You’re not in the map results
The three businesses shown on the map, above the blue links. It’s usually the most valuable spot on the page: the customer is nearby, ready and choosing. This page explains what decides who appears there.
This is the position closest to a booking
Someone searching for a treatment near them is further along than someone reading an article. The map results sit right at that moment.
That’s why a gap here usually costs more than a gap in ordinary search results, and why we measure it separately rather than folding it into a single score.
Three things decide it, and only two are in your hands
Distance from the searcher, how well your profile matches what they asked, and how established your business appears to be.
- Distance. You can’t change where you are. What you can change is which suburbs you’re plausibly relevant to, through what your pages actually say about where you work.
- Relevance. Whether your business profile and your website say, in plain terms, that you provide the thing that was searched for. This is the one most often neglected, and the easiest to fix.
- Prominence. How much corroboration exists about you across the web — directories, professional bodies, publications, consistent business details.
Most of the businesses we measure are losing on relevance, not distance: the profile is thin, the categories are wrong or too few, and the treatments are described on the website in language nobody searches for.
What we won’t do here
The usual advice for map visibility is to get more reviews. For an AHPRA-regulated practice we don’t do that, and we’d be careful with anyone who offers to.
Requesting, incentivising or managing customer reviews sits too close to the rules on testimonials. So we build map visibility from the parts of a business profile that aren’t affected: categories, services, attributes, hours, service areas, questions and answers, photos of the premises and equipment, and the consistency of your business details wherever they appear.
What you can check yourself this week
None of this needs us, and all of it is worth doing anyway.
- 01Open your Google Business Profile and read it as a stranger. Are the treatments you actually want to grow listed as services, in the words a customer would use?
- 02Check your categories. One primary category, chosen precisely, plus the secondary ones that genuinely apply. This is the single most common gap we find.
- 03Check your business details are identical everywhere — name, address, phone. Not similar. Identical, including the suite number.
- 04Search for your own treatment plus your suburb, on a phone, not logged in. Note who the three are.
Common questions
- Will you ask our customers for Google reviews?
- Not for AHPRA-regulated practices. Asking for or managing customer reviews sits too close to the rules on testimonials, so we leave it alone and build your map visibility from the parts of a business profile that aren’t affected.
- We’ve already got good reviews. Isn’t that enough?
- Reviews you’ve already received are a normal part of how the map results work, and we’re not asking you to remove anything. What we don’t do is go out and generate more for a regulated practice.
- Can you promise us a place in the three?
- No. Distance is part of the calculation, and it isn’t something anyone can change. We measure your position for a fixed set of questions and report what moves.
- How is this different from what an SEO agency would do?
- Mostly in what we leave out. The standard playbook leans on review generation, which we won’t do for a regulated practice, so we work harder on the parts of the profile and the site that aren’t restricted.
Where to go from here
The review measures your map position for a fixed set of questions and compares you with other businesses in your area.