Dental marketing: what the code of ethics allows, and the five levers that bring in patients

Type "dental marketing" into Google and you will mostly land on pages written for other countries, or for other professions. They recommend paid campaigns, discounts on teeth whitening, filmed patient testimonials. Applied in France, a good share of that advice puts the dentist in breach of the rules.

The word itself makes people uneasy. Marketing simply means all the ways you make a service known and easy to choose. Seen that way, a dentist already does it: the nameplate, the hours on the door, the phone number given to the on-call line. So the question is not whether to do marketing. It is where the line is, and what actually brings in patients on the right side of it.

The framework is more open than people think, and closed where no one looks

Many dentists still work under a rule they believe is absolute: everything is forbidden. That is no longer the case. Decree No. 2020-1658 of December 22, 2020 removed the general ban that appeared in article R.4127-215, and it is available on Légifrance. Informing the public about how you practice is now allowed, by any means.

What remains closed is specific, and it is exactly where advice from elsewhere leads you. Dentistry must not be practiced as a business (R.4127-215). No priority placement may be obtained through payment or by any other means (R.4127-217 II). No third-party testimonials, no comparison with other dentists (R.4127-215-1). No advertising for a third party or a commercial company (R.4127-225). No discounts and no incentives (R.4127-221).

Our guide on what the Dental Council allows on a dentist website goes through each text from the French Dental Council (Ordre national des chirurgiens-dentistes), and the dental marketing agency page explains how we work within this framework.

Eight common practices, checked against the code

Use this table as a filter. Whenever someone pitches you a marketing idea, find the row that looks like it.

The last two rows often come as a surprise. Yet they are the ones that come up most in the websites we take over. The detail on reviews is in our article on Google reviews and the code of ethics.

The five levers that actually bring in patients

Nearly one patient in two goes online before choosing: 59.8% of French people look for health information online (Eurostat, 2025), Google handles 88.76% of searches in France (Statcounter, August 2026), and 56.6% of French people already use artificial intelligence, including to find a dentist (Arcom and Médiamétrie, April 2026). Five levers cover these three paths.

• One page per treatment you provide. It is the most labor-intensive lever and the most durable. A "dental implant" page answers a specific search, while an "our treatments" page answers none.
• The Google Business Profile. It decides what a patient in your town sees. Google ranks on three official criteria: relevance, distance and prominence (Google help). The Google Business Profile for dentists page lists the fields to fill in.
• Displayed fees. It is a legal requirement, and it is also the question that triggers or holds back the call. Our article on dental fees on your website shows how to present them.
• The same information everywhere. Name, address, phone number and hours identical word for word on the website, the profile and the directories. It is the cheapest lever, and the most neglected one.
• A website machines can read. The crawlers from OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity do not read JavaScript, the small program that fills the page after it opens. Our article on why AI cannot read your dental website explains the four possible walls.

These five levers overlap with the ones detailed in our article on the visibility levers that remain allowed. The difference is the order: here, they are ranked by how much time they take before they have an effect.

The first ninety days, in order

A practice starting from zero does not need to do everything at once. This order avoids wasted work.

1. Week 1. Check that your Google Business Profile is in your name, and that the hours, address and phone number on it are correct. Fix the same information on the website.
2. Weeks 2 to 4. Write the page for the treatment that accounts for the largest share of your work. How it goes, duration, number of visits, aftercare, alternatives, fee range.
3. Weeks 5 to 8. Write two more treatment pages, on the same model. Add the fees page if it is missing.
4. Weeks 9 to 12. Complete the profile: services described in patients' words, description, photos of the practice and the equipment.
5. The last day. Record your baseline numbers: calls from the profile, appointment requests, new patients who mention the internet. Without that baseline, you will never know what changed.

This pace assumes a website you can edit yourself. If yours resists, the decision grid is in our article on redesigning or fixing a dental practice website. The dental SEO page shows how these projects fit together.

What can be measured, and what cannot

Dental marketing is not judged by a position on Google, which changes with location, device and time of day. It is judged by four patient actions: taps on the call button in the profile, calls from the website, appointment requests, and new patients who answer "the internet" at the front desk.

Three of these four numbers are free and can be read in Google's tools. The fourth is noted by hand, in one second per new patient. The full method, with the tracking sheet, is in our article on dental SEO results. Presence in AI answers is measured as the percentage of answers that cite the practice, never as a position.

The ten-minute check to run yourself

Take your phone, turn off Wi-Fi, and go through these five points.

1. Search for your practice's name. Does your website come up before the directories?
2. Search for your main treatment followed by the name of your town. Does one of your pages show up anywhere?
3. Open your website and count the treatment pages that have their own URL.
4. Look for the fees page. If it is missing, the requirement of article R.4127-240 II is not met.
5. Read the website footer. Any commercial credit for a vendor there is one too many.

A point that fails is worth a week of work, not a whole project. The SEO test runs this check for you. Once the five points are in order, the next question comes quickly: which of your pages brings in the calls, and which brings in nothing.

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