How a dental practice in Austin earned Google’s sitelinks.

Six months after launch, Cedar Valley Dental ranks #1 on Google for its brand name. Beneath the result, four auto-generated sitelinks — About, Services, Dr. Cami, Team — break the practice’s information architecture out for searchers. The Yelp listing that previously held that top spot now sits second. Better still: real patient inquiries arrive through the contact form.

The brief

Cedar Valley Dental is a small holistic-dentistry practice in Austin, Texas, founded by Dr. Camelia “Cami” Belean, DDS. Dr. Cami carries more than nineteen years of clinical experience — a DMD from Victor Babes University of Timișoara, a DDS from NYU College of Dentistry, advanced training in BioRejuvenation, Invisalign, and IAOMT mercury-safe protocols. The practice focuses on biocompatible materials, airway and sleep dentistry, and minimally-invasive techniques. Deliberately different from chain dentistry, deliberately quieter than the typical Austin corporate practice.

The clinical work was already excellent. The patient relationships were already deep. The challenge wasn’t the work — it was making sure the right people could find the practice online before they ended up on a Yelp page or a chain-clinic ad.

The challenge

Small holistic practices compete in a category dominated by aggregators (Yelp, Healthgrades, Zocdoc) and well-funded chain operators. The cost-per-click on terms like “dentist Austin” is brutal. The brand-name search — “cedar valley dental” — should be a clean win for the practice itself, but it was being dominated by the Yelp listing instead. Patients looking up the practice by name were landing on Yelp’s page first.

The previous website was a typical WordPress build: a theme, a plugin stack, a contact form, a few service pages. It loaded slowly, indexed inconsistently, and had no clear information architecture for Google to anchor sitelinks against. Service offerings were buried in long-scrolling pages. Schema was generic, applied by a plugin without real understanding of what the practice did. The site looked fine but it wasn’t doing the structural work Google needs to confidently feature you.

What we built

We rebuilt the site from the ground up as a custom static HTML application — no WordPress, no plugin layer, no database to maintain. Five core decisions drove the work:

1. Static HTML, not WordPress.

Pages load instantly because there’s no database query, no plugin processing, no PHP execution on every request. The whole site is pre-rendered HTML served from a global edge network. PageSpeed scores moved from the typical WordPress range into the high 90s on mobile. The site is also effectively immune to plugin vulnerabilities, theme updates, and the constant maintenance overhead that comes with WordPress — which means Dr. Cami’s team spends zero hours per month patching a CMS.

2. Health-first voice.

Every page leads with what makes Cedar Valley Dental different. “Listen first, recommend second.” “Minimally invasive, always.” “Airway-aware diagnostics.” The brand voice we drafted with Dr. Cami lets her clinical philosophy carry the page rather than burying it under generic “family dental care” copy that every other practice in Austin runs.

3. Five distinct service categories, each as a real page.

Instead of one services page with everything stacked, we split the offering into five clear category hubs:

• Airway & Sleep Dentistry — sleep apnea screening, NightLase, CBCT airway imaging
• Preventive & Restorative — exams, gentle cleanings, tooth-coloured fillings, crowns
• Cosmetic & Orthodontic — Invisalign, veneers, KOR whitening
• TMJ & Bite Stability — non-invasive jaw pain relief, BioRejuvenation, occlusal therapy
• Holistic & Advanced — mercury-safe removal, ozone therapy, biocompatibility testing

Each is its own indexable URL with strong individual titles, real internal linking, and content that actually answers what a patient searching that category needs to know. This is the structural work that eventually gave Google enough confidence to auto-generate sitelinks for the brand search.

4. Schema and structured data throughout.

Dentist schema. Person schema for Dr. Cami with her credentials, education, and IAOMT membership. LocalBusiness markup with exact ICBM coordinates (30.208539, -97.97431), opening hours, address. Service schema for each category. The whole site says clearly, in machine-readable form: this is a holistic dental practice in Austin, here’s who runs it, here’s what we treat, here’s how to reach us. Google’s Local Business panel populated with the right photos, hours, and review aggregate within weeks.

5. AI search readiness.

An llms.txt file with a clean editorial summary that AI engines can ingest. Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata so links shared in iMessage, WhatsApp, and Slack render with proper preview cards. AI crawler directives that explicitly welcome GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot. The site is designed to be cited, not just indexed — which matters as more patients ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for “a holistic dentist near me in Austin” instead of going straight to Google.

The result

Sitelinks are notoriously hard to earn for small businesses. Google generates them only when it’s confident enough in a site’s information architecture that it can break out an organisation’s key pages directly in the search result. They are not bought, not requested, not configured — they are earned, by giving Google clean, distinct, well-linked pages with strong titles and the right structured data. For Cedar Valley Dental, the sitelinks effectively doubled the search-result real estate the practice occupies on a brand-name query. Each one is a separate click pathway into the site.

The bigger win is downstream of the SERP. New patient inquiries now arrive consistently through the contact form. The kind of patient who searches “holistic dentist Austin” or “mercury-safe dentist” finds the practice’s site — not a Yelp page — and reads a page that speaks their language. Conversion happens naturally because the alignment is already there.

What Dr. Cami said

Did you see how the website appears now on Google search? We now get the hyperlinks added automatically at the bottom of the organic search result 👍

I am impressed, I saw that we got a few contracts through the website already 🤗 Thank you Florin, highly appreciate your help 🙏

Dr. Camelia Belean, DDS — Founder, Cedar Valley Dental, Austin, TX

What this means for other practices

If you run a small practice or service business and you’re losing the top result on your own brand search to Yelp, Healthgrades, or another aggregator, the path forward isn’t more ad spend. It’s structural:

• Clear information architecture. Real, distinct, well-linked service pages — not one giant services blob.
• Schema markup that matches reality. Not just “LocalBusiness,” but the specific type (Dentist, MedicalBusiness, AutoRepair, whatever applies) with credentials, hours, services, geography.
• Fast pages. WordPress can be optimised only so far before the architecture itself becomes the ceiling. Static HTML clears that ceiling entirely.
• Editorial voice. The page that ranks should sound like you, not like a directory listing. AI engines and humans both pick up on this.
• AI search readiness. llms.txt, clean OG metadata, AI crawler permissions. The shift from Google to ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity is already happening — build for it now while the lead-time advantage is real.

None of this requires a giant budget. It requires intentional structural work — the kind that compounds. Cedar Valley Dental will keep earning ground on Google for years from the foundation we laid in a few weeks.