Almost every dental clinic in urban India has a Practo listing, and most have a strong opinion about it. Both the enthusiasm and the resentment are usually justified — they are just about different things.
Here is the honest accounting, from someone who builds the alternative and therefore has an obvious bias, stated up front.
What Practo genuinely does well
- Volume from day one. A new clinic with no reviews and no rankings can receive enquiries in week one. Nothing you build yourself does that.
- Trust by association. Patients who would hesitate to call an unknown clinic will book through a platform they recognise.
- No technical work. Fill in a profile and you are live.
- Discovery you would not otherwise get. People browsing for a dentist rather than searching for one.
For a clinic in its first year, this is real and worth paying for. Refusing aggregators on principle while you have no other channel is not strategy, it is just fewer patients.
What it costs beyond the fee
- Commission, permanently. You pay per lead or booking for patients who often live two streets away and would have found you anyway once you had a presence.
- Your brand search is captured. Search your own clinic name. If a Practo page outranks your website, then a patient specifically looking for you lands on a page displaying three competitors beside you. This is the cost nobody quotes.
- The relationship is not yours. The patient’s contact details, their history with the platform and their reviews sit with Practo. If you leave, that goes with it.
- Price becomes the axis. Listed side by side with near-identical profiles, patients compare on price and distance, because nothing else is visible. Your fifteen years of experience is a line of text next to somebody else’s.
- Reviews build the wrong asset. Reviews on Practo strengthen Practo. Reviews on your Google Business Profile strengthen you, and they are what actually drive the map pack.
What your own channel costs and returns
| Aggregator | Your own site + profile | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first patient | Days | 6–10 weeks |
| Cost structure | Per lead, forever | One-time build, then close to zero |
| Cost of the 100th patient | The same as the first | Effectively nothing |
| Who owns the relationship | The platform | You |
| Compared against | Every clinic on the page | Nobody |
| Compounds over time | No | Yes |
The asymmetry is in the third row. Aggregator economics stay flat forever; your own channel gets cheaper per patient every month it exists.
The sequence that actually works
Take the aggregator volume. Simultaneously fix your Google Business Profile and build a real site. Treat the commission as an acquisition cost with an end date.
Every review request goes to your Google profile, not the platform. This is the single highest-leverage decision on this page and it costs nothing.
Your website should outrank your Practo listing for your clinic’s name. That is a solvable technical problem and it stops competitors being shown to people looking for you.
When your own channel produces a meaningful share of new patients, reduce the aggregator spend rather than cutting it. Keep it as a floor, not a foundation.
The one thing to do this week
Google your clinic’s exact name on a phone, in an incognito window, and look at what comes first.
If a Practo or Justdial page sits above your own website, you are paying for your own brand. Every patient who heard about you from a friend and searched your name is being handed a page with three competitors on it. Fixing that is technical, achievable in weeks, and worth more than most marketing you could buy.
About the author
Written by Kushal Kumar
Founder of Nifrox, a studio that builds websites and local search systems for private dental clinics only. Based in Noida; clinics live across Delhi NCR. Everything here comes from audits and builds, not from a content brief.
