Dental practice marketing in Australia usually solves the wrong problem. In the ABS Patient Experiences survey for 2024-25, 25.2% of people who needed a dental professional delayed the visit or skipped it. Cost was the reason for 16.1%. Every other reason combined accounted for 9.1%. For GPs the picture flips: 26.6% delayed, but cost explained only 7.7%. Dental is the common health service where money, not waiting times, is the main blocker. So the highest-leverage move is not more reach. It is removing price uncertainty before someone has to ring and ask.
What actually stops Australians booking a dental appointment?
Money. Not awareness, not location, not the wait.
The ABS Patient Experiences survey for 2024-25, released 18 November 2025, asks people who needed a health service whether they delayed it or went without, and why. Dental comes out with a barrier profile unlike anything else on the list.
Of people who needed a dental professional, 25.2% delayed or did not go. Cost was a reason for 16.1% of them. Reasons other than cost, which includes the service not being available, being too busy and the wait being too long, accounted for 9.1%.
Now put a GP beside it. A similar share delayed, 26.6%. But cost explained only 7.7%, and the non-cost reasons accounted for 18.9%. The proportions are almost exactly reversed.
Here is the same question across four services, using the share who said cost was a reason.
Cost stops more than twice as many dental patients as GP patients. That single fact should reorganise where a practice puts its money.
Two more figures from the same release are worth holding onto. Women were more likely than men to delay dental care over cost, 18.0% against 13.7%. And people in outer regional or remote areas were more likely than people in major cities to delay it over cost, 19.6% against 14.9%. If your practice is regional, the barrier you are up against is bigger than the national average, not smaller.
Why does the standard dental marketing playbook miss this?
Because it was built somewhere else, for a market with different rules and a different payment system.
Open any dental marketing guide and the running order is familiar. Rank for "dentist near me". Run local ads. Post before-and-after photos. Collect five-star reviews. Build a referral programme. Almost all of it is about being seen by more people.
None of that is wrong, exactly. It is just aimed at a patient who has not heard of you. The ABS numbers describe a different person. They know they need a dentist. They have decided not to go anyway, because they do not know what it will cost and cannot face finding out.
Reach does nothing for that person. They are already reached. What they are missing is a number.
And two of the imported tactics are not even available here. Patient testimonials about clinical care are prohibited in advertising under section 133 of the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law. Before-and-after photography is tightly constrained. So Australian practices inherit a playbook, delete the two tactics that carried its proof, and run what is left. I have made this argument about the wider category in healthcare marketing advice borrowed from SaaS. Dentistry is the clearest example of it.
What does AHPRA let a dental practice say about price?
More than most practices think, and with conditions most practices have never read.
The Guidelines for advertising a regulated health service, issued 14 December 2020, do not ban price advertising. There is no rule that says keep your fees off the website. What the guidelines do is set a standard for how a price is stated, and list the versions that may breach the National Law.
Among the advertising the guidelines flag as a possible breach:
- advertising that "contains price information that is unclear, inexact or vague";
- advertising that "states an instalment amount without stating the total cost (which is a condition of the offer)";
- advertising that "excludes reference to any existing restrictions or limitation, such as age, expiry date, geographical or restrictions on who is eligible for the offer";
- an offer of "make one consultation appointment, get one free" where the price of the first consultation is raised to largely cover the second.
On that last one the guidelines are blunt about the word free: "Consumers generally consider the word 'free' to mean 'absolutely' free. When the costs of a 'free offer' are recouped through a price rise elsewhere or through other sources such as Medicare, the offer is not actually free."
Read those together and a pattern falls out. Every item on the list is about vagueness. Not about disclosure. The guidelines are not warning you off publishing a fee. They are warning you off publishing a fee-shaped impression.
Which means the compliant version of a price and the useful version of a price are the same thing: an exact figure, with the conditions attached, easy to find. That is a rare piece of luck in this field, and almost nobody uses it. The broader rules sit in my guide to the AHPRA advertising guidelines for 2026, and the wording rules specific to this profession are in the AHPRA advertising rules for dental practices.
What should you publish instead of "affordable dentistry"?
A number. Then the conditions around the number.
"Affordable" is the default because it feels safe. It is also empty. It is a claim with nothing behind it, and it resolves precisely none of the uncertainty that made someone put off the appointment. Worse, a patient who has been quoted an unexpected figure once reads "affordable" as noise.
Here is what a fee page can carry, and what each element is doing.
Notice what is missing from that list. No superlatives. No promises about how the treatment will turn out. No patient quotes. The page does its work entirely with facts a practice already has in its own system.
That is the part worth sitting with. The single highest-leverage marketing asset for an Australian dental practice contains no marketing claims at all.
Do patient reviews count as testimonials for a dental practice?
Some do. Many do not, and the line is more precise than most practices realise.
The advertising guidelines say testimonials are "recommendations or positive statements about the clinical aspects of a regulated health service used in advertising". They then say directly that "not all reviews or positive comments made about a regulated health service are considered testimonials", and give the example of "comments about customer service or communication style that do not include a reference to clinical aspects".
The guidelines set out when a clinical aspect exists. It is where one of these is expressed:
- Symptom. The specific symptom, or the reason for seeking treatment.
- Diagnosis or treatment. The specific diagnosis or the treatment the practitioner provided.
- Outcome. The specific outcome, or the skills or experience of the practitioner, either directly or by comparison.
So a review saying the reception team explained the billing clearly and the practice ran on time is not a testimonial. A review naming a toothache, a root canal or a result is. This matters commercially, because the non-clinical half is exactly the half that speaks to cost anxiety and to being treated well.
One caution before anyone gets clever with this. The safest place for a review is where it already is, on a platform you do not control. Lifting reviews into your own advertising is where practices get into trouble. I have set out what you can and cannot publish in the AHPRA rules on patient testimonials, and where the control line falls on social channels in the AHPRA social media rules.
Where should a dental practice spend its budget?
In the order the barriers actually appear, which is close to the reverse of how most practices spend.
- The fee page, first. Not a line on the contact page. A real page, linked in the main navigation, covering the treatments people ask about most. This is the page that meets the 16.1%.
- Cost detail on every treatment page. A patient reading about a crown should not have to go and find the money answer somewhere else. Put it where the question is being asked.
- The health fund and scheme explainer. Written as process, not promise. What to check on your policy, what your practice needs from you, what happens on the day.
- Practitioner pages with real credentials. Names, registration, qualifications, what each person actually does. This is fully permitted and it is what a first-time patient is checking.
- Local search presence. Now, and only now, the reach layer. It sends traffic to pages that can finally answer the objection.
The sequencing is the whole argument. Paid reach into a site that cannot answer the price question sends people back to the phone call they were avoiding. Answer it first, then buy the traffic.
One more thing the ABS data supports. 53.9% of Australians aged 15 and over saw a dental professional in 2024-25. That is up slightly on the 53.2% recorded the year before. It also means a little under half that population did not go at all. Some of them did not need to. A large share needed to and decided against it on cost. That is not a market you reach your way into.
How do you tell whether any of it is working?
Watch what the phone stops being used for.
The signal is not traffic. It is the change in the first question a new patient asks. When the fee page is doing its job, people stop ringing to ask what a check-up costs and start ringing to book one. Your front desk will notice before your analytics do, so ask them.
Then check three things on the site itself. Whether people are reaching the fee page at all, whether they read it or bounce, and whether bookings from patients who saw it hold up better than bookings from those who did not. If you want a structured read on the whole picture, the technical side is in my guide to SEO for healthcare, and what patients are typing before any of this happens is in what patients Google before booking.
If you would rather someone else write the fee page and the treatment pages so they are compliant on the first pass, that is the job I do for dental clinics.
The uncomfortable summary is short. Australian dentistry has a price-communication problem that it keeps treating as a visibility problem. The regulator will let you fix it. Most practices have simply never tried.
This article is general information for education, not legal advice. For a ruling on specific content, get advice from a lawyer experienced in health advertising law, or check AHPRA's advertising hub directly.
