Why is my dental practice not showing on Google?

First, separate "not showing" from "not showing to me"

Local results are personalised by where the searcher is, what they have searched before and which device they are on. Searching your own practice name from your own reception, on a phone that has visited your website hundreds of times, tells you almost nothing about what a prospective patient two miles away sees.

Before assuming you are invisible, establish where you actually appear. A practice can sit in the top three for someone standing outside the door and be nowhere for someone in the next postcode. That is normal behaviour, not a fault, and it changes what you should do about it.

A quick way to sanity-check: ask two or three people who live in different parts of your catchment to search "dentist" plus their area and tell you whether you appear. It is crude, but it is far more informative than checking from your own phone.

The six common causes

• No Google Business Profile, or an unclaimed one. Google may have generated a listing for your practice from other data. Until you claim and verify it, you have no control over what it says.
• Verification failed, or the profile is suspended. In dentistry this is often triggered by adding treatment words to the practice name, changing address, listing associates as separate businesses at the same address, or using a virtual office.
• Duplicate listings. Rebrands, moves, practice sales and old associate listings leave behind duplicates that split your reviews and confuse Google about which listing is real.
• Wrong or thin categories and services. The primary category is one of the strongest relevance signals available. A practice offering implants and aligners that is only categorised as "Dentist" with no services listed will lose treatment-specific searches.
• Conflicting practice details. A different phone number on your website, an old address on a directory, two versions of the practice name. Each inconsistency reduces Google's confidence.
• A website with no local or treatment signals. No town in your page titles, treatments described only in images or PDFs, no page for the thing patients actually search for.

How to diagnose it, in order

• Search your exact practice name plus your town. If nothing appears at all, the problem is the listing, not your ranking, and everything else can wait.
• Sign in to your Google Business Profile and read the status banner. "Suspended" or "Pending verification" explains everything else you are seeing.
• Search your practice name in Google Maps and scan for near-duplicates, including old names and old addresses.
• Check your primary category and your listed services against the words patients use — implants, clear aligners, emergency appointments — rather than clinical terminology.
• Compare the name, address and phone number on your profile against your website footer, your Facebook page and the largest UK directories you appear on.
• Open your website and check whether your town and your main treatments appear in the page titles and visible text, not just in the design.

What to fix first

If the profile is suspended or unverified, nothing else matters until that is resolved. Reinstatement usually requires evidence that the practice exists at the address — signage, a utility bill, registration details — and a name that matches how you trade.

If there are duplicates, consolidate them. Losing a duplicate listing with a handful of reviews is worth it to have one authoritative listing rather than two weak ones.

If the profile is healthy, move to relevance: categories, services, a complete description, real photographs and correct hours. These are quick, free and often produce visible change within days.

Only then move to the slower work — treatment pages, review generation, local mentions — which is where the durable gains are, but which takes weeks and months rather than days.

When you are visible but still not getting calls

Sometimes the problem is not visibility at all. If your profile is appearing but calls are not arriving, look at what a patient sees at the moment of choosing: the rating, the recency of reviews, whether the photos look like a place they would want to visit, whether the hours suit somebody who works, and how quickly a call is answered.

It is worth ringing your own practice at the times patients actually ring — first thing, lunchtime, late afternoon on a Friday — and noting what happens. A practice can be perfectly visible and still lose most of its opportunity in the last ten seconds.