Local SEO for dentists: the map side, kept right every month

What a toothache and an implant plan look for on the same profile

Dentistry is searched by procedure and by urgency, almost never by the name over the door. What comes back is a handful of pins, and most people decide between them without opening a website at all.

• Two journeys start from one profile: the planned one ("implants", "braces for a teenager", "whitening") and the urgent one ("emergency dentist open now", a toothache at 22:00).
• The words matter more than the brand: cleaning, wisdom tooth removal, root canal, paediatric dentist. If the service is not named in the profile, the profile is not in that answer.
• "Open now" and the phone decide urgent cases in seconds; a wrong holiday schedule or an unanswered number sends the patient to the next pin.
• Pictures of the door, the waiting area and the surgery settle the unspoken question about how clean and how modern the place is, and they settle it before anybody dials.
• Recent reviews about pain, anaesthesia and unexpected bills are read closely, and the practice's own answers are read as evidence of how it behaves when something goes wrong.
• The last look is at the practical detail a parent or a nervous patient needs: a step-free way in, somewhere to leave the car, whether a child can be treated here, the language of whoever picks up the phone.

The fields a patient in pain reads, and the fields a patient comparing clinics reads

Google hands a dental listing a particular set of fields. Some of them serve the person who needs a chair today. The rest serve the person who will decide in three weeks. Both sets have to be filled from what the practice really does.

• Primary and secondary categories (dental clinic, orthodontist, paediatric dentist, oral surgeon) decide which questions the listing is eligible to answer at all.
• A service list written the way patients speak: cleaning, fillings, implants, braces and aligners, children's appointments, urgent relief of pain, and nothing the practice does not perform.
• Ordinary hours, the extra hours where they exist (an out-of-hours line, a Saturday clinic, the times the phone is staffed) and a special schedule entered before each holiday rather than after it.
• The attributes that settle a practical worry before the call: a step-free way in and an accessible toilet, where the car goes, the languages spoken at the desk, how people pay, whether anybody is seen without an appointment.
• The photo set: the building and the door from the street, reception, the surgery, the equipment, the team, and never a patient, a chart or an X-ray.
• A booking link only where the practice genuinely runs that system, the link lands on the right page, and Google actually offers the feature to dental listings where you work.
• The question and answer area, held in the practice's own voice: children, out-of-hours cover, a filling lost on a Sunday, whether a given insurer is taken. Left alone, it fills up with guesses from strangers.

The reply protocol, and the line a dental practice cannot cross in public

A dental review is health information about a real person. Even when the patient writes the diagnosis themselves, the practice must not confirm it. So the wording is settled in advance and written down, and the manager works from that document instead of from instinct.

• The protocol sorts reviews before anybody writes: the ones a manager may answer straight away, the ones whose wording waits for you, and the ones nobody answers in public at all.
• An answer of the first kind thanks the person and says nothing else that is true of them: no procedure, no dentist's name, no date, no acknowledgement that they ever sat in the chair.
• An answer of the second kind, about pain, about a wait, about a bill that came as a surprise, goes out in the words you approve, once reception has told you what actually happened.
• Themes that keep coming back, such as how a quote is explained at the desk or how a cancelled appointment gets rebooked, are gathered into the monthly report for the practice to fix, since marketing can fix neither of them.

One surgery, or a group of practices

1. Week 1

   Rights over the listing move to the team's corporate account. The manager goes through the profile field by field, writes down what is actually there, and then sits with you over the two documents: how reviews may be answered, and which dentists at this address may hold a listing of their own.

2. Week 2

   The first corrections go in: categories, the schedule including holidays and the out-of-hours line, attributes, the service list, the pictures. Anything Google had changed on its own comes back to you next to its earlier state, and any second record found at your address is described so that you can decide what to do with it.

3. Week 3

   Reviews still sitting open are worked through as far as the package covers, sorted by the protocol written in the first week. A complication, a disputed bill or a mention of a lawyer never enters that queue and lands on your desk instead. The first publication goes out from material you supplied.

4. Week 4

   The month arrives in writing: the passes made, the fields changed, what went out, what was answered, what came back to you and why, and what is worth doing next. On Growth that report ends with a plan for the month ahead.

This is an example of a sequence and nothing more. No real practice is described here and no outcome is promised. Your own month follows the package and the state the profile is in when we open it.