Win the 'dentist near me' Local Pack.

Roughly 70% of dental search volume is local-intent: "dentist near me," "emergency dentist [city]," "Invisalign [neighborhood]." These searches are won in the Google Map Pack - the three local results above the organic blue links - not in classic SEO. Map Pack ranking is driven mostly by Google Business Profile (GBP) signals: proximity, review velocity, review recency, category accuracy, and on-profile activity.

Xcare SEO & GBP is built around this reality. We optimize the GBP first, the website second, and we measure success in Map Pack impressions and direction requests - not in vanity backlink counts.

Onboarding is a one-time GBP audit and cleanup: primary and secondary categories, services, attributes, hours, photos, Q&A seeded, holiday hours scheduled. Then weekly: GBP posts (offers, updates, events), photo uploads, Q&A monitoring, review responses inside 24 hours, and citation hygiene across the 30 directories that actually matter.

On the website, we build location-specific landing pages, embed schema markup (Dentist, MedicalBusiness, FAQPage), wire internal linking, and keep page speed under two seconds on mobile. Every page is structured for both Google's classic crawler and the new AI snippet engines.

• GBP audit + cleanup (categories, services, attributes)
• Weekly GBP posts and photo uploads
• Review response inside 24 hours, every review
• Schema markup: Dentist, MedicalBusiness, FAQ, Review
• Location pages for each neighborhood you serve
• Citation hygiene on the 30 directories that move rank

Across our portfolio, the practices ranking #1-3 in their Map Pack average 4.7+ stars and 200+ reviews, with at least 8-15 new reviews per month. This is not a coincidence. Google's local algorithm weights review velocity (reviews per month), recency (reviews in the last 90 days), and response rate heavily.

Xcare SEO & GBP is paired with Review Generation - post-visit SMS that asks every patient and links directly to your public Google review form, with an optional private feedback channel offered in addition (never as a substitute), keeping the workflow onside with Google's review policy. The two modules together typically take a practice from 20-50 reviews to 200+ inside 9-12 months.

Local SEO is a 90-day game for movement and a 6-month game for compounding. Map Pack positions usually start to shift inside the first 60 days; organic blue-link rankings for procedure terms ("Invisalign [city]," "dental implants [neighborhood]") move slower, typically 4-6 months.

Once compounding kicks in, organic and Map Pack become the cheapest channels in the practice - typically under $40 cost per booked patient at steady state, versus $200-$350 for paid ads. The pitch is not "SEO instead of ads." It's "SEO so you can spend ad budget on procedures, not on hygiene fillers."

Most dental websites we audit make the same five mistakes. We fix them in the first two weeks and movement usually follows.

• Wrong primary GBP category (e.g. "Dental Clinic" instead of "Dentist")
• Service pages with thin content that don't mention the procedure name in the H1
• No location-specific landing pages for each neighborhood served
• Schema markup missing or wrong (no Dentist, no FAQ, no Review)
• Slow mobile load times - usually images, sometimes a bloated theme