Many of the people who open your Google Business Profile already know your name. A general dentist referred them, or a neighbor did, and now they are checking you on Google before they pick up the phone. The profile is the whole first look: whether the hours are right, whether the satellite office is open Thursday, and whether the last few review replies read like a practice that respects privacy.
Book a free consultation →Orthodontic practices tend to have the same handful of problems on Google, and they are not the ones a general marketing checklist goes looking for.
Orthodontics runs on referral in a way most local businesses do not. A general dentist says a name, or another parent does, and the next thing that happens is somebody types that name into Google to see what comes back. That is a branded search, not a discovery search, and the profile is the entire answer: hours, photos, phone, reviews, and the replies underneath them.
The rest of the traffic splits into a few recognizable people.
None of that requires your website. People call from the listing, tap for directions, and read reviews without ever clicking through. Keeping a listing in working order for any business is covered on the Google Business Profile page. This page is about the parts specific to an orthodontic practice.
Here is what we touch. Which items matter depends on how the practice is set up, and we say which ones are noise for yours before we start rather than billing the whole list.
We also make the website agree with the listing, since a listing and a website that disagree on the name, address or phone leave Google, and a parent, two versions of the practice to choose between. Our free local schema generator writes that markup, and it is open if you want to check your own pages before calling anybody. The site side of the job is covered on websites for orthodontists.
Reviews do not float free of the listing. Each one is attached to a specific profile, which turns the listing problems above into review problems: a duplicate created during a move holds reviews nobody at the practice answers, and an associate's practitioner listing keeps collecting them after she has gone. Part of the profile job is finding every place reviews have landed before anything gets merged, marked as moved or closed, because what happens to the reviews on a retired listing is Google's decision, not the practice's.
Then there is the question of who can type under them. More than one level of access on a profile can publish a reply in the practice name, and an orthodontic office that has been through an associate or two, a front desk turnover and a previous marketing company usually has a longer access list than anyone remembers. We work as a manager, the practice stays the owner, and old logins held by former staff and past vendors come off, so every reply that appears was posted by somebody the practice actually authorized.
A review that looks fake, off topic or abusive gets reported through the profile, and Google decides, often without saying why. Filing that report, and following it, is profile work.
The rest is one rule and a handoff: every patient gets the same invitation with nothing offered in exchange, and no public reply confirms that anyone is a patient, with how the ask is built and what a reply may say covered on reputation management for orthodontists.
Profile management for an orthodontic practice is almost always part of a broader local SEO engagement, not a separate monthly product. There is no per-listing fee here. The listing and the site have to say the same thing to be worth anything, and one person keeping both true costs less than two of them drifting apart on separate invoices. So the ongoing half belongs to the engagement, priced the way it is priced for everyone: $1,500 to $3,500 a month for most practices, and $3,500 to $7,500 a month in competitive metros or for practices running several locations.
If a cleanup is genuinely all you need, we will scope that on its own. A practice with four stray listings, a wrong primary category, and two years of unanswered reviews does not need a retainer to get sorted out. It needs somebody to sort it out. We quote that flat after we look, because the size of the mess is the price.
Imagine a practice whose satellite office opens on Tuesdays and Thursdays only. Its listing needs those two days and nothing else, photos of its own smaller front desk, and a review link of its own, or satellite families end up reviewing the main office because that is the address they know. Keeping those two days matched to the doctors' rotation is most of the upkeep.
Everything is month to month. No long-term contract, and the practice owns the profile, the reviews, the photos, and every login. If you want the numbers in front of you before we ever speak, how much SEO costs lays the pricing out in full and how long SEO takes covers how long any of it needs before it means anything. The full local engagement for this field is on local SEO for orthodontists.
A parent searching from the far side of town may never see your pin, however clean the listing is, because proximity to the person searching is a large part of how Google picks local results, and nobody outside Google controls that system. Anyone selling you a position in the map pack is selling something they do not own. We will not write that sentence, and we would rather lose the job than write it.
What we will do is give Google an accurate, complete, consistent picture of the practice, keep it that way as things change, and then count what comes back. The profile keeps its own counts of calls, direction requests and clicks through to the site. On the website side, consult requests land in a first-party lead dashboard, the kind running on more than 20 of the sites we manage, and the website link on the listing carries a tag, so a visit that started on the profile is counted as one instead of being guessed at.
One more thing worth knowing. The same structured information that fills your profile is part of what AI assistants pull from when somebody asks them for an orthodontist in a city, so a clean listing is now part of staying visible there too. That is its own body of work, covered on AI search. The whole marketing picture for this field, website and search together, sits on the orthodontists page. And if you would rather see work before you talk about money, we will build you a free homepage mockup, yours to keep either way.
Orthodontist, in almost every case. Google keeps it as its own category, and the primary is the one setting on the profile worth arguing about, because it decides which businesses you get listed among. If the practice also does general dentistry under the same roof, the primary should still reflect the work you want the calls for, with the rest handled through secondary categories and the services list. It is worth a conversation, not a default.
Google allows individual practitioners a listing separate from the practice, so this is common and usually fixable. A listing tied to a doctor who has gone should be marked as moved or closed, not left pointing at your address with a number nobody answers. When the departed doctor controls the login, it takes a documented request to Google rather than a click. We handle it as part of duplicate cleanup.
If it is a real address with your signage, staffed by your team during the hours the profile states, yes. The hours are the part that matters. A satellite listed as open all week when a doctor is there on Tuesdays produces locked-door visits, frustrated reviews, and strangers editing your hours for you. A profile showing two honest days beats one showing five invented ones.
No. We are added as a manager and the practice stays the owner, so control of the listing never depends on us, and an owner can remove a manager at any time. Where a former vendor or a departed office manager is still the primary owner, getting ownership back to the practice comes before any other change, because every edit made until then sits on somebody else's account.
Probably not on those grounds. The reviewer wrote it about their own care, so it usually does not break Google's policies, and only the reviewer can edit or delete it. You can report a review that is fake, off topic, or abusive, and Google decides. What you actually control is the reply, so the safe move is a short general response and a phone number, not a public correction while you wait on a report.
More than editing the name field. The name has to match the sign and the legal entity, ownership of the profile has to move to whoever holds it now, the website and phone need updating in step so Google is not cross-checking against stale pages, and any listings left behind by the previous owner have to be resolved. Done piecemeal, this is the quickest route to a flagged or duplicated listing.
Google Business Profile services · Orthodontists: industry overview · SEO for orthodontists · Local SEO for orthodontists · Websites for orthodontists · Reputation management for orthodontists · Social media for orthodontists · What should you pay? (free tool)
Request a quote or call or text (407) 694-2055, and we will walk the listing with you: the categories, the stray profiles, the hours, and the last stretch of review replies. No contract, and nothing changes until you say so.
Book a free consultation → Or call/text directly: (407) 694-2055Tell us a little about the business and we will come back with an honest read: what we would fix first, what it costs, and whether you need us at all. Prefer to see work before you talk numbers? Get a free homepage mockup, built for your business, yours to keep either way.
Brandon reads every one of these himself. You will hear back shortly with an honest read on what we would do first, what it costs, and whether it is worth it for you.