Let's TalkLet's TalkOne category choice decides which searches you appear in at all, and most clinics picked theirs in ninety seconds.
Give us your business name and postcode. We come back with where you rank across a grid of your catchment for your main treatments, how your categories and profile compare with whoever is beating you, and the three changes worth making first. Recorded walkthrough, no call required.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
A clinic listed as a beauty salon and a clinic listed as a medical spa are eligible for substantially different searches, and no amount of other work overcomes the wrong choice. It is a single field, most clinics set it in under two minutes when the profile was created, and it is doing more to determine visibility than everything else on the profile combined.
Under Google's own guidelines doctors and similar practitioners can hold their own profiles when they are public-facing and contactable at the verified location during stated hours, and where several share a location the organisation should have a profile for the location separate from each practitioner's. Clinics either miss this entirely or do it wrongly, most often by putting the clinic name in the practitioner's profile title where only the practitioner's name belongs.
This is not hypothetical. One dental practice settled with OCR for $10,000 after replying to a review with a patient's last name, treatment plan, insurance and cost details, and another settled for $23,000 for including names, treatment and visit detail in replies. Confirming that someone was treated at all is the line, and a warm, specific, helpful reply is exactly how it gets crossed.
Someone choosing an aesthetic clinic from the map decides largely on what the place and the work look like, and most profiles carry a handful of images uploaded when the listing was made. Meanwhile the images that would persuade are the ones with the heaviest constraints on use, which means there is a real plan to make here rather than a task to complete.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
Searched from the clinic's own address everything looks fine, which is why most clinics believe their map visibility is better than it is. A grid across the catchment shows where you actually appear and where you vanish a mile away. It produces worse-looking first reports and a real picture of the problem.
There are two OCR settlements involving dental practices whose review replies disclosed patient detail - $10,000 and $23,000 - and in both cases the practice was simply trying to respond helpfully. Confirming someone was a patient is the line. This is ordinary marketing work with a real consequence and it is nobody's job.
Most agencies leave them alone because the guidelines are fiddly and getting them wrong causes problems. They are also a genuine visibility asset for a clinic with several injectors. We set them up to the published rules - one per practitioner, titles carrying only the practitioner's name, the location profile kept separate.
Rankings measured across a grid for each main treatment, so the real picture replaces the flattering one.
Primary and secondary set against what the clinics beating you use and what you actually perform.
To the published guidelines, including the title rule that trips almost everyone up.
A framework for replies that stays warm without confirming anyone's treatment.
Services, attributes, hours, booking links, and a photography plan that accounts for what may be used.
Grid movement and profile-sourced contacts monthly, rather than a single rank check.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
It determines the searches a clinic is eligible for at all, and it is a single dropdown that most clinics set once without research. Comparing it against whoever currently outranks you is a twenty-minute job that routinely moves more than a quarter of content work.
Several public-facing practitioners at one location means several legitimate profiles under Google's guidelines plus the location's own, each able to accumulate its own reviews and visibility. Done correctly this is real estate no competitor with one profile has; done incorrectly it causes problems, which is why most clinics leave it alone.
Ad copy gets reviewed and site copy occasionally does. Review replies are written by whoever has time, they are public and permanent, and there are real settlements behind getting them wrong. A framework costs nothing and removes the exposure entirely.
What a prospective patient most wants to see is the work, and that is the imagery carrying consent requirements and board rules. Building a profile around the premises, the team and the process instead is a real creative constraint rather than a box to tick, and clinics that plan for it look better than the ones that do not.
The nearest engagement we can show is a multi-state clinic network rather than a med spa, and it was paid acquisition rather than local search - none of our case studies is a local SEO engagement and we would rather say so. What it demonstrates is operating in a regulated health category across markets with different rules. The practitioner-profile and review-reply work here comes from the published guidelines and the settlements themselves.
Read the full case studyMost often the primary category, and it is worth checking before anything else. A clinic listed as a beauty salon and one listed as a medical spa are eligible for materially different searches, and the field is usually set in under two minutes when the profile is created and never revisited. Compare yours with whoever is outranking you - it is a twenty-minute job.
Possibly, and it is worth doing properly. Google's guidelines allow a public-facing practitioner who can be contacted at the verified location during stated hours to hold their own profile, and where several share a location the organisation should have a profile for the location separate from each practitioner's. The title should contain only the practitioner's name, not the clinic's - that is the rule almost everyone breaks.
Warmly and without confirming that the person was treated by you. That sounds paranoid until you look at the settlements: one dental practice paid $10,000 to OCR after a review reply included a patient's last name, treatment plan, insurance and cost details, and another paid $23,000 for similar replies. Thank them for the feedback, offer to discuss it privately, and add no detail at all.
They contribute, and the steady accumulation matters more than the total. A practical system for asking every satisfied patient beats an occasional campaign, and in this category the reviews also do heavy persuasion work - someone choosing an aesthetic clinic reads them closely. Just never buy them, and never incentivise them.
Many more than you have, and mostly of the premises, the team and the experience rather than of results. The images that would persuade most are the ones carrying consent requirements and board constraints, so plan around that - a profile showing a clean, calm, real place beats one with six stock images and nothing else.
Yes, genuinely different work with different mechanics. Local SEO is about the profile and its position in the map results - categories, practitioner listings, reviews, proximity. Website SEO is about pages ranking in the ordinary organic results. A clinic can dominate one and be absent from the other, and the fixes have almost nothing in common.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
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