Local SEO is the work that gets a med spa, dental practice or local business into Google's map pack and local results when someone nearby searches for what it offers. It rests on five things: a complete Google Business Profile, recent reviews, one page per treatment and per city you serve, structured data and call and booking tracking.
This guide is for businesses that serve a defined area, from med spas and dental practices to gyms and auto shops. The FTC and HIPAA points apply to healthcare; the rest applies to any business with a storefront or a service area. NWLAB runs this work remotely for clients in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Brazil.
How does Google decide who shows up in the map pack?#
Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking (Google, 2026). Each factor calls for a different kind of work:
- Relevance: how well your Business Profile matches what someone is searching for. It depends on your category, services, description and the pages on your site.
- Distance: how far your business is from the person searching. You can't change it without moving, so the effort goes into the other two.
- Prominence: how well-known your business is. Google says it's also based on how many websites link to you and how many reviews you have, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking.
That's why a practice a few blocks farther away can outrank the one next door: stronger relevance and prominence make up for the distance. It's also why an agency promising the top spot in the map pack is promising something Google says it doesn't sell.
What should you set up in your Google Business Profile?#
Your Business Profile is what shows up on the map. Google says customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable when they find a complete profile, and 70% more likely to visit and 50% more likely to consider purchasing (Google, 2026). Competition keeps growing: the US went from 8,899 med spas in 2022 to 10,488 in 2023 (AmSpa, 2024), and all of them want the same local searches.
Category, name and services#
Google's guidelines ask you to use as few categories as possible, as specific as possible, and never to use categories as keywords (Google, 2026). A practice that only does orthodontics picks Orthodontist, not just Dentist. Your name has to be your real name: “Example Dental | Cheap Implants Dallas” breaks the rule against unnecessary information in the business name. Then add every service or treatment you offer, your real hours (with special hours for holidays) and a phone number someone actually answers.
Photos people look for#
Use real photos of the storefront, front desk, treatment rooms and team. Google says photos and videos help customers learn about your services and recommends adding them to promote engagement and boost your ranking in search results. In healthcare, patient photos follow the advertising rules covered below.
Who can have a profile, and why NWLAB doesn't#
Google says that to qualify for a Business Profile, a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours, and it lists brands, organizations, artists and other online-only businesses as ineligible; a virtual office doesn't qualify either (Google, 2026). That's why NWLAB has no Business Profile: we work 100% online, with no in-person service. Our clients, with real offices and front desks, do have one, and that's where the work happens. If you serve customers at their location, you set a service area and hide your address, as Google's guidelines ask.
Why build one page per treatment and per city?#
Your profile answers “where.” Your site answers “what.” Someone searching “Botox in Scottsdale” or “dental implants Plano” wants a page about that, not your home page. Each treatment gets its own page, named the way patients search. That's the page Google matches to your profile, and the one that can show up as a link in Google's AI answers, which only use indexed pages.
What goes on a treatment page#
- The treatment name as patients search for it, in the title and first paragraph
- Who it's for, how it works, how long it takes and what recovery looks like
- Real questions answered in text, not baked into images
- The provider who performs it, with name and credentials
- Name, address and phone that match your Business Profile exactly, with a tap to call button on mobile
- Real photos of the office and team, and no promised outcomes
City pages that don't turn into spam#
A page per city or neighborhood only makes sense where you really serve patients. Google's spam policies list having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse (Google, 2026). Twenty copies of one page with the city name swapped is exactly that. A useful city page covers what changes there: directions, parking, insurance accepted at that location, hours, providers and reviews from local patients.
At NWLAB, the med spa and aesthetics and dental playbooks start from this structure of profile, treatment pages and location pages.
How do you get more Google reviews without breaking the rules?#
Reviews are the factor you control most. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, run with 1,002 US adults (BrightLocal, 2026), shows how high the bar is:
- Only care about reviews written in the last three months: 74%
- Won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews: 47%
- Will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher: 31%
- Likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews: 80%
- Unlikely to choose a business after templated or generic replies: 50%
How to ask#
Google suggests asking customers to visit a Google link or scan a QR code (Google, 2026). In a practice, that means a short link by text after the visit and a QR code at the front desk. Google's policy bans offering incentives such as payment, discounts or free services, discouraging negative reviews and selectively soliciting positive ones (Google, 2026). Asking only happy patients counts as selective. The FTC's Consumer Review Rule adds federal teeth: it bans fake reviews, buying positive or negative reviews, undisclosed insider reviews and review suppression (FTC, 2024).
How to reply in healthcare#
Reply to every review, short and specific. In healthcare, your reply can't confirm that someone is a patient or discuss their care. In December 2022, HHS's Office for Civil Rights settled for $23,000 with New Vision Dental, a California practice whose replies to negative reviews disclosed patient names, insurance and treatment information, and OCR's director said providers cannot disclose protected health information when responding to negative online reviews (TechTarget, 2022). A safe reply thanks the reviewer, acknowledges the experience and invites them to talk privately.
Which structured data should you use: LocalBusiness, MedicalClinic or Dentist?#
Structured data is a block of code (JSON-LD) that describes your business to search engines. Google says LocalBusiness markup can tell it about business hours and departments, requires a name and address, and recommends the most specific LocalBusiness subtype (Google, 2026). For health businesses, the schema.org options are:
- Dentist: a dental practice. It's a subtype of LocalBusiness, MedicalBusiness and MedicalOrganization, so it can also use properties like isAcceptingNewPatients (schema.org).
- MedicalClinic: a medical practice, including a med spa where licensed providers perform medical treatments, with medicalSpecialty and availableService to list specialties and treatments (schema.org).
- LocalBusiness or another specific subtype, such as DaySpa: for everything else, from gyms to auto shops.
Fill in phone, coordinates, hours and the location URL with the same data as your Business Profile. One common mistake is marking up your own reviews to get stars: Google says that if the entity being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, pages using LocalBusiness or any other Organization markup are ineligible for the star review feature (Google, 2026).
What do FTC rules allow in med spa and dental content?#
Your site, profile, blog and social posts are advertising, and the FTC's standards apply to all of them. What matters most for local SEO content:
- Claims about health benefits or safety need substantiation in the form of competent and reliable scientific evidence (FTC Health Products Compliance Guidance).
- Testimonials that report results more dramatic than users can generally expect are likely to be deceptive, and a “results not typical” disclaimer doesn't cure that. Treat before-and-after photos with the same care.
- Fake reviews and testimonials, review suppression and incentives tied to a review's sentiment are banned under the Consumer Review Rule (FTC, 2024).
- State medical and dental boards add their own advertising rules, so check your state's before you publish.
In practice, the page educates (who it fits, steps, aftercare, risks) and doesn't sell outcomes. A headline like “the best Botox in town” stays out, and so does any guaranteed result.
Does local SEO work in a small town?#
Yes, and there's usually less competition. About 76% of the roughly 19,500 incorporated places in the US had fewer than 5,000 people (US Census Bureau, 2020), and in many of them a handful of practices compete for the same map pack. With few competitors, a complete profile and recent reviews carry more weight. The ceiling is search volume: in a small town, few people search for each treatment every month.
So in small and mid-size towns, city pages cover the nearby towns your patients actually come from, each with its own details, and content answers questions that apply to the whole region. NWLAB's local business playbook covers this outside healthcare.
How long does local SEO take, and what does it cost?#
Timeline#
Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others could take several months, and that you'll likely want to wait a few weeks before assessing the effect (Google, 2026). In local SEO, profile fixes show up first; new pages have to be crawled and indexed; and reviews build at the pace of your appointments, so prominence takes longest. If you need booked consults now, run paid media with a tight radius while organic matures.
Cost#
No serious agency charges for rankings, because, as Google puts it, no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google (Google, 2026). NWLAB's public pricing:
- SEO, local SEO included: from $1,140/mo with Explorador, built for local businesses and early-stage sites
- Paid media: $440 setup + $890/mo management per channel + a fee on ad spend
- Recommended minimum ad spend: $1,500/mo per channel
Plans and what each one includes are on the SEO page. For scale, the accounts NWLAB runs have tracked more than US$ 2.4M in revenue for clients (BRL 12.6M), with more than US$ 500k in ad spend under management (BRL 2.6M) (NWLAB accounts under management, 2023 to 2025).
How do you show up in AI answers like AI Overviews and ChatGPT?#
Google's AI Overviews passed 2 billion monthly users, Sundar Pichai said on the July 2025 earnings call (TechCrunch, 2025). And 45% of US consumers used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool for a local business recommendation, up from 6% a year earlier, while 82% read AI-generated review summaries (BrightLocal, 2026).
On Google's side, there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet (Google, 2026). The practices Google lists line up with local SEO:
- Important content available in textual form
- Structured data that matches the visible text on the page
- Up-to-date Business Profile information
For ChatGPT, OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features and recommends allowing it in your robots.txt (OpenAI, 2026); blocking GPTBot, which crawls content for model training, is a separate decision. Beyond that, what works is what works on Google: the same name, address and phone everywhere, pages that answer real questions and recent reviews.
What's the local SEO checklist to start this week?#
- Review your category, real name, hours, phone and services in your Business Profile
- Upload real photos of the storefront, front desk, rooms and team
- Create your review link and QR code, and build the ask into checkout
- Reply to recent reviews without confirming anyone is a patient
- Build one page for each of your most searched treatments
- Build city pages only where you really serve patients
- Publish Dentist, MedicalClinic or LocalBusiness markup that matches your profile
- Check every page against FTC rules and your state board
- Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and confirm your pages are indexed
- Track calls, directions, messages and clicks in your profile's performance report, plus every call and form fill on your site
If you want to know where your practice stands on this list, NWLAB starts with a free diagnostic, done online.
