In this article (4 sections)
Most dental websites aren’t broken in any obvious way. The homepage loads, the phone number is there, the contact form exists. But underneath, small technical faults quietly cost you enquiries: a service page Google never indexed, a booking form that fails on mobile, a page that takes eight seconds to load on 4G.
You don’t need to be a developer to find most of them. Here’s a website audit checklist you can work through yourself in an afternoon, using free tools and your own phone. Anything you can’t fix, you’ll at least be able to hand to your developer as a specific list.
The 10 checks
1. Confirm every page loads over HTTPS
Type your domain without the “https://” and see where you land. You should be redirected to the secure version, with a padlock and no warnings. Click through a few interior pages and check the padlock holds. A “not secure” warning on the page where patients enter their name and phone number is a conversion problem before it’s an SEO one. If one image or script still loads over plain HTTP, the padlock breaks; your developer can find it quickly once you tell them which page.
2. Find the pages Google hasn’t indexed
Search site:yourpractice.com.au in Google for a rough view of what’s stored, then compare it against your own list of pages. Missing service pages are the ones to worry about.
For a proper answer, open Google Search Console and go to the Pages report under Indexing. It tells you exactly which URLs are excluded and why: “noindex tag”, “blocked by robots.txt”, “duplicate without canonical”, “crawled - currently not indexed”. If you take one thing from this checklist, take this report.
3. Use your own site on your own phone
Not a resized desktop browser, but an actual phone on mobile data rather than the practice wi-fi. Work through the journey a new patient would take: find a treatment page, read it, tap the phone number, go back, open the booking form. Look for text that needs pinching to read, buttons too close together to tap accurately, a sticky banner covering content, or a phone number that isn’t a tappable link. These are cheap fixes that make a real difference to enquiry volume.
4. Test speed on the pages that actually matter
Run your homepage and your two or three most important treatment pages through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Look at the mobile scores, and pay attention to the field data at the top if it’s available, because that’s real visitor data, not a lab simulation. The most common culprit on dental sites is images: large, uncompressed photos of the practice and team, uploaded straight from a camera. Resizing and compressing them is usually the biggest speed win available, and it doesn’t require a rebuild.
5. Hunt down broken links
Links rot as pages get renamed, partner sites disappear and treatment pages are consolidated. Free tools like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider (free up to 500 URLs) will crawl your site and list every 404 along with the pages linking to it. Fix each one by pointing the link at the right page, or with a redirect if the old URL still receives traffic.
6. Look for duplicate and near-duplicate pages
This catches out a lot of practices with suburb pages. If you have ten location pages differing only by the suburb name, Google may treat them as thin duplicates and rank none of them well. Check whether each page says something genuinely specific: parking, public transport, which clinic serves that area. If it doesn’t, either write it properly or consolidate it into a stronger page.
7. Check your practice details are identical everywhere
Your practice name, address and phone number should match exactly across your website footer, contact page, Google Business Profile and the major directories. Inconsistencies such as an old suite number, a pre-move address, or a tracking number appearing in one place only will undermine local rankings and confuse patients. Write your details out once in the exact format you want, then check each location against that master version.
8. Review title tags and meta descriptions
Every page needs a unique title tag and meta description; duplicates across pages usually mean a template was never filled in. Spot them in Search Console, in a crawl, or manually by searching your brand name and reading the results. Titles like “Home | Practice Name” or “Services | Practice Name” are wasted space. They should describe the treatment and the location.
9. Submit a test enquiry through every form
Fill in each form as though you were a patient, then confirm the enquiry actually arrived: in the practice inbox, not the spam folder, and not only in a dashboard nobody logs into. Form failures are the most expensive fault on this list because they’re invisible: nothing looks wrong, the enquiries simply stop. Do the same for your booking system and any chat widget, after every website change and quarterly regardless.
10. Validate your structured data
Structured data tells search engines what your practice is, where it is and what it offers. At minimum you want it on your homepage and contact page, covering practice name, address, phone number and opening hours. Run those pages through Google’s Rich Results Test to see what’s detected and whether anything is erroring. Errors here are usually quick to correct once identified.
How often to run through this
A full pass twice a year suits most practices, with two exceptions: test your forms quarterly, and run the whole checklist after any redesign, platform migration or change of address. Redesigns in particular are where indexing and redirect problems get introduced, often unnoticed for months. Keep a simple record of what you checked and when. It makes the next audit faster and shows when a problem first appeared.
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Get my free auditWhat to do with what you find
Sort your findings into three buckets: fixes you can make yourself today (image sizes, title tags, broken links in your own content), jobs for your developer (redirects, HTTPS, template problems), and questions that need a strategy conversation (thin location pages, duplicate content, site structure). Most practices find the first bucket is bigger than expected. Start there: it costs nothing but an afternoon, and it tells you whether the site’s problems are technical or something further upstream. For how this fits alongside content, local search and paid advertising, our complete guide to dental marketing in Australia covers how the pieces work together, while our guide to dental website design that converts looks at the same site from the patient’s side.
Getting a second set of eyes on it
Working through this checklist yourself will tell you a great deal about your site, and often turns up fixes worth making straight away. If you’d rather have the technical side handled properly, or you’ve run the checks and want help interpreting the results, our technical SEO service for dental practices covers the full crawl, diagnosis and implementation. You’re also welcome to get in touch for a straightforward conversation about what your site needs.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need paid tools to audit my dental website?
No. Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the Rich Results Test are free and cover most of this checklist. The free tier of Screaming Frog handles broken links and duplicate titles for sites up to 500 URLs, which covers most single-practice websites.
How long should a website audit take?
Working through these ten checks takes roughly half a day for a typical practice site. Fixing what you find takes longer and depends on what turns up. Image compression and title tags are quick, while indexing problems or restructuring thin location pages are larger jobs.
Will fixing technical problems improve my rankings?
It depends what was wrong. Pages Google couldn’t index, or a site that was slow on mobile, can change meaningfully once the barrier is removed. Technical health doesn’t create rankings on its own, though. It lets your content and local presence do their job without obstruction.
Should I audit before or after a website redesign?
Both. Audit beforehand so you know which URLs earn traffic worth preserving, and again after launch to catch redirect, indexing and form problems while they’re fresh. The post-launch pass is the one most often skipped, and it’s where the costly faults hide.
Want a marketing plan built for your practice?
Tell us where you are and the treatments you want more of. A real person goes through your site and calls you back.
