Google Business Profile for Dentists: Every Section, in Order

When someone searches for a dentist nearby, the first thing they see about your practice is not your website. It is your Google Business Profile: the listing in the map, with your rating, your photos, your hours and a button to call.

Plenty of patients decide from that listing alone. They ring the number on it without ever opening your site.

This guide goes through the profile section by section, in the order it matters. If you want the wider picture first, how the map is decided and what else goes into it, start with local SEO for dentists.

First, Make Sure You Own It

Before anything else, check who controls the profile. Search for your practice on Google, and if you can edit the listing from there, you own it or manage it.

If you cannot, somebody else does. Most often that is a former agency, a former practice manager, or the previous owner of the practice.

The practice should always be the owner. An agency should be a manager, never the owner.

A manager can do all the day-to-day work. An owner can remove everybody else. If an agency holds ownership and you part ways badly, you can lose control of the listing your patients rely on. Google has a process for requesting access to a profile somebody else controls, and it is worth doing now rather than in a hurry later.

If the practice has no profile at all, create one at business.google.com. Google will ask you to verify that the practice is real, usually with a short video of the building, the signage and the reception, and sometimes with a postcard or a phone call.

Your Name

Use the name on your sign, and nothing else.

“Smith Dental” is right. “Smith Dental – Implants & Invisalign Leeds” is against Google’s rules. It is tempting because names carrying keywords sometimes rank better for a while, but a competitor can report it, and the usual result is a suspended profile and weeks without a listing.

Categories

The single most important setting on the profile, and the one most often left at whatever was picked on the first day.

• Main category. “Dentist”, for a general practice. It tells Google what you are before it reads anything else.
• Additional categories. Add every one that is true. Cosmetic dentist, emergency dental service, dental clinic and dental hygienist are the usual ones.
• Specialist categories. Orthodontist, periodontist, endodontist and the like only if someone at the practice is on the GDC specialist list for it. The GDC treats those titles as a claim to be a specialist.

Services

Under the categories, Google lets you list the individual services you offer. Each one is a search somebody makes, so list them all: implants, clear aligners, whitening, composite bonding, veneers, crowns, root canal treatment, hygiene appointments, emergency appointments, children’s dentistry.

Add a short description to the treatments you most want. One or two plain sentences saying what it is and who it is for. Prices are optional, and if you publish them on your website, matching them here does no harm.

Hours, Including the Awkward Ones

Opening hours matter more than they look. “Open now” is one of the most used filters in Google Maps, and a practice shown as closed does not appear when it is switched on.

Set special hours for every bank holiday and for Christmas, ahead of time. A patient who drives to a practice Google said was open, and finds it shut, tends to say so in a review.

If you offer emergency appointments outside normal hours, say how in the description rather than listing hours you are not actually staffed.

The Description

You get 750 characters. Use them to say, plainly:

• What you treat. The treatments you most want to be known for, by name.
• Who you see. NHS, private, or both. Whether you take new patients.
• Where you are. The town, and anything that helps people find you, such as parking.

Leave out the slogans. “Creating beautiful smiles since 1998” tells a patient nothing and gives Google nothing to match.

Photographs

Good, recent photographs show the profile is cared for, and patients do look at them. Add them in batches of a few every month rather than thirty on one day.

• The outside, from the street. So people recognise the building when they arrive.
• Reception and the waiting area. Nervous patients want to see where they will sit.
• The treatment rooms. Clean, bright, and actually yours.
• The team. Real people, with their permission. This is the photograph patients look at longest.

No stock photographs. And before-and-after photos only with the patient’s written consent and only if they are honest, which is what the GDC’s guidance on advertising expects.

Booking and Contact

Add your phone number exactly as it appears on your website. If you take bookings online, add the booking link in the appointments field, so it shows as its own button on the listing.

Fill in the attributes too, such as wheelchair access and accessible toilets. They are quick to do and they answer questions patients would otherwise ring to ask.

Reviews

Reviews do more for a local listing than anything else you can influence. They help you rank, and they are what patients read before they call.

• Ask everyone, consistently. A steady flow every month beats a burst every year. Ask at the end of an appointment that went well, and send the link straight after.
• Ask them to say what they had done. A review mentioning implants helps you appear for implants. “Lovely staff” does not.
• Reply to every one. Thank the good ones briefly. Answer the bad ones calmly, and never confirm that the reviewer is a patient or mention their treatment. Patient confidentiality applies in a review reply as much as anywhere.
• Never pay for them. No discounts, no prize draws, no staff writing them. Google removes reviews it thinks were incentivised, sometimes all of them at once.

Updates

You can publish short updates on the profile: a new treatment, a new team member, a change to opening times. They are a small signal, but they show Google and patients that somebody is looking after the listing. One or two a month is plenty.

How to Tell If It Is Working

The profile has its own performance figures. The three that matter are calls, requests for directions and clicks through to your website. Those are patients taking a step towards booking.

Look at them monthly, and compare against the same month last year where you can, since dental enquiries rise and fall with the seasons.

The Short Version

• Own it. The practice is the owner. Everyone else is a manager.
• Real name, right categories. No keywords in the name. Specialist categories only with a specialist.
• Every service listed. Each one is a search.
• Hours that are right on bank holidays. Or you disappear from “open now”.
• Reviews, every month, that name the treatment. The biggest lever there is.

Managing the profile properly is part of our cheapest package, Starter at £299 a month, along with the directory listings that back it up.

What is in each package, or how local SEO for dentists works.