Website check for dental practices in St Albans

Toothache does not wait for office hours and it does not browse. It searches on a phone, at speed, and books whoever answers first.

Who the local authority is, and why it is on this page

St Albans is in St Albans City and District Council’s area, covering AL1, AL3 and AL4. The GDC and the CQC regulate the practice nationally. The council is the local authority for the premises and runs the environmental health inspections that sit alongside them.

Trading Standards here is not run by the council. It is Hertfordshire County Council — which is not obvious, and is worth knowing before you need it.

The postcode matters more than it sounds. Your Google listing carries an address and a postcode, your website carries them again, and the directories that answer local searches match the two against each other. When they disagree — an old address, a missing postcode, a unit number on one and not the other — the listing and the site stop reinforcing each other, and a business drops out of searches for its own town without anything visibly breaking. That is one of the first things we check.

What a search in St Albans actually looks like

Somebody near St Peter's Street with toothache on a Sunday does not open ten tabs. They ask, they get two or three names, and they ring the first one. When the search widens to Harpenden, London Colney, Radlett and Wheathampstead, you are competing with every practice in those areas on whatever a phone shows first.

So the work splits in two. Half of it is your website: whether it works on a phone, how fast it loads, whether an enquiry can reach you at all. The other half is everywhere else, and for dental practices it is usually the half that decides it.

What the General Dental Council and the Care Quality Commission already asks of your website

CQC Regulation 20A requires your latest rating to be displayed on your website, and the GDC sets out what every practice site must carry. Both are checkable from outside in seconds, which means anyone can check them.

The registers that count for dental practices

These are the sources an answer about a dentist in St Albans is assembled from. We check every one and tell you which you are missing from:

What the free check covers

Your website, and everywhere else your practice should appear. You get the findings either way — if there is nothing wrong we tell you that, and it has cost you an email.

InSite Scan › dental practices › St Albans