Search dental practice Altrincham and Google answers twice: a block of businesses on a map, then a column of ordinary blue links underneath. The two are assembled by different systems — the map draws on Google Business Profiles and on how far the searcher sits from a pin, the links below on websites. Effort that lifts one does not automatically lift the other, so the checklist here is sorted by which it feeds.
Google's grip on UK search is heavier than its grip on the American market, so this is a checklist about Google, with Bing flagged where it earns a mention.
One disclosure before step one. WebAsk holds no Google Business Profile and will not be applying for one — fully remote, and we meet no customers in person, so there is no listing we are eligible to create. Our Manchester page sets out what that costs us, and running your own profile for you is a separate plan, Google Business Profile management. If your business has premises, the profile is the largest single lever in local search, and nothing below argues otherwise.
1. The profile — if you qualify for one
Google's rule is narrow and worth reading before you claim anything: the business must make in-person contact with customers during the hours you publish. A mailbox service, an unstaffed hot desk or a PO box will not do as an address, and Google says a profile set at a PO box will be suspended. If you travel to customers instead, the service-area setting hides the address rather than inventing one. With no premises at all, ranking in the Map Pack without a shopfront goes through Google's rules case by case.
After that the work is unglamorous: the narrowest primary category that fits plus honest secondaries, hours that match reality including bank holidays, services listed individually where Google offers them for your category, real photographs rather than stock, and, where Google offers Q&A for your category and region, answers to the questions your phone already fields.
Your profile is advertising space, in our reading of the CAP Code
The CAP Code covers marketing by businesses "on their own websites, or in other non-paid-for space online under their control", and in our reading a Business Profile is that space, as a website is. For a clinic that matters: prescription-only medicines cannot be advertised to the public, and CAP's guidance counts indirect references to them, not only their names. A service list, a description or a Post can breach the rules while the website itself is clean. Aesthetic clinics covers what is left to say.
2. Reviews — in the UK this is a legal step, not a marketing one
If you have read local SEO advice published in the US, you will have met the suggestion to offer a small discount in exchange for a review. Do not import it. Since 6 April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has made it unlawful to write, commission or publish fake consumer reviews, or to conceal the fact that a review was incentivised — and an incentive includes cash, a discount, a freebie or an event invitation. Presenting reviews misleadingly is caught as well, aggregate star scores included.
What makes this sharper than a platform policy is the enforcement route: the CMA can determine a breach and impose a penalty without going near a court.
The CMA's guidance says asking customers generally, without steering what they write, "is not prohibited under the banned practice". So ask every patient or customer, ask promptly, keep it to a single tap, and reply to all of them. Our guide to what UK law allows when you ask for Google reviews sets out the rest.
3. NAP, the British version
Name, address, phone — consistent everywhere. Three details decide whether a UK NAP stays that way.
- Name. Settle on your registered name or your trading name, then use that one everywhere. Appending best dentist Manchester to a profile name breaches Google's naming rules and invites a suspension.
- Address. Royal Mail format, postcode spaced properly (
M1 2AB, neverM12AB). The county line has not been needed for delivery in years, and adding it to some listings but not others is the easiest way to end up with two versions of one address. - Phone. One number, written one way. Call-tracking numbers scattered across directories break that consistency by design; if you need tracking, use dynamic insertion that leaves the canonical number in the markup. International form drops the leading zero after
+44, and the American 555 convention does not exist here.
Heads up
Publishing an address because the law requires it is not the same as being local to it. The Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 require the service provider's name, geographic address and email to be easily, directly and permanently accessible — a legal disclosure that confers no local ranking benefit whatsoever. Renting a virtual office to claim a city fails on both counts at once.
4. Citations a British searcher actually recognises
An international directory does nothing for you in the UK. The list that counts starts with Yell — the most widely recognised name, and one that accepts service-area listings — then FreeIndex, then the long tail of Thomson Local, 192.com, Scoot and Cylex. Sector registers outrank all of them for trust: CQC registration for dental practices in England (in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the equivalents are Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Healthcare Inspectorate Wales and the RQIA), JCCP and Save Face for aesthetics, plus LinkedIn for entity reinforcement.
Tip
Bing Places deserves twenty minutes despite Bing's traffic share, because ChatGPT and Copilot both run on the Bing index. Apple Business (formerly Apple Business Connect) feeds Siri and Apple Maps, and Foursquare is reported to supply 60–70% of ChatGPT's local recommendations. Check each one's presence rules before submitting — the test that rules out a profile rules these out too.
With no eligible profile and no Google reviews to gather, the professional-directory tier — Clutch, DesignRush, G2 — sits at the top of WebAsk's own citation order rather than at the bottom. Reorder yours the same way if the map is closed to you.
5. Area pages that earn their place
One contact page cannot rank for six towns; a page per area can, provided it says something specific — the districts you cover, the sectors that cluster there, the services you deliver locally. Slug conventions matter too: /locations/manchester, not the American city-state pattern, which reads as an import to the audience you are addressing. London is the exception, worked borough by borough rather than as one page, because head terms there are the most expensive in the country. The same rule is applied here: WebAsk publishes an area page only where there is something specific to say about the area it names, which is why there are three of them rather than thirty.
A page per area
- Competes for "service + town" queries individually
- Room for genuinely local detail, so the copy reads as written rather than generated
- Carries its own structured data and internal links
One page for everywhere
- Splits its relevance across every town and wins none
- Interchangeable copy with nothing local in it
- Forces Google to pick an area on your behalf
The caveat is absolute: a page differing from the last only by its town name is worse than not publishing it. That is a doorway, and Google's position on doorways has been settled for a decade.
6. Structured data — and the property to omit when you have no premises
If you have a real address, mark it up so nothing is inferred:
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Example Dental Practice",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "1 Example Street",
"addressLocality": "Manchester",
"addressRegion": "Greater Manchester",
"postalCode": "M1 2AB",
"addressCountry": "GB"
},
"areaServed": "Greater Manchester",
"telephone": "+44-161-496-0123"
}That block belongs to a business with premises. Without them, delete the address object rather than filling it with something plausible and emit areaServed alone — which is what this site does: WebAsk's organisation markup declares areaServed as the United Kingdom, with no address and no geo anywhere.
7. The technical floor
Speed counts too, though not on its own: Google says a great page experience "can contribute to success in Search" where many pages are equally helpful. This one is built to LCP ≤ 2.0s, INP ≤ 200ms and CLS ≤ 0.05. Layout shift, main-thread blocking and script weight fail the build on every pull request that changes the site; LCP is tracked there as a warning, because a localhost run under mobile throttling is not the number that decides anything; and INP can only be measured from real sessions, so no lab test asserts it at all. A budget checked once at launch and never again is not a budget. What the three metrics mean, and how to find and fix your own, is in our Core Web Vitals guide. If your site is an ageing WordPress install, measure it before blaming the platform: in UK field data, WordPress sites passed Core Web Vitals more often than Next.js sites. WebAsk replaced its own 2020-era WordPress build at webask.co.uk on 8 October 2026, for the reasons in custom website vs WordPress.
What to leave out in 2026
- Bulk citation packages. Hundreds of automated listings on directories no British customer visits will not move you, and inconsistent copies of your NAP actively hurt.
- Anything that buys or rewards a review without saying so. Since April 2025 an undisclosed incentive has been a banned practice the CMA can fine for directly.
- Keyword-stuffed profile names. Google says unnecessary information in a business name "could result in the suspension of your Business Profile". What to do if that happens is in our suspension guide.
- Chasing every algorithm rumour. The fundamentals above move slowly. Section 2 is the exception, and it moved because the law changed — not because an algorithm did.
Where to start this month
Three moves, in order. Complete the profile if you are eligible. Fix your NAP everywhere it appears, starting with Yell and your own footer. Then build one honest page per area you serve, adding the next only once the first has something real to say.
To see the gaps before committing to anything, request a free audit — or read how the SEO service handles local search with the map pack off the table.