Managing SEO for a single dental practice means optimizing one Google Business Profile, one website, and one set of local citations. Add a second location and the complexity doesn't double — it multiplies. Add five or ten, and without a deliberate system, the locations start undermining each other.
The core challenge is local intent specificity. When someone searches "dentist near me" or "family dentist in Naperville," Google is resolving that query to a specific geographic point. It wants to surface the most relevant, most trusted practice within a reasonable distance of the searcher. A single brand page that mentions multiple cities doesn't satisfy that intent — each location needs its own signals.
This is where many DSOs and group practices run into trouble. A well-meaning web team builds a clean national or regional site and then creates a simple "Locations" page with a list of addresses. That structure tells Google almost nothing useful about any individual location. There's no depth of content, no locally relevant signals, and no distinct entity for Google to evaluate on a per-location basis.
The second challenge is internal competition. If two of your locations serve overlapping geographic areas and you haven't clearly differentiated their content and GBP targeting, they'll compete for the same searches — and both will rank lower than a single, well-optimized independent practice.
Effective multi-location dental SEO solves both problems at once: it treats each location as its own local entity while using the parent brand's domain authority to give every location a head start that independent competitors don't have.