Going private is mainstream, being private-ready online is not

In June, Oarline ran the 90-second test a private patient quietly runs on every practice they consider across the first 50 practices a patient would find across Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester. Half failed. And the failures were not the lazy ones. Here is the test, so you can run it yourself.

The NHS-to-private conversation is no longer happening behind closed doors. At the British Dental Conference and Dentistry Show in May, Practice Plan ran an entire Dental Business Theatre for it. The BDA keeps saying, more plainly each time, that private income is what holds much of mixed-practice economics together. And April’s contract changes in England have sharpened the question for many Principals from whether to grow private care to how.

So the interesting question has moved on from ‘should we?’. When a prospective private patient looks your practice up tonight, will they find a reason to choose you?

Oarline wanted a number rather than a hunch. So in June it scored the first 50 practices a patient would find searching ‘dentist’ on Google Maps in Leeds, Newcastle and Manchester, against 10 pass-or-fail checks across the three things a patient sees first: the homepage, the Google listing, and the most active social feed. Of the 48 it could fully verify, 24 failed. Not because the dentistry is weak, but because the patient cannot tell.

What you see is not what they see

Inside the practice, a principal sees a team they trust, decades of training behind every treatment plan, and patients who have stayed for 15 years.

Here is what the patient sees. Only 13 of the 50 homepages opened with a real photo of the practice or its people. 42 of 50 opened with a headline that could sit on any practice’s website, and eight of those literally began with the word ‘welcome’. One, with a sort of accidental honesty, read: ‘Welcome to dentist in Leeds.’ Over on Google, 39 of 49 listing cover photos showed no real people at all. Among NHS-mixed practices, that was 14 out of 14.

Money does not buy a pass. Private-only practices did better than mixed ones, but not by nearly as much as their fees imply, and their headlines were, if anything, more generic. Every national chain location we could verify failed the test outright, and two locations of the same chain, in two different cities, open their homepages with the identical stock photo of a laughing woman. The best performers in the sample were independents.

The patient is not asking whether you have a website, a profile and a social feed. They are asking whether what is on them feels like a real, current place run by real people. Mostly, it does not.

90 seconds, three questions

The private patient most mixed practices are courting is not the classic cosmetic buyer. Many arrive reluctantly, because they could not find an NHS dentist. They are cautious, price-aware, and quietly weighing whether paying privately will mean a better experience or just a bigger bill.

And they scan. They do not study. Before the phone ever rings, a prospective patient gives a practice roughly 90 seconds: half a minute on the website, half a minute on the Google Business Profile, half a minute on whichever social channel you use most. In that time they are working through three questions, in order. Out of the practices I am comparing, why would I pick this one? Is this a place I would actually walk into? And if I had seen this practice sooner, would I have chosen it over the one I go to?

Run the test on your own practice

It is the same test we ran, and it takes a minute and a half.

First 30 seconds: your homepage

1. Is the first image a real photograph of your practice, or stock?
2. Do the opening words say something specific, or ‘Welcome to ABC Dental’?
3. Can the patient actually see the dentist on the page?
4. Is there anything here that only your practice could say?

Next 30 seconds: your Google Business Profile and main social feed

1. Is the featured photo you and your team, or an empty surgery?
2. When was the most recent review? When was the last post?
3. Could any of those posts have been published by another practice without changing a word?

Final 30 seconds: all three together

1. Does the website match the practice the Google profile is selling?
2. Does the social feed look like the same place?
3. If a private patient saw all three tonight, would they have enough to call you?

Scoring is simple. If two or more answers point the wrong way, that is your starting point. It is not a verdict on your dentistry. And for calibration: nobody in Oarline’s 50 passed all 10 checks. The best four practices in three cities failed exactly one.

The right things in the wrong order

The homepage is where the test was lost. 41 of the 50 practices failed that block, the first thing a patient sees.

Yet the failures were not the practices doing nothing. Every verifiable listing in the sample had a Google review less than a year old, so the patients are holding up their end. 17 of the 50 had posted to Instagram within 48 hours of the audit. 13 of those 17 still failed their own homepage.

That is the whole problem in one statistic. Practices are not failing online because they are absent. They are failing while being busy, because the effort happens in the wrong order. The proof that a practice is real, current and run by people patients like already exists, in the feed and in the reviews. It just never reaches the three things a patient sees first.

Most principals build from the top down: run the ads, keep posting, sort the website later. The patient experiences the practice from the bottom up. They land on the homepage, open the Google profile, scan the recent reviews, and within thirty seconds decide whether this is a real place worth calling. More traffic to a weak online presence does not solve the problem. It simply makes more people aware of it.

The order that works is unglamorous. Foundation first: a homepage and profile that give a comparing patient a reason to pick you. Presence second: the reviews, content and faces that confirm the place is real. Visibility last, once the first two can carry it. Often it does not even take new material.

In Oarline’s sample, most practices with an active feed were already posting real people from the practice. The proof exists. It has just never been moved to the hero image, the headline and the cover photo, where a patient actually looks. None of this needs a rebrand. It needs specificity.

‘Your first private appointment is 45 minutes, not squeezed between two check-ups’ tells a patient more than a paragraph of high standards ever will. Until the online presence does that work, the business is asking patients to believe something the marketing is not yet proving.

Your starting point

If you ran the test while reading, you have already started. Whatever you saw is a starting point, not a verdict. Half the practices around you are starting from the same place.

The next step is seeing what a pass looks like. On 2 July, Oarline is hosting a free 45-minute webinar, ‘Would a private patient choose you?’, where it runs the 90-second test live on real practices, walks through what the 50-practice audit found, and takes questions in a live Q&A. No pitch, no countdown clocks. Register for free here.

This article is sponsored by Oarline.