Local Search and the Map

So far we have talked about questions that relate to treatment, such as whether an implant hurts or not. But there is another category of searches that contains no scientific question at all. The patient writes “dentist near me”, “implant Ahvaz”, or “dentistry Kianpars”. This person is not looking for an answer, they are looking for a practice, and they usually want to book an appointment today or this week. In terms of value for the practice, this search matters more than the other kind.

Google treats this kind of search differently. Instead of the usual list, it shows a map at the top of the results with a few specific practices on it, and under each one the name, address, opening hours, phone number and rating. Most people pick one of these few practices and never even reach the list below the map. So the question is where Google picks these few practices from, and why your practice is or is not among them.

The first thing you need to know is that in this kind of search, your competitor is neither a dentist in Tehran nor a dentist with more followers. Your competitors are the few practices in the same city and the same area. Google knows where the patient is standing, because it learns it from their phone or because they typed the name of the city themselves, and it shows the practice that is close to them. There is no way around this, and no need for one, because a patient looking for a dentist in Kianpars is not going to go to Tehran anyway.

After distance, one of the things Google looks at is whether it can be confident that the practice is real and that its information is correct. For that it looks at three things: the exact name of the practice, the address and phone number, and the opening hours. It gathers these from several places. One is the place Google itself has for registering businesses, where the practice has to have registered itself, which we will come to in detail later. One is the practice’s own site. And the rest are places where the practice’s name has appeared for one reason or another, such as appointment-booking systems, the Instagram page, or sites that list the dentists of the city.

This is the main point of this part. Google compares these places with each other. If the phone number you wrote on Instagram differs from the one on the site, if the address is “Main Street, corner of Third Street” in one place and “Kianpars, No. 12” in another, if the practice’s name is under your own name in one place and under the clinic’s name in another, Google cannot be sure these are one practice. In part 4 we said that one of the things Google counts is trustworthiness, and that one of its signs is information that agrees with other places. This is the same point, only for a practice instead of a text. A practice whose information is the same everywhere stands ahead of a practice that has written something different in each place, even if the second one is better known.

Many practices have this problem right now without knowing it. The practice’s number changed once and in half the places it is still the old one. The opening hours on Instagram say “mornings and evenings” while the booking system has the exact hours. The practice’s name has been written a different way every time it was needed. None of these is a problem on its own, but together they tell Google that this information cannot be relied on.

The reason is simple: this information has never been written down once, anywhere. Every time it was needed, it was written from memory. What this part asks of you fixes exactly that, and it still has nothing to do with building anything.

Take a file or a sheet of paper and write these few items down once and for all. The name of the practice, exactly in the form in which it will be written everywhere from now on, in one form only. The full address in a form a courier could find you with, including the neighbourhood, street, number, floor and unit. The landline, and if you also have a mobile number for appointments, that too, each one once. And the days and hours of work, exact, not “mornings and evenings”. If you are closed on a particular day, write that down too.

Then bring every place where the practice’s information has already been written into line with this file: the Instagram page, the booking system, anywhere else you can remember. The test of correctness is this: if a stranger had only this file, they should be able to call during an hour when the practice is open and find you. If you have only one version of each item and it is the same everywhere, the job is done.

Keep this file, because from now on, every time the practice’s information is needed, it is taken from this file, not from memory. If you want to see right now what this information looks like under a domain, open this address: https://dentcast.ir/card/. This entrance sits under the DentCast domain, which is my own site and not part of a ready-made commercial service. It works like a digital business card and holds the very information I described, and a little more. In the coming parts we will take this same information further together until, in the end, as a goal, you have an entrance on your own domain. That will be the first entrance of your site, and after that you can expand it on your own.

The next part is about what comes up when, instead of “dentist near me”, the patient types your own name or the name of your practice, and why that result is more in your own hands than you think.