The highest quote I was given for a dental website was twenty-four thousand dollars. Ongoing SEO was going to be about three thousand a month on top of that.
I still think twenty thousand dollars for a website is a crazy number. What took me longer to work out is that the number was never really the problem.
Look up what a dental website costs and nearly every page answering the question is published by a company that sells dental websites, mine included. Most of them land on some version of it depends, which is true and not useful to anyone. So read this with that in mind, and here is the part the answer usually skips.
You are being quoted for three things and shown one price
A website quote almost always contains three separate kinds of work.
There is design and build, which is the part everyone pictures. There is content, meaning the actual words on every service page, which is usually the largest hidden cost and the part most likely to be outsourced to someone who has never worked in a dental office. And there is ongoing work after launch, which is where the monthly fee comes from.
Those three have completely different price behaviors. Design and build is largely a fixed cost. Content scales with how many pages you have. Ongoing work is a labor subscription. Bundle them into one number and you lose the ability to ask which part you are actually buying.
One quote, three different costs
Design and build
Largely fixed. Roughly the same work whether you have eight pages or sixty.
Content
Scales with page count. Usually the largest hidden cost, and the part most often outsourced.
Ongoing
A labour subscription. You are buying hours per month, not a deliverable.
Proportions are illustrative. The point is that the three behave differently, so one number hides which one you are paying for.
Something else worth noticing: most agencies sell the website and the SEO as two separate products, and a lot of the underlying work is the same work. The page structure, the content, the internal links, the technical setup. Those are website decisions and they are SEO decisions at the same time. When they are sold twice, you pay twice.
What actually drives the price
Page count, mostly. A practice site with eight pages and a practice site with sixty pages are not the same project, and the second one is not seven times the design work, it is seven times the writing.
Then whether the build is custom or a template. Custom is not automatically better. A well-built template site with good content will outperform a beautiful custom site with thin content every time, and I say that as someone who once had the beautiful version.
Then who writes the copy. If the agency writes it, you are paying for it. If you write it, you are not, and it will probably be more accurate.
| What moves the number | Why | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Page count | Sixty pages is not seven times the design work. It is seven times the writing. | How many pages, and who writes each one? |
| Custom or template | A good template with real content beats a custom build with thin content. | What am I paying extra for that a patient would notice? |
| Who writes the copy | If the agency writes it you pay for it, and it is usually less accurate. | What does the price drop to if I write it? |
| The monthly fee | There is no unit. Hours are the product and nobody sells it that way. | How many hours a month, and on what? |
None of that is exotic. It just never appears itemized on a proposal.
The monthly number is the one nobody can explain
One company will quote you five hundred a month. Another quotes twenty five hundred. Same city, same practice, roughly the same words in the proposal.
The truth is you will never know how much either of them is actually doing. There is no unit. Nobody tells you how many hours you are buying, because hours are the actual product and no agency wants to sell it that way.
This is also the honest explanation for something every practice owner has been told: give it a year or two. That timeline is not a law of nature and it usually is not a lie either. Every agency has a finite number of employees, so each client gets a fixed number of hours a month. Your budget does not change the pace much. It buys you a slice of someone’s calendar, and the calendar is the constraint.
To be fair, and I want to be fair here, SEO genuinely takes time. I do not blame a marketing company for charging real money if they are actually doing the hours. The problem is that you have no way to check, and the reporting you get back is usually built to reassure you rather than inform you.
The question I would ask before the price question
When I went through this in 2024, I was asking what it should cost. That was the wrong first question.
The better one is what you own when the relationship ends. Your domain, your hosting, your site files, your content, your Google Business Profile, your Search Console property. If the answer to any of those is the agency, then the price of the website is not really the price. The price is the price plus whatever it costs you to leave.
Six things to check before you sign
Your domain registrar. Your hosting. Your site files. Your content. Your Google Business Profile. Your Search Console property.
If the answer to any of these is the agency, the quote is not the price.
I have watched practices pay for the same website twice for exactly this reason.
That is worth a separate article, and it is the next one.
Dr. Kevin Baharvand, DMD, is an orthodontist and practice owner in Frisco, Texas. He took over his own practices’ websites and digital marketing in December 2024 after interviewing a number of agencies and deciding to learn the work rather than keep buying it. He writes about search, websites, and AI visibility for independent dental practice owners.
