Healthcare & dental
Patients pick a practice before they ever call.
Dental, chiropractic, physical therapy, optometry, med spa. The research happens quietly on a phone, and the practice with more recent reviews and a complete profile wins the appointment.
Why this industry is different
Healthcare is a trust purchase made by a stranger.
Nobody chooses a dentist casually. They compare, they read reviews carefully, and they weigh signals most other industries can ignore. That makes the profile do more work, and it makes small gaps expensive.
PROBLEM 01
Your reviews are old and thin
Patients read healthcare reviews far more carefully than restaurant reviews, and they check dates. A practice with 90 reviews where the newest is eleven months old reads as a practice that stopped caring.
PROBLEM 02
You never respond to the bad one
A single unanswered one-star review does disproportionate damage in healthcare. A calm, non-defensive public reply that takes it offline can neutralise it almost entirely, and most practices never write one.
PROBLEM 03
Your services are not listed
Someone searching for Invisalign, or a specific therapy, or a particular procedure, is a high-intent patient. If that service is not listed individually on your profile, you are not in the running.
PROBLEM 04
Insurance and hours are missing
The two questions every prospective patient has before they call. When the answers are not on the profile, a meaningful share simply move to the next practice rather than phoning to ask.
What people actually type
Patients search by problem, procedure and insurance.
Very few search for a practice name. Almost all of them combine a symptom or procedure with a location, and increasingly with an insurance or availability qualifier.
Typical searches in your market
- dentist near me accepting new patients
- emergency dentist altoona
- chiropractor for lower back pain
- invisalign cost near me
- physical therapy near me
- pediatric dentist state college
- dentist that takes my insurance
- same day dental appointment
- eye exam near me
- walk in chiropractor
"Accepting new patients", "takes my insurance" and "same day" are the qualifiers that separate a browser from a booking. Each one maps to a specific field or attribute on your profile that can simply be filled in, and in most practices has not been.
The work
What the first ninety days look like for a practice.
Slower and more careful than the trades, because trust signals matter more than speed and because there are rules about what you can and cannot say about patients.
Services listed individually
Every procedure and treatment as its own entry with a plain-English description. This is the single highest-value change for most practices and it is almost always undone.
Attributes and insurance
Accepting new patients, wheelchair access, languages spoken, appointment links, parking. Small fields that answer the questions keeping people from calling.
Review responses, carefully
Every review gets a reply. Negative ones get a calm, non-defensive response that never discusses any specifics of care, then moves the conversation offline. Wording matters a great deal here.
A compliant review request flow
Asking every patient, at the right moment, with a direct link. No incentives, no filtering, no gating. Those tactics violate platform policy and can cost you the reviews you already have.
Citations across health directories
Consistency across the general directories plus the healthcare-specific ones that patients and Google both check.
Grid testing and category tuning
Position measured for five procedure terms across your catchment, then categories and services adjusted against what is actually converting.
Start here
See how your practice looks to a patient comparing three options.
The scan reads your live profile and scores it against the same five pillars every Real Local client is measured on. No login, no patient data involved, about a minute.
Questions from this industry
The ones I get asked most.
Is any of this a HIPAA problem?
Review responses are the only place it comes near, and the rule is simple: never confirm or discuss that someone was a patient, and never mention any detail of their care, even to correct something false. Every response I write follows that. I am not a compliance attorney, and your practice should run the approach past whoever handles that for you.
Can I offer patients something for leaving a review?
No, and I will not do it. Incentivised reviews violate Google policy and can get your existing reviews removed or the profile suspended. The volume comes from asking everybody at the right moment, which works well enough that you do not need the shortcut.
We have multiple providers. Does each need a listing?
Individual practitioner listings are a real strategy but they are easy to get wrong and can create duplicate problems. It is a conversation for the Authority tier rather than something to do casually.
Our practice management software sends review requests already.
Good, and I will work with it rather than replacing it. Usually the issue is not the sending, it is that the request goes to the wrong place, at the wrong moment, or asks for a review on a platform nobody checks.
How long until we see new patients?
Profile completeness can shift visibility within weeks. Review velocity takes a month or two to build meaningfully. Realistically you are judging this at day 90, which is why the initial term is three months.