A crown comes loose on a Friday, or a family lands on the island and needs a first cleaning, and somebody opens Google and picks from the dentists it shows. Which practices make that list was decided long before the search, by details on each website that nobody at the front desk has looked at in years.
Most advice written for dentists is a playbook: claim the Business Profile, keep the name and address consistent everywhere, write a page for every service. Reasonable, and all of it generic. We did something plainer. We ran the same homepage check on every dentist in one city and counted what came back.
How we picked the sites
On October 12 we searched Google Maps for dentists in Honolulu. We took the open practices with a website, five or more reviews, and a rating of 3.5 or better. That came to 18.
17 of the 18 sites let the check run, so every count below is out of 17. The checks are the ones our free audit runs on a homepage: title tag, description, headings, images, business markup, sitemap, analytics, and Google's PageSpeed test for phones. Here is the count of sites with each problem:
| What we checked | Sites with a problem |
|---|---|
| No analytics, nothing counts visitors | 12 of 17 |
| Images missing alt text | 12 of 17 |
| Title tag missing or cut off in results | 12 of 17 |
| Main heading missing or duplicated | 7 of 17 |
| Description missing or cut off | 7 of 17 |
| No business markup | 5 of 17 |
| Sitemap silent for a year or more | 3 of 17 |
| Footer showing an old year | 2 of 17 |
Three problems in a dead heat at the top. One of them is the quiet one, and it is where we will start.
Twelve of seventeen count nobody
12 of the 17 homepages carry no Google Analytics and no Tag Manager. That is the most sites without analytics of any trade we have run through this check: 8 of 15 solar sites, 10 of 14 plumbing sites, 7 of 12 air conditioning sites, 5 of 10 electrician sites, and now 12 of 17 dental sites.
Nothing on those 12 pages counts who arrived, where from, or whether the visit turned into a booked appointment. A practice can spend real money on a site and on ads and never learn whether either one produces a single new patient.
Analytics is free to set up, and adding it changes nothing a visitor sees. Without it, the front desk phone is the only meter the practice has.
The most polished pages in the series
This is the fifth Honolulu trade we have run through the same check, after the solar installers, the plumbers, the air conditioning contractors, and the electricians. On the surface, the dentists come out looking the best of the five:
- Photos: 91 of the 507 homepage images have no alt text, which is 18 percent. That is the lowest share in the series by a wide margin. Solar sites left 62 percent of their images blank, electricians 49 percent, plumbers 44 percent, air conditioning 30 percent.
- Sitemaps: all 17 sites have one, the first trade in the series where none is missing.
- Speed: only 3 of the 16 sites that returned a phone score land in the range Google marks red, where 8 of 15 solar sites did.
Seven of the sites run on WordPress and two on Squarespace; eight we could not identify. These pages were clearly built by professionals. What the professionals skipped is the plumbing behind them: the measurement, the markup, and the two lines of text Google actually shows.
A title tag 478 characters long
The title tag is the blue headline a searcher clicks in a Google result, and Google cuts it off at about 60 characters. One dental site has no title at all. Of the 16 that do, 11 run past the cut. The shortest title we found is 19 characters. The longest is 478, roughly eight times what a searcher will ever see, trimmed mid-word on every phone in town.
The description is the line under the headline. Two sites have none, so Google picks text off the page and shows whatever it finds. Of the 15 that have one, 5 run past 160 characters, the longest at 230. Both lines are text somebody types once, and both decide whether the searcher taps this practice or the next one on the list.
The images tell a similar story. 18 percent blank is the best share in the series, but 12 of the 17 sites still have at least one photo with no alt text, the short caption Google reads in place of an image it cannot see. The worst single homepage says nothing to search on 23 of its 102 photos.
Seven pages leave Google guessing
One main heading, the H1, tells Google what a page is about. One site has none and six have more than one, so on 7 of the 17 homepages Google is left to guess which line matters. Ten have exactly one, which is what Google expects.
Business markup is the code that states dentist, this address, these hours in Google's own format. Five of the 17 sites have none, so Google infers those facts instead of being told. And while every site has a sitemap, the file that lists which pages exist, 3 of them have not told Google about anything new since last year or earlier. Two footers agree with that reading: one shows 2023 in the copyright line, and one still shows 2016.
The speed scores, and a warning about the 100
Sixteen of the 17 sites returned a phone speed score; one did not. The scores run from 34 to 96 with a median of 61, and 3 of the 16 land under 50, the range Google's tool marks in red as poor. A page that slow loses people on a phone, which is where a toothache does its searching.
One number on that report deserves a warning label. Google's own SEO check in the same tool gave half of these 16 sites a perfect 100, and every one of the 8 still has problems from the list above. That check does not look at analytics, alt text on every image, or business markup. A 100 there is not a clean bill of health; it is a narrow test passed narrowly.
What to do with this
Run the same check on your own site at the homepage check; the results show on screen and no email is asked for. If you want the whole thing looked at, every page, the Google listing, the reviews, the speed, and the competitors, there is the free audit.