but Google shrouds its algorithm in secrecy, giving guides but not exact data. SEO experts have had to work together to build up a picture of what works best. It’s also why you need to take notice of trends, not daily spikes and drops.
Those who have named their business to suit a search term are likely to be SEO savvy and undertaking other SEO tasks correctly, too.
None have meta descriptions with niche dental terminology.
Side story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/14/court-says-melbourne-dentist-can-serve-google-for-user-details-over-bad-review
Side story: https://www.9news.com.au/national/fake-reviews-becoming-more-common-and-harder-to-identify-on-melbourne-business-sites/48084f34-e4b9-4588-af95-01ddc7bd529a
Side story: https://elitlaw.com.au/melbourne-dentist-defamed-patient-google-review/

Perth

The number one SERP ranking (non-map) is the leader in 10 of the 19 areas we checked in Perth. It shoots the lights out.
This site could work on page speed and add content to the home page to further cement its position.
The map result has domain name advantage but is also strong on links, social media, page and domain authority and its Google reviews are excellent.
Top of page 2 is strong on content and links, which is why it is poised to enter page one. It has issues with a small number of reviews based on what is normal in the profession and its star ranking is good but not excellent. It also has issues with speed and the number of linking domains.
Bottom of page 5 finished last in all but three areas. Basics such as a meta description are missing, no social media, Google Reviews ranking is below 4 stars, spam score is the highest, it has very few backlinks and – not surprisingly – it only has five keywords that rank on page one of the Google search results.

Sydney

The principles, insights and lessons remain intact, no matter which tool you use.
Interesting the page five website has a strong number of linking domains and links, as well as 25 good reviews. But it has few keywords on page 1 and none in the top 4 of page one – compared to the number one ranked website that has 20 times more. The keywords it does well on attract low volumes of traffic but the top websites rank high for terms that drive a lot of traffic.
Page five ranked website is doing a lot things right. Recent socials. Speed. Linking domains. Page Authority. It goes to show how competitive markets like Sydney are.
Map result had strong meta description that included the most technical terms – which is a signpost to Google that it authentically has dentist expertise. However, it also combines it with normal, geo-based text.
The first map result ticks most of the boxes. It leads in 10 of the 19 factors we analysed.
Top search result, non-map, is like Goldilocks. It doesn’t lead many of the stats but is close to the leadership scores and has few bad points.
The dentist on the top of page 2 has just 16 keywords on p1 of results – the leader has 17 times more!
The results are skewed by those companies that have all or part of the search term in their URL. Nevertheless, the study clearly shows that Google rewards good practice because in the instance of the highly competitive Sydney market, the top map listing also finished first in the vast majority of our ranking criteria.