Somebody gave them your name. The site decides what happens next.
The page is not competing for a stranger. It is confirming what a friend already said, to somebody who is checking.
The short answer
People do not shop for a dentist the way they shop for a restaurant. They ask somebody they trust, get a name, and then look that name up.
So the website is not there to win an argument. It is there to survive being checked.
What the research actually found
A study of 466 patients across 3 German cities, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, asked how they had become aware of their dentist. 65.6% said a recommendation. 7.3% said the internet.
That is one country and the fieldwork was done in 2012 and 2013, so treat it as a shape rather than a measurement of Durres today. The shape is the useful part, and it has not reversed anywhere it has been asked since.
Being checked is a different job from being found
Somebody who was given your name types it directly. They are looking for an address, a photograph of the place, the hours, and some sign that a real person works there.
If nothing comes up, the recommendation quietly weakens. Not because they doubt their friend, but because a clinic with no trace looks like one that might have closed.
What to put on the page, in order
The name of the dentist and a photograph of them. The address with a map. The hours. What you actually treat, in the words a patient would use rather than the clinical ones.
Prices are a decision rather than an obligation, and whichever you choose, saying nothing at all is the option that costs you the nervous patient.
Where search still earns its keep
Two cases. The emergency, where somebody in pain searches and takes whoever can see them. And the newcomer who knows nobody in the city yet, which in a town with this much movement is not a small group.
Both are found on the map rather than through the site, which makes the listing the cheaper half of this job.
Search your own clinic the way a patient would, with the name a friend would have given them, and tell us what you found. Get a free audit.
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