Short answer: yes, but we do not recommend it.

Branded searches are high intent, and that intent belongs to the practice being searched, so you will generally be wasting a lot of budget trying to intercept it.

Your spend goes further on neutral keywords like emergency dentist or dental implants [city]. Here is the full picture before you decide.

What Google actually permits

Bidding on competitor names as keywords is allowed, but restrictions apply to the ad copy itself.

Trademark owners can file complaints that block their name from appearing in your headlines and descriptions, and ads that imply affiliation with another practice can be disapproved.

Why it usually underperforms for dentists

Someone searching a practice by name has already chosen that practice.

Expect low click-through rates, poor quality scores, and click prices well above what the same budget earns on service keywords like emergency dentist or dental implants [city].

Conversion rates on conquest campaigns are consistently the weakest line in any dental account we audit.

The small-market problem

Dental is local. The practice you target is often a few blocks away, staffed by people who will see your ad the first time they search their own name.

Retaliation takes one afternoon: they bid on your name, and now both practices are paying for branded clicks you each used to get free.

In a neighbourhood market, this is a race to the bottom.

The exception: a near-identical name bidding on yours

An example might be Northside Dental Studio and Northside Dental Centre in the same city.

A patient searches "Northside Dental", and the ad at the top decides which front desk the phone rings at. The practice that avoids the ad auction, or appears in position #2 is losing calls to their competitor.

In this circumstance, you should run a defensive brand campaign with a specific bidding strategy. We define the strategy as Absolute Top Impression with the following settings:

• Where do you want your ads to appear: Absolute top of results page

• Percent (%) impression share to target: 100%

• Maximum CPC bid limit: $25

We ran this exact defense for a client in this position: a branded campaign on the shared name, with ad copy built to separate them by neighbourhood, doctor names, and street.

Booking confusion dropped within weeks. If this is your situation, the defensive campaign is not optional.

We walk through the full setup in our other article: What to Do When a Competitor Runs Google Ads on Your Practice Name.

What to do before any of that

Defend your own name first. Search your practice name and see what appears. If a competitor or an aggregator like Opencare is bidding on it, a low-cost branded campaign protects the highest-converting traffic you have. That defensive spend, with the rest of your budget concentrated on neutral service keywords, outperforms any conquest campaign you could run.

At DentalRx, this is where we start with every ads client. We check who is showing up on your practice name, put a defensive campaign in place if anyone is taking a cut of it, and move the rest of your budget onto the service keywords that actually book appointments.

Book a free ads account audit and we will show you what your name looks like on page one and where your budget is going today.