The list on the front page is short. This is what it looks like when it lands.
Everything below is illustrative — written for a made-up practice to show the shape of it. Yours would be built around your services, your people and the questions your patients actually ask. The examples are dental because that's where I'm taking on clients first; the shape is the same whatever the trade.
Nine hundred to two thousand words, on topics agreed with you first, with every claim sourced.
Two a week, laid out with the text, the image and the button, ready to paste.
A drafted reply to every review, with you inside 48 hours of it appearing — up to fifteen a month, which is more than almost any practice receives.
One email to your patient list, written from that month's articles rather than repeating them.
What was written, when it reached you, and what it covered. No dashboards, no invented metrics.
Most practice blogs read like a leaflet: four hundred words, no sources, and a paragraph at the end asking you to book. The pieces I write are meant to be genuinely useful to somebody at two in the morning trying to work out whether what they're feeling is serious.
Three of them are on this site, complete. They're the fairest test of whether you'd want me writing for you:
Teeth grinding — why most people don't know they do it, and why the sequence only runs one way.
Read →What the research says about how common dental anxiety is, and what a patient can ask for.
Read →The four separate checks, why "every six months" was never a rule, and where the money goes.
Read →Each one arrives with the sources listed, and with anything I couldn't verify flagged for you to confirm or strike before it goes anywhere.
When someone searches your practice by name, the panel beside the results is your Google Business Profile. Posts appear in the Updates section of it. They aren't social media — nobody scrolls past them. They're seen by people already looking at you, usually while deciding whether to ring.
Which is why they're short. Google allows 1,500 characters but only the first line shows before "Read more", so the useful length is two or three sentences. Four of a month's eight:
Bleeding when you brush isn't something to brush past. It's usually the earliest sign of gum inflammation, and at that stage it's reversible. Left alone for months, it isn't.
New on our site: why so many people wake with a sore jaw and never connect it to what happens while they sleep. What grinding does to teeth, and what can be done about it.
Meet Rachel, our hygienist for six years and the reason a lot of our patients stopped dreading the appointment. She makes twenty minutes feel like five.
We hold a few appointments back each morning for patients in pain. If you ring before nine we can usually see you the same day — worth calling even when the online diary looks full.
The eight rotate through four kinds — something useful, a link to that month's article, something human about the practice, and one treatment explained plainly. Roughly six parts useful to one part promotional, because a listing that only sells stops being read.
By default I don't hold your Google login and you publish. All eight arrive on one sheet, in order, each ready to paste into Google's own box:
Open your profile, click Add update, paste, add the image, publish. About two minutes each.
If you'd rather they went up without anyone at your end doing it, that's possible — it needs Manager access to your listing, which you can withdraw at any time, and it's worth a conversation rather than an assumption either way. Nothing would go up that you hadn't approved first; the only thing that changes is who does the pasting.
A patient leaves a review saying their crown came loose a fortnight after it was fitted. Whoever looks after the listing wants to put it right, so they write something warm and specific: sorry about the appointment on the 14th, sorry the temporary didn't hold, we've booked you back in.
It reads well. It is also a confidentiality breach, published under the practice's name, where it stays.
A patient can say whatever they like about their own care. A practice cannot reply in kind. They have waived nothing by posting. MDDUS — one of the UK's dental defence organisations — puts the line further back than most people expect: a practice shouldn't confirm whether someone even attends, because that alone identifies them as a patient. Everything after that compounds it.
The GDC's standards say the same, and apply online exactly as in the surgery. Information that looks anonymous stops being anonymous the moment it sits beneath a review carrying somebody's name and a date.
So the reply that works is the one that confirms nothing — and writing it is a matter of judgement rather than knowledge. Here's the same review answered two ways.
"Had a filling here in March that fell out within a fortnight. Then they wanted to charge me again to fix their own mistake. Avoid."
"The filling was replaced under guarantee and the charge related to separate treatment on a different tooth."
Accurate, fair, and every clause of it confirms a patient relationship and discusses their treatment in public. It also starts an argument about clinical care that the practice can't win and can't bring to an end.
"We're sorry to read this. Concerns about treatment and about charges are both things we take seriously, and both are better dealt with directly than here. Please contact [name] on [number] or [email] and we'll look into it."
No confirmation, no denial, no clinical detail — and it still answers both things the reviewer raised. Anyone reading it later sees a practice that responds calmly and offers a route. That is what a review reply is for: not the person who wrote it, but the two hundred people who read it afterwards.
The straightforward reviews — four and five stars, general praise — get a reply written around what the person actually said, rather than the same sentence under each one.
The difficult ones come to you as a draft with the questions attached: who should be named as the contact, and is there any reason not to reply at all. You paste it, change it, or bin it. It's your listing and your login. What arrives is a considered reply ready to go, so a bad review stops being another decision to make on a busy morning.
And sometimes the right answer is not to reply. Where a formal complaint is already running, where your indemnity provider is involved, or where a review is abusive rather than dissatisfied, silence is correct and the review gets reported to Google instead. I'll say when I think that's the case, and why.
Written from that month's articles rather than repeating them — a short piece of useful advice, a line about anything changing at the practice, and a link to read more. Sent by you, from whatever you already use. If you don't have a list, say so and I'll tell you honestly whether there's something more useful I could do with that time instead.
What was written, when it reached you, and what it covered. No dashboard, no invented metrics, and no claim that your enquiries went up because of me — too many other things affect that for anyone to say so honestly. You get a clear record and you judge it yourself.
Read the drafts, change anything you want changed, paste them where they go. That's it. There's nothing to write, nothing to plan, and no meetings.
Two things help enormously at the start: a folder of your own photographs — team, reception, surgeries — because real pictures of the actual building beat stock every time and one collection lasts months. And one named person who can approve a draft.
If you're weighing it up, tell me what you'd like more customers for — the services, the treatments, the jobs you'd rather be doing more of — and I'll come back with the first two pieces I'd write and why those two. It costs you nothing and commits you to nothing — and you'll know within a minute of reading it whether I understand your business well enough to write about it.