Three listings sit above everything else on a local search. That’s the whole game, and most practices have never properly claimed theirs.
The Bigger Brand is a Manchester-based dental marketing agency providing local SEO for private and mixed dental practices across the UK and Ireland. We manage your Google Business Profile, build citations, generate reviews and write location page content, all aimed at the local map pack for treatment and town searches. Reports cover map pack rankings, profile actions such as calls and direction requests, and enquiries from local search.
Most people want a dentist they can actually get to. Whether it’s a family looking to register, someone with toothache or a patient who’s finally ready to talk about implants, they search with a town name or “near me” on the end and pick from what comes up.
Local SEO makes sure your practice is one of the names they see, and the one that looks worth ringing. Those searches happen every day in every town you serve, and the work keeps paying back long after it’s done.
Somebody in your town searches “dentist near me” on their phone.
Before they see a single website, they see a map and three businesses, with names, star ratings, opening hours, a call button and directions.
Most of them never scroll past it. You can have the best website in the county sitting at position four in the organic results and still lose that patient to a practice with a better-managed profile and forty more reviews.
That isn’t really SEO in the way most people mean it. It’s closer to a shopfront, and like a shopfront it works on proximity, prominence and whether it looks open.
When a practice is missing from the map pack, it’s nearly always down to one or more of these.
Nothing has been posted, there are no photos since the refurbishment, half the services are missing and the opening hours were last corrected before the bank holiday.
Google cross-checks your name, address and phone number across the internet. "Smith & Partners Dental" on one directory and "Smith and Partners Dental Practice" on another makes it less confident about who you are.
Forty reviews from three years ago carry less weight than fifteen from the last quarter. Recency matters as much as volume.
Google reads your replies. So does every patient deciding between you and the practice down the road, particularly when they're reading the two-star one.
"Dentist" is the obvious primary category. If you want implant searches, there's a category for that too, and most practices haven't set it.
The map pack and your website feed each other. A practice with a proper page about the town it serves ranks better in that town.
Google treats each physical location as a separate business. Each site needs its own profile, its own citations, its own reviews and its own page on the website. What you can share is the content strategy and some of the posting.
What you can’t share is the profile. Two practices under one listing is a listing that ranks for neither.
We cover the profile, the citations, the reviews and the pages on your site that support them.
We set up your categories, services, treatment descriptions, opening hours (including bank holidays), attributes and booking links, plus the Q&A section most practices don’t know exists.
We shoot the exterior so people recognise the door, then reception, the surgeries and the team. Google gives more weight to profiles with recent, real images, and patients make their decision on them.
Treatments, offers, team news and open days all go on the profile. A dormant profile looks like a dormant business.
We find every listing of your practice online, correct the ones that disagree and build the ones that are missing. It’s tedious, manual work, and it makes a real difference.
Treatments, offers, team news and open days all go on the profile. A dormant profile looks like a dormant business.
We find every listing of your practice online, correct the ones that disagree and build the ones that are missing. It’s tedious, manual work, and it makes a real difference.
An automated request goes out by text or email after appointments, so reviews arrive steadily rather than in a flurry every time someone remembers to ask.
We reply to all of them within a couple of days, including the difficult ones. Especially the difficult ones.
Real pages for the towns you actually serve, covering distance, route, parking and why patients travel from there. Never the same page with the name swapped.
We’ll check your Google Business Profile, citations and reviews against the three practices currently beating you, and tell you exactly what it would take to get in there. It’s free.
Map pack rankings depend on proximity to the searcher, how complete and active the Google Business Profile is, review volume and recency, consistency of business details across the web, and the relevance of the practice website. Practices can influence everything except proximity. Profiles with the right categories, recent photographs, regular posts and steady recent reviews usually outrank dormant listings.
There’s no fixed threshold. What matters more is being competitive with other practices in the same area and keeping a steady flow of recent reviews. A practice with fifteen reviews from the past three months often outperforms one with sixty that are two years old. Replying to reviews helps both rankings and conversion.
A citation is any online mention of a business name, address and phone number, such as a directory listing, a dental association profile or a local business register. Consistent citations help search engines confirm a practice’s details. If the same practice name or address is formatted differently across sites, it can reduce Google’s confidence and hold back local rankings.
Yes, when they contain information that’s actually different, such as travel distance, parking, local context and the treatments relevant to that area. Near-identical pages with only the town name changed risk being treated as low-value scaled content and rarely rank. Most practices do better with a small number of well-written location pages than with many thin ones.
