Would you choose a dentist without checking their reviews? Why would your patients not read reviews as well? The importance of positive reviews cannot be overstated for dental practices.
1,026 U.S. adult consumers responded to BrightLocal’s 2025 Local Review Survey. Beyond the 83% who use Google reviews, 74% say they use two or more review sites before making decisions.
Consistently acquiring a consistent stream of positive reviews is essential to new patient acquisition and your practice’s brand strategy.
Read on to find out why positive reviews are so critical to your success.
All local businesses including dental practices have a reputation. Each person who talks or writes about you colors how a person will see your brand.
The same is true for what reviewers report about the dentists in your practice. And also the hygienists and administration staff in your office.
From the beginning, you want potential patients to see glowing details about your practice. And this will lead to appointments and an office visit.
In the 2025 survey previously mentioned, 42% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.
Patient reviews are how a practice attracts additional patients. They get valuable insights from what your current dental patients have to say about your dentists and your practice.
What they write on review sites reflects on the entire team in your dental office. And it determines your practice's and dentists' reputations.
Reviews also affect your search engine rankings. Your success in the dental industry relies on how well you manage your online reviews.
The two main reasons patients choose dentists are personal referrals and feedback in online reviews. It is how they gain valuable insights on where to find the best possible care.
Your patients may mention anything from why they chose your practice to the type of services and treatment plans you offer.
They want to know how professional everyone working in your office is. But most importantly, they want to know about any concerns others report.
In the dental industry, the offices with the most helpful reviews and feedback garner the lion's share of patients.
Feature your best reviews on your website's pages and mention them in blog posts. Ideally, display reviews containing details that focus on each of the services you offer on the service page.
All of your reviews are the foundation of your local business's reputation. And they can all affect your visibility in search engines.
Google reviews for dentists directly impact local search results rankings. Google's algorithm considers several review-related factors:
The impact of reviews on a dental office's reputation extends far beyond search rankings. Reviews serve as a pre-qualification tool that:
In saturated dental markets, online reviews for dentists create significant competitive differentiation. Practices with strong review profiles often:
Local businesses are hopefully aware they need online reviews on Google Business Profiles (GBP). But there are other review sites that impact your visibility.
If anonymous reviews have concerned you in the past, you'll be happy to know that Google no longer permits them as of May 2018.
Google Maps Google Business Profiles GBPs for Las Vegas NV dentists
Are you aware that Apple iOS devices favored by affluent users pull from Yelp reviews? Also, Bing and Apple Maps both use Yelp rather than Google.
Approximately 2.35 billion Apple devices worldwide have Apple Maps preinstalled. In the U.S., iOS controls 58.65% of the mobile device market as of May 2025 vs Android's 41.1%.
This makes Yelp more important than many suspect. But you only want Yelp reviews from your patients who regularly use Yelp. We'll explain why in Maui Bob's 5 Star Reviews System.
Surprisingly, Yelp reviews weren't the second most popular after Google reviews. BrightLocal's survey discovered that 48% of respondents mentioned using local news to choose local businesses to patronize.
While most local news websites do not have review sections, they often have community spaces where locals share helpful feedback.
Especially now with AI overviews taking away clicks, your dental practice will want to give more attention to PR and mentions like the one below on local websites.
Your Google Business Profile and Yelp aren't the only places potential patients use to find a new dentist. The Nielsen Trust in Advertising Survey sometimes asks what people trust most:
Recommendations from friends and family consistently ranks #1 with 89%. And where are more friends and family of potential patients likely to be than Facebook?
Facebook can be one of the more problematic review sites for dental practices. Your dental office cannot remove negative reviews yourself.
And it is critical to continually monitor feedback received on Facebook because spam is a pervasive issue there. All spam reviews need to be immediately reported for removal.
But having positive reviews, strong ratings, and immediately posting review responses on Facebook builds trust and credibility.
It is worth the effort to be active on social media platforms, especially Facebook. Just take a deep breath before you respond if you get a negative review.
While they don't officially have reviews, opinions on dental practices are often shared on Instagram and even TikTok.
Here's an example of a patient who shared on Instagram that they love their dental office:
Monitor mentions of your dental practice across all social media networks. And respond promptly to both positive and negative reviews.
You never know when potential patients will see what is said about you on social media. If you comment, always respond in a professional manner.
This shows an effort to resolve any complaints and is an effective way to impress prospective patients.
One of the things that Google takes into consideration for a business is how relevant you are. How often you are mentioned on social media, how many reviews you have, and how often you get new reviews all matter.
From our experience, any review after 30 days becomes less likely to influence where you appear in Google Maps. Why, you ask?
Well, an old review is better than no review; however, a few things come to mind if you haven't gotten a review within 30 days.
If you have your dentists and others in your practice asking for reviews, you should get regular new reviews just as Lone Mountain Dental in Las Vegas does.
Now this next part is mostly subjective, but you will find it true yourself as a reader. When looking at reviews and you haven't seen a new review in a month or more, I personally wonder is this place that busy?
Do people think it's worth their time and money? Or perhaps the service wasn't good enough to want to write about it?
Now, maybe you don't think about this. However, there are a lot of people who think this way, so consistently asking for reviews is important.
And ask for Google reviews in particular because they are the most commonly used search engine and they rate you off of relevance and your reviews.
Unfortunately, there is no sure-fire way to avoid all negative reviews. But the best protection against bad ratings is having a large number of reviews.
Here's an excellent example. Even though Las Vegas Modern Dentistry and Orthodontics has negative reviews, their rating is 4.8 due to their 544 total reviews (as of today):
Did you know that people don't trust responses that are all five stars? It makes them suspicious that you may have paid someone to submit fake reviews.
A mix of mostly good, but some less than stellar responses in reviews for local businesses is normal. And it increases trust that the responses about dentists are real.
No matter whether a patient's responses on reviews are positive or negative, respond to every one in a professional manner.
Focus on making the unhappy patients satisfied. And be sure to show appreciation for the ones who love their dentists and were kind enough to leave a review!
So rather than dreading a negative review or spending unnecessary time and money trying to get it removed, just accept that it happens (since you can't please everyone).
And then bury it with more good reviews. Your friendly staff following your review requests process is key to higher ratings and more positive reviews.
As soon you are done reading this, do two things:
You'll find out in 7 Rules to Help You Gain 347% More Reviews how to make it easy. At the moment your patients are happy, make contact with them and ask for a review.
When you provide a QR code and link that drops patients right into a review, in most cases patients are happy to give feedback on your business.
You can find more tips in Why Your Best Patients Never Leave Reviews (And How to Change That).
We've established that your potential patients do seek out and read reviews. And that they use multiple review sites before deciding to make appointments.
It is essential that you have a process to send them review requests. This is because you need to consistently generate recent reviews.
Explain the importance of requesting reviews to each of your dentists and other staff. It truly does make a huge difference in the number of new visits you can generate.
