Local Search Visibility Audit

The new one: AI search

Your Google profile and reviews

Start with what's working. Your profile is set to Dentist, your address is in Boise, and you're open 47 hours a week. Competitor 1 is open 37 and Competitor 2 24, so you beat both. At your own front door you're number one on the map for dentist.

Above that, the profile is close to empty. Google lets you list more than one category. You list one. Competitor 1 lists four. A category is the shelf Google puts you on, and your service pages already tell you which other shelves fit.

In August your profile had one photo, while Competitor 1 had 12 and Competitor 2 had 8. Your description is one short line, and there's no booking link. Each of those is a profile setting, not a website job.

Reviews are the bigger gap. You have 25 at 4.2 stars. Competitor 2 has 93 at 4.6. Competitor 1 has 533 at 4.9 and adds about nine a month. You add about one every two months. Five of your 25 are one or two stars, and the two newest, from July, are both one-star. None of your 25 has a reply. Competitor 2 answers 56 percent of theirs. In a 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, 97% said they read reviews for local businesses and 89% expect the owner to reply to them. Source: BrightLocal, Local Consumer Review Survey 2026.

The reviews you do have are strong material. 88 percent include written text, and they average 64 words, longer than either competitor's. Patients name their dentists and talk about years with the practice. One wrote: "No further attempts at selling or get me to spend more money. My experience was 10/10." Nine of your sixteen services are never mentioned in a review, though.

One more thing at your address. Three more dentist listings sit at your street address, none with a rating. On our August map scan for dentist, at the point on your front door, they held positions 3, 4 and 9. Two belong to your own dentists, and Google allows a listing for each dentist. All three listings carry the practice phone number. The fix is to claim and manage your dentists' two listings and keep the practice listing as the main one. The third is for a dentist who isn't on your website. We couldn't tell from public data whether she still works there. If she has left, that listing should be removed.

Your website

The site is sound underneath. It loads securely, all 25 pages we read opened without an error, and your name, address and phone match your Google profile on every page. Ten of your sixteen services already have a page of their own. One small thing: your Google profile links to the older http address, not the secure https one.

Google Analytics is on the site. What's missing is call tracking. Nothing we found records the calls themselves, so today there's no way to see which calls the website brings in, or which pages earn them.

Six services you offer have no page of their own: porcelain veneers, dental bonding, root canals, tooth extractions, children's dentistry and emergency dentistry. A few come up on broader pages, but none has a page built for the search a patient types. Emergency dentistry is a good place to start. You already have a five-star review from a patient you saw the same day for tooth pain.

None of your ten service pages shows a patient's own words. Five patient quotes sit on your homepage and testimonials page. But eleven of your good written Google reviews aren't used anywhere on the site, and some name a treatment, like a crown or a filling. Your gallery has two smile transformation cases that aren't linked from your cosmetic page. If those are your own patients, they belong there too.

Every booking button leads to the same request form on your contact page, not a live calendar. That's fine, but your Google profile doesn't link to it. Competitor 1's profile carries a booking link.

Your homepage title names Boise, but the main heading on the page reads "Welcome to Our Practice" and doesn't. Each service page names Boise once and never mentions your own neighborhood. No service page links to a related one. The ten useful questions on your FAQ page sit on their own page, not on the service pages they answer.

A few pages need tidying. /gallery repeats /smile-gallery word for word, and your payment options page has under 50 words. Of the 34 pictures we checked on the site, 19 are stock photos. Six didn't turn up as stock photos, and four of those are before-and-after smile photos in your gallery.

Where you show up when people search

We checked 49 spots across your part of Boise, about two miles apart, for six searches. That's 294 checks. Typed the way a nearby patient types it, you show up at 125 of them, so Google knows your listing, though you show up at none of the 49 spots for family dentistry or preventive dentistry. But you're in the top 3 at just 6, and at most of the rest you sit too far down the list to be seen. Add Boise and you still show up at 125, but you're in the top 3 at only 3.

On the same 294 checks Competitor 1 is in the top 3 at 20 spots, with or without Boise. You're in the top 3 at 6, then 3 once Boise is typed. Competitor 2 is in the top 3 at none without Boise and 1 with it.

For 'dentist', you're number one at your own address, but in the top 3 at just 2 of 49 spots. You show up at 40 of them, mostly too far down to be seen. Competitor 1 is in the top 3 at 2 spots on the same search, the same as you. Type 'dentist Boise' and you're in the top 3 at only 1, though you show up at 44. When 47 local search specialists scored what moves the map results in 2026, the top of the list was the main profile category, distance from the searcher, a real address in the city, being open when people search, a high Google rating and the number of Google reviews. Source: Whitespark, 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors.

The clearest differences are ones you can change. You list one category where Competitor 1 lists four. You bring 25 reviews at 4.2 stars against 533 at 4.9. Being open 47 hours a week is one thing in your favor.

Below the map, on the Boise searches we tracked on August 25, your site isn't in the first 20 of the regular results for any service. A search-data tool estimates your site appears in Google's results for 21 searches across the US, against 1,030 for Competitor 1's site. One bright spot: the same tool places your homepage at position 5 for a dentist search that names your neighborhood.

On family dentistry you don't show up on the map, with or without Boise, and Competitor 1 and Competitor 2 aren't in the top 20 there either. On preventive dentistry the scan recorded no position for any of the three practices. Neither is where effort should go first.

Every service, one search each

You offer sixteen services, and we checked a Boise search for each. A service counts as visible when you're in Google's top 3 map results in our search check for it, and that check recorded no top 3 map result for you on any of the sixteen. On the map scan, crowns reaches the top 3 at one spot with Boise typed and one without, and cosmetic dentistry at one spot without it. The map scan covered six searches, not sixteen, so twelve services have no map reading here. None of the sixteen reaches the first 20 of the regular results for its Boise search.

Demand is a band based on how often people search for each service across the US each month. It is not a count of local searches. Ten of the sixteen have no demand reading, so those cells are blank.

The search page, search by search

Here's how you showed up on twelve searches we checked on August 25, 2026. Six are typed the way a patient nearby types them, and the same six have Boise added. Each shows the map. The six with Boise also show the regular results and ChatGPT's answer.

The AI column is ChatGPT, asked the way a patient asks about a Boise dentist. Google's own AI answers were not recorded in this scan, so we don't report them. Without Boise typed, the regular results below the map are a national list, so we left that column blank. No Boise practice is expected to rank there, and nothing is missing.

Where your business is listed online

Where you're listed: Yelp, Facebook, MapQuest and Waze all carry the Boise dental practice. On MapQuest and Waze we checked your name, address and phone, and all three match. Competitor 1 turned up on three of these four, and Competitor 2 on none. You also have pages on the Better Business Bureau, WebMD and Birdeye, and an entry on OpenStreetMap, which feeds many maps and car navigation systems.

Where details look different: your OpenStreetMap entry lists your website address with one letter missing. Google's previews of your Yelp and Facebook pages show your website address ending in .biz instead of .net. Facebook and MapQuest also show your name with PLLC added. We couldn't open the Yelp and Facebook pages themselves, so check those two first. When 1,227 US consumers were asked in 2026 what decided which local business they contacted, the top answer was clear and complete information (hours, address, phone), ahead of reviews and pricing. Source: BrightLocal, Consumer Search Behavior 2026.

What we couldn't confirm: Foursquare did not come up when we searched your name. Check Foursquare and add the practice if it's missing. It feeds a long list of apps.