When a patient in Newcastle 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 across New South Wales. This service exists to put your practice in it for the Newcastle suburbs you actually want to win, Hamilton, Merewether, Charlestown, New Lambton, and keep you there. The same catchment logic covers patients coming in from Maitland, Lake Macquarie, Cessnock.
If any of these sound familiar, the Local Pack is quietly sending your Newcastle patients to the practice down the road.
You search your specialty plus Hamilton 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 in Newcastle
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 Newcastle suburb (Hamilton, Merewether, Charlestown, New Lambton), 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 Newcastle suburbs, and map your top competitors. You fill out a short intake on services, tone, and the suburbs you actually want to win, whether that is Hamilton, Merewether, or the wider catchment.
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 Newcastle 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 when a patient searches "doctor Newcastle" or "near me" from Hamilton. 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.
Newcastle practices cover the Hunter region and beyond. A website built on solid SEO foundations helps patients from Lake Macquarie to Maitland find you first. We track your rank suburb by suburb, Hamilton, Merewether, Charlestown, New Lambton, and we know the Australian directories and "near me" search patterns that feed the Newcastle Local Pack, not a generic playbook written for US dentists.
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 across Newcastle
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 across Newcastle, 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 Newcastle Local Pack as the product, and the report we send you every month shows exactly how you are tracking toward it.
Local Pack optimisation is part of our Growth tier, alongside the rest of your online presence. Pick the path that matches where your Newcastle practice is today.
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.