How a 4-location dental group tripled calls from Google Maps
Six months. No new website, no ad spend increase. Mostly category strategy, citation cleanup and finally building the service-area pages they'd been told they didn't need.
Table of contents
The situation
Four practices across one metro area, all under one brand, all with a Google Business Profile that had been set up years earlier and barely touched since. They were ranking well organically for their brand name and almost nowhere in the map pack for the treatments that actually made them money.
They'd been with two agencies before me. Both had produced monthly reports full of impressions and "keywords in top 100". Neither had touched the profiles.
The core problem
- All four profiles used the same generic primary category
- NAP data was inconsistent across 180+ listings, including two old phone numbers
- One site-wide "Areas we serve" page instead of real location pages
- Review requests happened when someone remembered — roughly never
What was actually wrong
The grid audit made it obvious. Each practice ranked acceptably within about half a mile of its own front door and fell off a cliff beyond that. That is the signature of a profile that Google understands as a dental practice but not as the practice for a particular treatment in a particular area.
The citation audit was worse. Searching the old phone number in quotes turned up listings on directories nobody had thought about since 2019, all feeding inconsistent data back upstream.
What we did
Category strategy per location
Each practice got a primary category matched to what it actually specialised in, checked against what the current map pack winners in that specific area were using. Two of the four changed. Both dipped for about ten days, then recovered higher.
Citation cleanup, aggregators first
180 corrections, starting upstream so fixes stopped being overwritten. Two duplicate profiles merged. This was the slowest and least interesting part of the project and probably the second most valuable.
Twelve real service-area pages
Treatment × area, each with genuinely different content — local context, the practice that serves it, real photos, specific pricing. Not one template with the town name swapped.
A review workflow the front desk could actually run
One SMS, sent at the right moment, with a short link. Review velocity went from roughly two a month across all four practices to around eleven.
The bit that nearly went wrong
Changing the primary category on two established profiles caused a visible drop for about ten days. If we hadn't agreed that expectation upfront, that would have been a very uncomfortable phone call in week two. Set this expectation before you make the change, not after.
Results
Six months in, measured on the same grid, at the same points, at the same time of week.
Average grid rank across 20 tracked points, all four locations. Lower is better.
| Metric | Month 0 | Month 6 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Map pack impressions | 18,400 | 75,800 | +312% |
| Calls from Maps | 212/mo | 627/mo | +196% |
| Direction requests | 340/mo | 1,180/mo | +247% |
| Avg. grid rank | 6.8 | 1.9 | −4.9 |
| Reviews / month | 2 | 11 | +450% |
Calls from Maps roughly tripled inside two quarters. The part I didn't expect was how much of it was fixing things we already had.
— Practice Manager (placeholder — real attribution with name, role and company before launch)
What I'd do differently
I'd have done the citation cleanup first rather than in parallel. Because we changed categories and cleaned citations in overlapping windows, I can't cleanly attribute how much of the month-two movement came from which. It didn't matter commercially, but it made the reporting less honest than I'd like.
I'd also have started the review workflow in week one instead of week six. It was the cheapest intervention in the project and the one with the longest lead time to show results.
Similar situation?
If you're running multiple locations and suspect the profiles are the bottleneck, that's usually diagnosable in about twenty minutes.
