Grade your Google listing the way an auditor would.

Look at who has access. If a former office manager, the web designer, a hospital system you used to belong to or a marketing company from years ago is the primary owner, you are one resignation away from losing the most valuable free listing your practice has. Ask for the transfer today.

Then search your practice name, and each provider's name, in Google Maps. Google allows one listing for the practice and one per public-facing practitioner (source: Google); anything beyond that is a duplicate that splits your reviews. Naming and merging them is covered on Google Business Profile for doctors. Never delete a listing with reviews on it.

“Example Family Direct Care | Best DPC Doctor Anytown” is the kind of name competitors report. Google's rules say unnecessary information in the name is not permitted and can lead to suspension (source: Google). It works until it doesn't, and then it can take the listing with it.

Compare the listing to your website, then to your NPPES record, the national provider registry that doctor directories copy from; a wrong phone number there reappears on sites you have never heard of, so fix it upstream first. And use one real office number everywhere: a call-tracking number on the listing is a second phone number for your practice, and directories will copy it too. What NAP consistency means, and why the NPPES record comes first.

Google says the categories you choose affect your local ranking, and its advice is to pick as few as accurately describe your core business (source: Google). Whitespark's annual survey of local SEO practitioners ranks the primary category the most influential field on the profile (source). A pediatric practice under “Medical clinic” is not losing the pediatrician searches on quality. It has told Google it belongs somewhere vaguer.

To check it, read the gray line under each competitor's name in the map box. That is their primary category. If all three say one thing and you say another, you have found your first fix, and it takes a minute.

The categories a practice usually chooses between are Medical clinic, Family practice physician, Pediatrician and Naturopathic practitioner. Functional medicine is not a Google category, and as of September 2026 we find none for direct primary care either, so the choice is a judgment call: use the narrowest one that is accurate for the license and put “functional medicine” or “direct primary care” in your services and description, which is Area 4. Add other categories only for things you genuinely do.

This is the field we find empty most often, and one of the fastest to fill. It matters more for a cash-pay practice, because no category says “membership” or “no insurance.” Services and the description are the only places on the listing where “direct primary care,” “first visit for new patients” or “telehealth for patients in [states]” can live.

List services in the order you want the work, in a patient's words, not a billing code's. Then check that each one has a page on your website; that is Area 8, and the two are graded together.

Recency matters as much as count. Sixty photos uploaded one afternoon three years ago reads as abandoned, to Google and to the person deciding whether you still exist.

Phone photos of the real place beat stock, because the job is to look real and findable: the building a new patient has to locate, the door, the front desk, the exam room, the clinicians. Two rules for a practice. Never a patient, even from behind; ask your compliance adviser before posting anyone who doesn't work for you. And no stock clinicians. One sales pitch to settle: we know of no evidence that adding location data to photo files changes where a listing appears. Don't pay for it.

Compare your count to your map box, not to an absolute target. Fifty reviews is strong where the leaders have sixty and thin where they have four hundred. Recency is what most owners miss.

Reply to all of them. Thank the writer, state your general policy, invite them to call the office. Never confirm the reviewer was seen, and never mention anything about care; the reviewer going public first doesn't change that. A practice settled with the HHS Office for Civil Rights in 2023 over a reply that disclosed patient information (source: HHS); reply templates are on Google Business Profile for doctors. We are not lawyers; ask yours.

This is the one area you cannot fix alone in an afternoon. It needs a small system, inside two rules. Google's policy prohibits incentives of any kind, and the FTC's 2024 rule prohibits incentives conditioned on the review being positive (source: Google, source: FTC). Google also prohibits asking only your happy patients, and the FTC rule bans fake reviews. The wording, the timing and the link are in how to ask patients for reviews without breaking the rules.

If the listing says open until five and nobody answers at 4:50, that is an F whatever else is true. Why the phone at 4:50 matters more than it seems.

Be careful with posts in both directions. We have not seen evidence that posting moves a listing's position much, so don't pay a lot for weekly posts. But a listing with no sign of life in a year reads as closed. One or two posts a month about something true, such as new hours or a new provider, is enough. Don't grade the public questions-and-answers section: Google has retired it (the note on Google Business Profile for doctors has the detail), and its work now falls to your services, description and site.

Search engines and AI assistants read the listing and the site side by side and build their answers from both. The listing makes claims; the website is the evidence. Eight services against a one-page site is eight claims you can't cash.

Schema is the machine-readable version of the same agreement: your name, phone, address, hours and clinicians as labeled facts in the page's code, which site builders often fill with template values nobody checked. Paste your homepage into Google's free Rich Results Test to see what yours says. What schema is, in plain English. The standard each service page should meet is in what a practice service page should say.