When a patient searches your specialty plus their suburb, Google shows three clinics on a map at the top of the page. That is the Local Pack, and it gets the majority of local clicks. This service exists to put your practice in it and keep you there.
If any of these sound familiar, the Local Pack is quietly sending your patients to the practice down the road.
You search your specialty plus your suburb on your own phone, and three other clinics show up on the map. You are nowhere. That is where the majority of local clicks go, and you are missing every one of them.
No posts in months, photos from 2019, half the services missing, and the hours are wrong. Google reads neglect as a signal. Dormant profiles slide down the rankings while active ones climb.
You know you should reply, but one wrong sentence about a patient is an AHPRA problem. So the reviews pile up, competitors with more engagement outrank you, and the 1-star from 2022 is still the first thing people read.
Your primary category says "Doctor" instead of "Cardiologist". Half your services are not listed. The Q&A section is either empty or full of random questions from strangers. Every one of these is a ranking signal you are giving away.
Setup, weekly ongoing work, and monthly reporting. Every item below is included, no upsells, no tiers hidden inside the tier.
Full profile audit or ground-up setup: ownership, verification, and cleanup of duplicate or incorrect listings
Primary and secondary category strategy tuned for your specialty (the single biggest Local Pack ranking lever)
Service area, business hours, holiday hours, attributes, and accessibility fields completed properly
Geo-tagged photos of your practice, team, and interior, refreshed regularly so the profile reads as active
Weekly Google Posts written by us, AHPRA-reviewed, on-brand, covering services, updates, and seasonal health topics
Q&A section seeded with the real questions patients ask (written in your voice, pre-approved)
Review monitoring across Google, and AHPRA-compliant response templates for every star rating
Drafted responses to new reviews within 24 hours. You approve, we post
Citation building and NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency across Australian medical directories
Local content recommendations for your website, the pages that feed the Local Pack above and beyond GBP itself
Monthly Local Pack ranking report: where you sit in the 3-pack for every target keyword, in every target suburb, on mobile
Competitor monitoring, who else is showing up in the 3-pack for your terms, and what they are doing that you are not
Suspension recovery support if your profile is ever flagged or taken down
Seen enough? Let’s talk about your practice.
GBP is not a one-off setup job. The profiles that rank are the ones that stay active, so this is a cycle, not a project.
We pull your current GBP, check for duplicates and ownership issues, benchmark your Local Pack position across your target suburbs, and map your top competitors. You fill out a short intake on services, tone, and the suburbs you actually want to win.
We claim or clean up the profile, fix the primary category, complete every field Google offers, upload geo-tagged photos, seed Q&A, and start citation building across Australian medical directories. Most of the heavy lift happens in the first two weeks.
Weekly Google Posts written and published by us. New reviews get drafted responses within 24 hours, AHPRA-reviewed, ready for you to approve. Photos refreshed monthly. Citations expanded over time. The profile stays alive, which is what Google rewards.
Every month you get a plain-English report: Local Pack rank per keyword and per suburb (measured on mobile, where your patients actually search), review velocity, post engagement, profile views, direction requests, and what your competitors are doing. No vanity metrics.
This service is part of our Growth tier
Responding to Google reviews as a health practitioner is a regulated activity. One wrong sentence, confirming someone was a patient, referencing their condition, thanking them for a testimonial, can trigger an AHPRA notification. We write every response against the AHPRA advertising guidelines before it ever gets posted.
Plenty of agencies will "tidy up your profile" and call it a day. We sell a specific outcome: appearing in the Google Maps 3-pack for the searches that actually bring patients to your door. Everything we do ladders up to that one number.
The single biggest mistake on medical GBPs is the primary category. Most practices default to "Doctor" when they should be using a specialty-specific category like "Cardiologist", "Dermatologist", or "Physiotherapist". This one field moves the needle more than any other. We know which categories actually exist in Google’s taxonomy and which ones rank.
We report where you actually rank in the 3-pack, by keyword, by suburb, on mobile, because that is how most "near me" searches happen. Not desktop snapshots from a single location. You get the real picture every month, not a dashboard full of flattering but useless metrics.
We know Australian suburbs, Australian directories, and the AHPRA rules that govern how doctors are allowed to advertise. No offshore teams, no generic playbooks written for US dentists.
Here is what each option actually gets you, not the brochure version.
You fumble through Google’s UI between patients, skip half the fields, and pick "Doctor" as your category
A generalist account manager who has never set up a medical GBP follows a checklist built for restaurants
Healthcare-specific setup, every field completed, categories tuned for your specialty, ownership verified
Guess. Pick "Doctor" and hope for the best
A bored intern copies whatever your competitor chose
Specialty-first primary category plus a researched set of secondary categories based on what actually ranks in your suburbs
Either ignore them (and lose ranking signal) or reply off the cuff and create AHPRA exposure
Generic template replies that sound the same on every client and still breach AHPRA if you read them carefully
Every response drafted against the AHPRA advertising guidelines, in your voice, within 24 hours of a new review
You meant to, but it has been three months
AI-generated slop posts with stock imagery, Google can tell, and so can patients
Written by us, AHPRA-aware, tied to your actual services and seasonal health topics
You search your own name on your own phone and feel good about yourself
A single desktop rank from one postcode, reported quarterly
Per-keyword, per-suburb, mobile-first Local Pack tracking, reported monthly, in plain English
You submitted to Yellow Pages in 2018 and never touched it again
A bulk submission tool spraying your details across 200 low-quality directories
Hand-curated Australian medical and health directories with NAP consistency checks
Entirely your risk
Most agencies do not know AHPRA exists
Every reply reviewed against the guidelines before it is posted
Google’s support forums and a two-week wait
A support ticket that gets forgotten
We handle the appeal, the documentation, and the reinstatement conversation
Free, plus the hours you are not seeing patients, plus the bookings you are losing to the practice ranked above you
$800–$1,500/mo on top of a retainer you already pay, often bolted onto unrelated work
Included in Growth. Flat monthly fee. Cancel anytime.
The honest summary: DIY is technically free but expensive in clinical hours and AHPRA risk. Generalist agencies treat your profile like a restaurant listing. We treat the Local Pack as the product, and the report we send you every month shows exactly how you are tracking toward it.
When someone searches Google for something like "cardiologist near me" or "physio Bondi", the first thing they see, above the regular blue links, is a map with three practices pinned on it. That block of three is the Local Pack (also called the Maps 3-pack or the Map Pack). For "near me" and suburb-based medical searches, the majority of clicks go to those three results. If you are not in there, you are effectively invisible on mobile for your own neighbourhood.
Honestly, it depends on how competitive your specialty and suburb are, and what state your profile is in today. Most practices see meaningful movement within 1–3 months. A brand new profile in a low-competition suburb can move faster. A mature profile in a saturated area like Sydney CBD takes longer and requires sustained work. Anyone who promises you a fixed timeline is guessing, or lying.
Yes, and this is one of the most valuable parts of the service for medical practices. Every new review gets a drafted response within 24 hours, written against the AHPRA advertising guidelines. You approve it, we post it. We never confirm someone was a patient, never reference conditions or outcomes, and never phrase a response in a way that could be read as a testimonial endorsement. If a review is borderline or emotionally charged, we flag it and talk it through with you before anything goes public.
Only if it genuinely breaches Google’s policies: things like spam, off-topic content, conflicts of interest, hate speech, or impersonation. We will assess the review honestly and, if there is a valid basis, file the removal request and follow it through. What we will not do is promise to remove negative reviews as a blanket service. That is against Google’s terms, nobody can actually guarantee it, and any agency that does is not being straight with you. The better long-term answer is usually a well-written public response and enough fresh positive reviews to push the old one down the page.
Suspensions happen, sometimes for legitimate reasons, often because Google’s automated systems flagged something like a category change or a service area edit. We handle the appeal, prepare the supporting documentation, and work with Google support until the profile is reinstated. If you come to us already suspended, tell us upfront and we will start there before anything else.
Yes. Multi-location practices actually benefit the most from proper Local Pack work because each location needs its own optimised profile, its own category strategy, its own citation set, and its own suburb-level tracking. We scope multi-location engagements based on the number of profiles, talk to us about your setup and we will put a plan together.
Yes, within what AHPRA actually allows, which is narrower than most agencies pretend. We help you set up a soft-ask flow: the right moment in the patient journey, the right wording (no incentives, no pressure, nothing that could be read as soliciting a testimonial), and an easy link for patients who want to leave one. We will not run review-gating software that hides negative feedback, and we will not offer incentives. Both are against Google’s terms and, in healthcare, both are an AHPRA problem.
Honest answer: they reinforce each other and you really want both. GBP is what puts you in the map 3-pack. Traditional SEO is what puts you in the regular blue-link results underneath, which is where a lot of research-phase patients spend their time. A strong GBP makes your SEO rank better locally, and strong local SEO feeds your GBP signals. That is why our Growth tier includes both, website, ongoing SEO, and GBP as one integrated service.
Yes, technically. Google gives you every tool for free. The reason practices hire us anyway is the honest list of what tends to get missed: the primary category is set to the wrong value, posts stop after the first month, reviews go unanswered or get answered in a way that creates AHPRA risk, citations are never built, the profile is never tracked against real per-suburb mobile rankings, and nobody checks what the competitors are doing. If you have the hours and the discipline, the DIY path is real. Most doctors we work with tried it for six months and came to us because the time cost was higher than the service cost.
No, and if any agency guarantees a specific Local Pack ranking, walk away. Google explicitly forbids SEO ranking guarantees, rankings depend on factors nobody fully controls (including what competitors do next month), and a guarantee is usually a sign someone is about to take your money and blame "the algorithm" later. What we do commit to is transparent monthly reporting of where you actually rank, and a clear view of what is moving and what is not.
Local Pack optimisation is part of our Growth tier, alongside the rest of your online presence. Pick the path that matches where your practice is today.
Pick the path that matches what you actually need. No pressure, no upselling, just the option that fits.
I need a professional, AHPRA-compliant website live as soon as possible. I don't want to talk to anyone. Just build it.
I want everything in Launch, plus a team actively growing my online presence: SEO, Google Business Profile, content, and a real strategy.
I want done-for-you marketing at scale: SEO, content, ads, GBP, reputation. I want a team that knows my practice and an ongoing relationship.
Not sure which fits? Just send us a message and we’ll point you in the right direction.