Local SEO for dentists: how the map pack is actually won

Three practices get a map place for your main search term. Everyone else is below the fold. Here is what decides which three, and which parts of it you can move.

29 August 2026 · 4 min read

Start your free monthNo card. Four fields, under a minute.

Search "dentist" plus your town on a phone. Before any website appears you get a map and three practices. That block is the local pack, and for a patient looking for a nearby dentist it is most of the decision. Everything below it is competing for the leftovers.

Local SEO is the work of getting into those three places. It overlaps with ordinary SEO but it is not the same thing, and a practice can be genuinely good at one while invisible in the other.

What decides the three

Google weighs three things, and they are not equally movable.

Proximity, which you cannot change

The single strongest factor is how close the practice is to the person searching. This is why your ranking is not one number. Stand outside your door and you may be first. Drive three miles to where a good share of your patients actually live and you may be nowhere.

You cannot move the building. What you can do is know the shape of it: which parts of your catchment see you and which do not. A practice that discovers it is invisible across an entire town three miles away has found something worth acting on, and no single-position report will ever show it.

Relevance, which you can change

Whether Google thinks you match what was typed. This is mostly your Google Business Profile and your website saying, clearly and in the same words a patient would use, what you do and where.

The common failure is being generically dental. A practice offering implants that never says "implants" on a page of its own is relying on Google to infer it. Sometimes it does. Often a practice down the road that spelled it out gets the place instead.

Prominence, which you can change slowly

How well known you appear to be. Reviews are the visible part of this, along with mentions and links from elsewhere on the web.

We measured the review side across every city, town and suburb in the UK in September 2026, 1,532 places in all. The median practice holding a local pack place had 113 reviews, and one in ten was doing it on 12 or fewer. The number that predicts is not the region but how many practices compete: 70 reviews where three to five do, 246 where twelve or more do. It is a real factor and it is not a wall.

The lowest-rated practice we found holding a pack place was on 2.4 stars. If someone with a rating like that is above you, the thing separating you is not patient satisfaction. It is proximity or relevance, and relevance is fixable this month.

See this for your own town.

Every practice competing with yours on one map, sized by the share of local search each one holds, re-checked every week.

Run on our own practice first: ninth in its town's searches in May, first in September. Page-one keywords: 6 in May, 194 now.

Start your free month See the live demo

Thirty days free. No card, and nothing starts automatically when it ends.

The five things worth doing first

Complete the Google Business Profile properly. Categories, every service, opening hours including bank holidays, and real photographs. It is free, it is the one surface Google controls entirely and you can edit directly, and it is where most practices we look at have filled in half the fields and stopped.
Give each treatment its own page. One "Treatments" page listing twelve things ranks for none of them. Twelve pages, each answering what a patient actually asks, is the difference between being findable for implants and hoping.
Get your listings consistent. Name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Google is reconciling a lot of sources, and a practice that moved or rebranded often has a trail of old details quietly contradicting the new ones.
Ask for reviews steadily. A trickle every week beats forty in a fortnight, which looks like exactly what it is. Find your town's real median before deciding how far behind you are.
Answer the questions your rivals answer. Look at what Google shows in the "people also ask" box on your main terms. If competitors' pages answer those and yours does not, they are collecting searches you never see.

What to measure, and how often

Local search moves. Not dramatically week to week, but a competitor opening, a chain buying a practice down the road, or a rival finally writing an implants page all change the picture within a month or two.

Three things are worth watching, and none of them is "our ranking":

Your share of the estimated search value in your town. This weights each term by how much traffic it actually carries, so being fourth on something busy counts for more than being first on something nobody types.
Who occupies the pack on each of your main terms. Names and review counts. When one changes, something happened.
Coverage across your catchment, not one point. The same term, checked from a grid of locations across the area you draw from, which is the only way proximity effects become visible.

What this is worth

Be sceptical of anyone who converts rankings into a revenue promise, including us. What can honestly be said is narrower: the map pack takes a large share of local intent searches, three practices hold it, and the factors deciding which three are public and measurable.

Knowing where you sit does not by itself win a place. It tells you whether the gap is reviews, relevance or simple geography, and those need completely different responses. Most practices spend on the wrong one because nobody ever showed them which it was.

See the pack from every part of your catchment

One position is one point on a map with hundreds. Practice Radar checks your terms from a grid across your whole catchment, so proximity effects stop being invisible.