SEO for dentists: 49 Italian sites, measured

The numbers, before the explanations

The gap is not SEO, it is GEO

Twenty-five points between the two medians are not a detail, and they have a simple explanation: part of classic SEO arrives on its own. The WordPress theme writes the title, the plugin generates the sitemap, the theme adds the menu links. GEO, instead, arrives from nowhere: structured data, a recognizable author, questions with answers and update dates are things someone has to decide to add.

For a dental practice this weighs more than elsewhere. When a patient asks an AI assistant for “a dentist open on Saturday in Padova,” the answer is built on information declared in a readable way: address, hours, services, who you are. On the sites we measured, that information is almost always in the text, and almost never in a form a machine can read without guessing.

The defects, ranked by how many practices have them

The percentage is out of the 49 sites reached. A defect counts once per site, even when it appears on all five pages.

• 94%

  No business schema, and no address in the structured dataHigh

  The practice's address is written in the footer, where a person reads it. It is not declared in JSON-LD, where a machine reads it. This is why a practice with ten years of history may not show up in an AI assistant's local results, while one that opened last year and added three lines of schema does.

• 92%

  No professional schema (Dentist, MedicalBusiness)High

  Schema.org has a type made specifically for dental practices. Declaring it costs you once and states explicitly what your trade is, instead of leaving it to be inferred from the words on the site.

• 90%

  No identifiable authorMedium

  Pages about implants, whitening or orthodontics are health content, and nobody signs them. The dentist's name, the professional register number and two lines of biography are enough: it is the difference between a text someone wrote and a text anyone could have written.

• 82%

  The city does not appear in the page titleMedium

  In 90% of cases it does not appear in the description either. A patient's searches are almost always local, and this is the point where you recover ground fastest: “Studio Dentistico Bianchi, Padova” instead of “Home” or “Welcome”.

• 63%

  Thin text contentMedium

  Service pages of just a few lines, often a photo and a bulleted list. There is not enough text to answer the question that brings the patient there: how long it lasts, how much it hurts, how much it costs, how often it is repeated.

• 53%

  Meta description missingHigh

  More than one site in two lets Google choose the line shown under the title in the results. It is the only presentation sentence a patient sees before deciding whether to click.

• 49%

  No H1 on the pageHigh

  Almost half of the sites have no main heading, the big one at the top. It usually happens because the theme replaces it with an image or a slider: it looks perfectly fine, and to an engine it does not exist.

• 61%

  No llms.txt fileMedium

  It is the file that tells AI assistants which pages matter and what you do. Almost nobody in the sector has one, so right now it is the cheapest way to stand out.

Eleven sites out of sixty do not respond at all

Before the scores, there is this. Of the sixty starting addresses, eleven did not respond twice in a row: seven have an expired or no longer resolvable domain, one answers “page not found,” three do not respond within the time limit. These are practices that exist in the world, and whose site, where someone looks for it, is no longer there.

What I would do, in this order

1. 1Declare the practice in JSON-LD. Type Dentist, name, address with the city, phone, hours. You write it once, it applies to the whole site, and on its own it covers the two most widespread defects in the sector.
2. 2Put the city in the title and in the description of the home page and the service pages. It is the change that takes the least time of all and puts you ahead of 82% of the sector.
3. 3Sign the health pages. The dentist's name, professional register number, two lines of biography. It matters for patient trust even before it matters for the score.
4. 4Answer in writing the questions you get asked on the phone. How much an implant costs, how long a root canal lasts, how often to have a cleaning. They are the same questions patients ask an AI assistant, and whoever has written the answers is the one who gets cited.
5. 5Check that the H1 really exists. Look at the code, not the page: if the big heading is inside a slider image, to an engine that page has no title.

How we measured it

• Where the sites come fromOpenStreetMap, dental practices in Italy that declare a site. Open data, ODbL license. Sixty unique domains, excluding social profiles and directory pages.
• Who measuredThe Trovavio engine, the same function that runs when you analyze your site from the home page. No different model for the occasion.
• How many pagesUp to five per site, 3.7 on average. The site's score is the average of its pages.
• Declared sectorDentist, set by hand: this way the local SEO checks and the sector comparison apply, instead of the generic profile.
• WhenAugust 18, 2026. We will repeat the measurement, and when it changes we will write it here with the new date.
• What we do not publishThe names. Measuring a public site is what the product does every day; publishing a practice's report card with its name on it is something else, and we do not do it.

The sample is what it is: forty-nine sites are not a census of Italian dental practices, and whoever puts their site on OpenStreetMap is not necessarily the same as whoever does not. But it is a real, repeatable measurement with a written method: much more than an average nobody ever counted.

Questions