Getting your practice listed in the right places

Your Google Business Profile is the anchor of being found, but it isn't the whole of it. Your practice's name, address and phone number appear in other places too — health directories, general business listings, your social pages — and whether those all agree with each other quietly affects how much Google, and increasingly AI search tools, trust you. These mentions are called citations, and most practices have a scattered, half-forgotten trail of them that nobody has ever tidied.

The thing that matters about a citation is consistency, far more than quantity. When your phone number is one thing on your website, another on an old directory, and a third on a listing a receptionist made years ago, both Google and the AI tools now answering "find me a dentist" get confused about which version of you is real — and a tool that isn't sure of your details is less likely to show you, or to recommend you. This used to be dismissed as minor; with the rise of AI search it's become more important again, because the language models behind those answers lean heavily on consistent citations to decide what's true about a business.

For a South African practice, the list that matters is short and worth getting right rather than blasting yourself across hundreds of low-quality directories:

Getting citations right

• Google Business Profile first — it's the anchor everything else should match. Get it exact, then make the rest agree with it.
• The main SA directories — the health and general listings patients actually use. A handful of credible ones, done properly.
• Identical name, address and phone everywhere — the same format, character for character, not "Street" here and "St" there.
• Fix or remove old, wrong listings — an outdated entry with a previous address or number actively works against you.
• Quality over quantity — credible, relevant sources beat a spray of spammy directory submissions, which can do more harm than good.

The practical work is mostly a clean-up, not a campaign. Search your own practice name and see what comes back: the old listings, the wrong numbers, the address from two premises ago. Each inconsistency is a small vote against you, and the fix is just making them all say the same thing.

This is the exact problem we find most often in audits — a Google card showing one street address while the website shows another, and a phone number that was updated on one listing years ago but never on the rest. The patient can't tell which is real, and neither can Google.

Consistency is the whole game here, and it cuts the way you'd least expect: a single wrong old listing showing your previous address does more harm than ten correct ones do good, because it makes you look unsure of your own details — and a practice that can't keep its own address straight is not the one a nervous patient trusts with their teeth. Make everything agree, and you've done ninety percent of what citations are for.