Google treats every site as a separate business. Your patients do too. Only your head office thinks of it as one thing.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency that markets multi-site dental groups across the UK and Ireland. We cover group brand management, a fully optimised Google Business Profile for each location, site-specific local search, centrally run paid advertising with location-level targeting, and reporting at both practice and group level. Each location is managed as its own local market, while the brand stays consistent across the group.
Every site in a group carries its own rent, its own team and its own surgery hours, and those costs are only covered once patients are booked in. As the group grows, so does the amount of chair time that needs filling every week.
Marketing is what keeps that growth paying for itself. It brings patients into each location and steers them towards the treatments the group wants more of. It also shows the owners which sites are earning their keep, which gets harder to see with every practice you add.
The mistake nearly every group makes is treating the second site like a copy of the first.
The same website template goes up with the address swapped. The same campaign runs across both towns, with the same messaging and the same offers.
Then site two underperforms and nobody can work out why.
It’s usually because site two is in a town with three established competitors, a different average income, an NHS practice still taking patients, and patients who travel in a different direction. What worked in town one had more to do with that market than with the brand.
What should be shared is the system: the reporting, the follow-up process, the content production and the standards.
What can’t be shared is the local visibility. That has to be earned separately, site by site, every time.
Some of the work is done once for the whole group. The rest has to be repeated at every site, and that split is where the efficiency comes from. A group should pay less per site than a single practice would, but not four times less. Anyone quoting you a flat rate across ten sites hasn’t understood the local half of the work.
Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, location pages, local ad targeting and map pack rankings. Each one is separate work, every time.
The brand and design system, website structure, treatment page content, follow-up sequences and scripts, and the reporting framework. Photography and video are filmed once and used across sites, and ad creative is shared with local variants.
Most groups grow by buying rather than building, and the marketing question arrives at the worst possible moment.
Do you rebrand straight away or keep the existing name? The old name usually carries local recognition and reviews you don’t want to lose. The new one carries your systems and standards.
Our usual answer is to keep the local identity at first, bring the systems in, then move over to the group brand once the patient base is stable. Losing a Google Business Profile with two hundred reviews to a rebrand is an expensive way to tidy up an org chart.
Either way, it needs planning before completion, not after.
These are the problems that come up most often when we look at a group’s marketing.
Or two profiles with identical details. Either way Google gets confused, ranks neither properly, and sometimes merges them without asking.
The town name is swapped and nothing else changes. Google treats near-identical pages as low-value scaled content, so none of them rank.
Site three has three competitors and a smaller catchment. It doesn’t need the same monthly spend as site one, and it won’t produce the same return.
Usually it’s the flagship, because that’s where the manager who cares about it works. The other sites stagnate.
Group totals look healthy while one site quietly loses money for eight months.
Three sites take three different approaches to the price question on the phone, and there’s no way to tell which one converts.
This is how we set up and run marketing across a group, from the first audit to monthly reporting.
Each location gets its own competitive analysis, local search position and patient catchment review. They’re different businesses in different markets.
One design system, one tone and one set of treatment pages, so a patient moving between sites experiences the same practice.
Every site gets its own Google Business Profile, citations, review process, and a location page with properly local content.
The budget goes where the return is, not where the sites are. Some months that means doubling site two.
One CRM, one set of follow-up sequences, one script and one standard for response time, with training delivered consistently across all locations.
Group level for the board and the accountant, and site level for the practice managers. The metrics are the same (treatments booked and cost per case), so the sites can actually be compared.
We’ll audit each location separately, show you which sites are under-earning and why, and set out how we’d split the budget. It’s free.
Each location needs its own Google Business Profile, its own citations, its own review process and its own page on the group website, with content that’s specific to that location. Google treats each physical location as a separate business, so local visibility can’t be shared across sites. Brand elements, treatment content and website structure can be.
One group website with a dedicated page per location usually works better than separate sites, because it concentrates domain authority while still allowing local targeting. Each location page should have its own content, including address, opening hours, clinicians, parking, local context and directions. Separate sites split authority and multiply maintenance.
Local search work is usually charged per location, because it can’t be shared, while brand, content and systems costs are shared across the group. That generally means a lower cost per site than a single practice would pay, but not a flat group rate. Advertising budgets are usually allocated by local opportunity rather than split evenly.
Usually not. Rebranding straight away risks losing local recognition, existing Google reviews and the search visibility tied to the old name. Many groups keep the local identity at first while bringing in their systems and processes, then switch the branding once the patient base is stable. Plan any Google Business Profile changes carefully to keep the review history.
