How much does dental marketing cost in London, Ontario?

The short answer

Dental marketing has three price tags, and most quotes mix them up. There's the fee you pay an agency or freelancer for the work. There's ad spend, which goes to Google if you run ads. And there are one-time costs, like setup or a new website.

A useful way to size the total: published dental industry guidance often puts marketing at roughly 4% to 7% of collections for an established practice, with the agency fee and ad spend counted together. For a practice collecting $1 million a year, that works out to about $3,300 to $5,800 a month. A practice with a waitlist can spend less. One trying to fill a new associate's schedule may need more.

What the agency fee should cover

The fee pays for work, so the useful question is what work. For a dental practice, a solid monthly program usually includes:

• Managing your Google Business Profile: categories, services, photos, posts and replies to reviews
• Keeping your practice name, phone number and hours identical across directories
• New or improved pages for the treatments you want more of
• Google Ads management, if you run ads: keywords, ad copy, budgets and landing pages
• Call and booking tracking, so you can see which channel produced each new patient
• A monthly report, and a conversation about what to do next

In an Ahrefs survey of 439 SEO providers, the most common monthly retainer was $501 to $1,000, and local SEO averaged about US$1,557 a month. Agencies charged a lot more than freelancers. A low fee isn't automatically bad, but it usually means very little time on your account, and in local search, too little work often moves nothing at all.

What Google Ads cost for dentists

Ad spend is the part you control most directly. You set a budget, and Google charges you each time someone clicks your ad. Dental clicks are among the more expensive ones. In LocaliQ's 2026 search advertising benchmarks, dentists paid about US$8.00 per click on average, about 10.7% of clicks turned into a call or a form, and each of those leads cost about US$73.

Those benchmarks come from US campaigns and are in US dollars, so treat them as a rough guide rather than a London quote. Your real numbers depend on which treatments you advertise, how far your ads reach, and how easy your landing pages make it to call or book. The only reliable figure is the one from your own account after a few weeks.

Here's the math with round numbers close to those averages. It's an illustration, not a forecast.

Whether $160 is good depends on what a new patient is worth to your practice. You can estimate that from your own records: average collections in a new patient's first year, and how many of them stay. The example also shows why the booking step matters so much. If your front desk books three in four callers instead of half, the ad spend per new patient drops by a third, with no change to the ads at all.

The Ontario rule that changes how dentists pay

One way of paying is off the table for Ontario dentists. The RCDSO's practice advisory on professional advertising tells dentists not to enter advertising arrangements that share or split fees with a third party based on the amount of business a campaign brings in. If a marketer offers to charge per new patient, or to take a cut of what those patients spend, check the offer against the advisory before you sign anything.

The same advisory rules out free offers, contests and giveaways, which takes some of the cheapest-looking promotions off the menu. Our guide to Ontario's advertising rules covers the rest.

What pushes the price up or down

• How many chairs you need to fill. A two-dentist practice with open hygiene time needs more new patients than a solo practice with a waitlist.
• Which treatments you want more of. New-patient exams, emergency visits and higher-value treatments each need their own pages and, if you advertise, their own campaigns.
• Competition near you. London has far fewer practices chasing each search than downtown Toronto, but some neighbourhoods and treatments are crowded. Google Maps rankings change block by block, so the competition that matters is the few kilometres around your door.
• Where you're starting from. An unclaimed Google profile, mismatched listings and no tracking mean more setup work in the first months.
• Whether you need ads at all. If your schedule is full, put the money into your listing, reviews and pages, and save ad spend for when you have room.
• Whether you need a new website. Most practices don't. If yours is slow on phones, hard to book from, or controlled by someone else, it may be worth replacing.

Costs that don't show up on the first quote

• A website you don't own. Some packages include a site that stays with the agency when you leave. Ask who owns the domain, the site and the content.
• Ad spend routed through the agency. Some agencies bill your ad spend themselves, sometimes with a markup. Ask whether Google bills your card directly.
• Accounts in the agency's name. If your Google profile or ads account sits under the agency, leaving can mean starting from scratch. Everything should be in your practice's name.
• Long contracts. Twelve months or more with no way out makes it hard to walk away from work that isn't producing.
• Reports without bookings. Rankings and clicks are easy to report. If the monthly report never mentions booked appointments, you can't tell whether the fee pays for itself.

What Forest City Search charges

Here are our prices, so you have one real number to compare against. They're flat monthly fees in Canadian dollars, plus HST, with a six-month minimum, and Google bills ad spend straight to you.

Practice Growth is the usual fit for a one- or two-dentist practice. Add $2,000 a month in ad spend and the total is $5,000 a month, inside the 4% to 7% range for a practice collecting about $1 million a year. Founding clinics get 20% off for their first six months. See everything each plan includes, or read how we approach dental marketing.

How to tell if it's working

Judge dental marketing on one number: what each booked new patient cost you, by channel. Rankings, clicks and impressions are useful signals, but they don't pay the rent.

• Add up everything you spent in the month: the fee plus any ad spend.
• Count booked new patients from each source: Google Maps, organic search, ads and referrals.
• Divide spend by bookings, and compare the result with what a new patient is worth to your practice.

Give local SEO three to six months before you judge it, because rankings built on content and reviews take time. Ads can show a cost per booking from the first month and usually improve as they're tuned. Our guide to appointment tracking shows how to count bookings by source while keeping patient information out of your reports.

Questions to ask any agency before you sign

• Who owns the Google profile, the ads account, the website and the domain?
• Does Google bill my card for ad spend directly, or does it go through you?
• Is any part of your fee tied to patients, leads or revenue?
• What exactly will you do each month?
• How will you report booked appointments, not just clicks and rankings?
• How do you check ads and pages against RCDSO rules?
• What's the minimum term, and what happens to my accounts if I leave?