Message Boards
Today's Active Topics Today's Active Cases Browse Forum Categories My Recent Activity My Messages Private Groups My Marked Threads My Subscriptions
Today's Active Images Today's Active Polls Most Active Topics Global Townie Map Advanced Message Board Search Message Board Terms of Use

High Visibility by Dr. David A. Wank

View Comments (10) More by this author (5)
High Visibility 

Improve your practice’s visibility with local SEO

by Dr. David Wank

Introduction
In this article, we’ll dive into everything you need to know about local SEO in 2025, along with actionable steps to help maximize your practice’s visibility in local search results.

Local SEO and traditional SEO are similar in that the goal of both techniques is to get your practice more visibility on Google searches. However, these two approaches are different in where users see your efforts, how we measure results and how we achieve these results.


Placement and Measurement
For local SEO campaigns, we focus on your Google Business Profile (GBP) and the Google Maps Pack. When we talk about results for local SEO campaigns, we are referring to placement in the Google Maps Pack, phone calls to your practice from your GBP and website visits from your GBP. Obviously, the most important result to track is the number of new patients coming into your practice, but the previous metrics are data points you can look at along the way (Fig. 1).
High Visibility Dental SEO
Fig. 1: Local SEO data points.

For traditional SEO campaigns, we focus on rankings for specific keywords (e.g., “dental implants”) and organic visits to your website. Visitors can get to your website in a limited number of ways:
  • Direct: they type in your web address.
  • Referral: they click on a link on another website.
  • Paid: they come via a paid ad campaign.
  • Organic: they come from a Google search including your GBP.
When we talk about traditional SEO in this context, we are referring only to organic traffic. Once again, the most important data point is the number of new patients coming into your practice, but notice the steps we use to get there are different (Fig. 2).
High Visibility Dental SEO
Fig. 2: Traditional SEO data points.


Visibility
Figures 5 and 6 show a traditional Google search result. While some of the items we see in search results may vary (questions, videos and images), when it comes to searches related to local businesses (as we are as dentists), you often see the following:
  • Paid Google ads (green)
  • Google Maps Pack (yellow)
  • Traditional organic search (Fig. 6)

Local SEO and Traditional SEO Overlap
If you have an optimized local SEO approach, you might see improved traditional SEO results. However, the data to support this observation is anecdotal. Local SEO campaigns generally consist of two separate parts, including a Google My Business Optimization Campaign and a Citation Campaign. Remember that Google Maps is for searchers, and GBP is where we as profile owners give Google Maps information.

Your GBP is the foundation of any local SEO campaign, and it is the most important part of your local presence. They’re free to get, and you can visit business.google.com to claim your profile and verify your practice. It’s important that once you verify the profile, you fill it out completely. Google is often updating the data you can add to your GBP (they recently added an option to mark if you are accepting new patients), so it’s important that you keep an eye on your profile.

Another reason you should fully complete your profile is that we don’t know what GBP factors will draw in clicks from searchers.

You can check the strength of your profile by logging in to the Google account associated with your profile and then Googling your business’ name. You’ll see an area at the top of the page that looks like this, and you want to make sure your Profile Strength is green and says “Looks Good” underneath (Fig. 3).
High Visibility Dental SEO
Fig. 3: A view of your Google Business Profile strength.


Google Maps Pack Placement and Guarantees
There are no guarantees with Google Maps Pack placement, and Google shifts the maps pack positions around in a seemingly random manner. For example, there are practices that have 10 times the number of reviews as a competitor but rank behind practices that have only five reviews. Unfortunately, this is part of the Google algorithm. My advice is to follow Google’s recommendations and optimize your profile as best as possible, generate reviews and run a citation campaign.


Local SEO Ranking Factors
The number one ranking factor for local SEO searches is proximity. That can be frustrating for us as dentists because we treat patients from multiple local areas. You might be in Short Hills and able to see Millburn Town Hall from your office, but it doesn’t change the fact that Google is going to recommend practices in Millburn to people in Millburn. That being said, there are ways we can rank a practice for multiple localities, but understand that no matter how much effort you put in, it’s unlikely that you will rank in a second area where there is any level of competition.

The number one ranking factor when it comes to optimizing your GBP is the Primary Category of your profile (Fig. 4). After that are your on-page signals, including having your name, address, phone number and hours on your website. Reviews are the next factor, which is why it’s important to maintain current, positive reviews.

High Visibility Dental SEO
Fig. 4: Your primary business category.


Citation Campaign
Before we talk about citations, let’s talk about links. A link is when one website connects to another, and high-authority sites can share their authority. For example, if you are featured on CNN, FOX or MSNBC and they link the story to your website, it is a much more valuable link than the same one from Short Hills Design’s website because Google views these major news sites as much more authoritative.

When it comes to a local SEO campaign, when we refer to links, we are usually referring to citations. A citation is a listing for your business on an Fig. 4: Your primary business category. aggregator or directory-type website. Google states that they want local businesses to have citations because the more accurate and consistent citations that a business has, the more proof that the business is local.

A citation campaign is a process by which you submit your practice’s information to multiple listing sites to make sure that you have a presence on these sites. Of course, some of these sites have more authority than other sites, so your goal is to list your practice on the top sites. There are also services called aggregators which submit your information to a group of citation providers including the Yellow Pages and the GPS listing (which is important for having updated information GPS/map products).

In a citation campaign, you also want to correct any old or incorrect listings (like if you have changed the name of the practice or changed the address) so that your information is as consistent as possible for Google. My personal objection is that there is no way to quantitatively state that if you have twenty citations, you’ll do better than a competitor with only 19 citations. Or if you have 10 top authority citations and your competitor has 100 low authority citations that they will do better. Ultimately there is no current guidance as to what the correct number of citations is and how having more citations or fewer citations will affect your local listings.

While you can run a citation campaign by hand and manually submit your practice’s information to 50-plus websites, we use the service BrightLocal. There are many other companies that provide citation submission services and they all cost some amount of money to make submissions, but we’ve found that BrightLocal is the best choice when it comes to price, ease-of-use and support.


Notes About Citations
You want to make sure that your citations are consistent across the web, but not to the point where it consumes your life. That is, if the bulk of your citations are consistent, don’t lose sleep over a few errant listings (however, you must make sure that top sites such as GBP, Facebook and Apple Business Connect are accurate).

Also note that once citations are submitted, they generally can’t be removed—only updated (unless the business closes). So, once you submit a citation, you don’t necessarily have to keep paying for a service to keep that citation open, though you might want to keep paying to keep an eye on it to make sure it stays up to date.

That being said, you want to make sure that if you work with a company for citation submissions, they don’t threaten to undo the citation work if you leave or stop paying. With Bright- Local, we can transfer the campaign over to our client if the client decides to manage the citations on their own.

Other Local SEO Best Practices
  • Make sure that you own the GBP. Agencies can manage it for you, but you must own it.
  • On your contact page, consider providing written directions with local landmarks, as this type of hyper-local content may reinforce the local nature of your page.
  • Make sure to register your practice with Apple Business Connect, as many people now use Apple Maps instead of Google Maps.
  • For reporting, focus on the number of calls you are getting from your GBP and the number of visitors to your website from GBP. The other metrics are less important.
  • It’s fine to manage your GBP and your citations on your own or to use an agency to help you.


Summary
Local SEO is the process by which you aim to have your practice appear for local-specific searches. It’s a different service compared to traditional SEO that uses different modalities to implement and relies on different metrics to track. Make sure that you have an optimized Google Business Profile, and that you run a citation campaign to ensure that your practice’s name, address and phone number is consistent across the web.
High Visibility Dental SEO
Fig. 5: A Google SERP. The area in green contains paid ads, while the area in yellow is what’s known as the “Maps Pack.” You may not see this on every search, but when you do it will usually be found below the paid ads.
High Visibility Dental SEO
Fig. 6: The organic search results of a Google SERP. These can be found below the paid ads and Maps Packs.

Author Bio
Dr. David Wank Dr. David Wank is a practicing general dentist in New York City and the CEO of Short Hills Design, a digital marketing agency for healthcare clients. He received his DMD from Harvard in 2003 and is an authority on topics including website development, hosting, SEO, local SEO and analytics.

Wank writes CE courses for dentaltown.com and is the author of the Small Business Website Owner’s Manual. He is the creator and instructor of courses including Google Analytics 4 Migration Process Training and the Local SEO Process Training (localseoprocess.com). Contact him at davidw@shorthillsdesign.com or find him running around on the Dentaltown message boards.

 
Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
Dentaltown Magazine September 2025 Read Current Issue Read Archived Issues
Sponsors
Townie Perks
Townie® Poll
Who or what do you turn to for most financial advice regarding your practice?
  
Site Menu
Message Boards Magazine Continuing Education Podcasts Blogs Classifieds Dental News Events Townie® Poll Ebooks Townie Choice Awards
Company Info
Contact Us Advertise With Us Howard Farran DDS, MBA Policies and Agreements
Site Help
Sally Gross, Member Services Specialist
Phone: +1-480-445-9710
Email: sally@farranmedia.com
©2025 Dentaltown, a division of Farran Media • All Rights Reserved
9633 S. 48th Street Suite 200 • Phoenix, AZ 85044 • Phone:+1-480-598-0001 • Fax:+1-480-598-3450