Why Did My Practice Drop Out of the Map Pack?

You were in the three-listing box for your main search. Now you're not, and nothing obvious changed. This is one of the most common questions I get, and the frustrating part is that six or seven different causes all produce exactly this symptom.

They aren't equally likely and they aren't equally urgent. Here's how to work out which one you're looking at, starting with the possibility that it didn't happen.

First, confirm you actually dropped

Map results are built partly on where the searcher is standing, so there's no single ranking to lose. You can be in the pack for somebody two blocks away and out of it for somebody across town, at the same moment, for the same words.

That makes your own searches the weakest evidence available to you. You're searching from inside the building, on a phone that has visited your site and your profile many times, usually signed into an account that knows exactly who you are. Check from several points in the neighborhoods you draw patients from, or use a tool that samples a grid of locations, before treating this as a problem. A fair number of these turn out to be nothing.

One distinction worth naming: never having appeared in the pack is a different problem from appearing and then stopping. This is about the second one.

Something got edited

Check this first, because it's the answer more often than anything else. Changes to the business name, the address, the primary category or the hours can push a profile back into review, and while it sits there the listing can slide or disappear.

The edit doesn't have to be yours. Google accepts suggested edits from the public, applies some of its own from other sources, and the listing can be changed by anyone else holding access, which at most practices means a former employee or an agency from two contracts ago. Open the profile and read what it says now rather than what you remember it saying.

The name field earns its own mention, because stuffing it is the most common self-inflicted suspension there is. That field is for your name. Adding your city or your specialty to it breaks Google's policy, it works right up until somebody reports it, and the correction costs more than the gain was ever worth.

The profile is suspended

If you've vanished completely rather than moved down a place, check whether the listing is suspended. A suspension shows in the dashboard, and it usually follows either an edit like the one above or an address that doesn't meet the rules for a staffed location.

Handle this one the same day. Nothing else on this list matters while it's in force.

A competitor moved, not you

Nothing has to have happened to you. The box holds three. A practice nearby that added forty reviews over a quarter, corrected a primary category that was wrong, or opened a second office closer to the center of town can move above you while you changed nothing at all.

It's the least satisfying answer and frequently the true one. It's also the only cause here where the response is ordinary competitive work rather than a correction, which is most of what SEO for an orthodontic practice or for a criminal defense firm consists of.

The search itself changed

Google reinterprets what a query means from time to time, and the pack it returns changes with it. A search that used to surface general practices starts surfacing specialists, or the reverse.

You'll recognize this one because you didn't only lose your spot, the whole set of businesses in the box changed character. If the two listings sitting there now are a different kind of business from the ones you used to sit beside, the query moved rather than you.

Reviews came off

Google removes reviews it decides break its policies, sometimes in batches, and a practice that loses a dozen at once can slide. It happens more where somebody has been gathering reviews carelessly, in bulk from one network, or with something offered in return.

Count what you have against what you remember having. A falling total alongside a falling position is a strong signal, and the repair is the slow one: back to asking properly, one patient at a time.

A duplicate is splitting you

An old listing at a previous address, or one a partner set up years ago, can sit alongside the current profile and divide the signals between them. Google sometimes resolves that on its own and picks the wrong winner.

Search your practice name, your address and each provider's name, and count how many results carrying your details come back. The cleanup is covered field by field in the walkthroughs for doctors and dentists and for law firms.

The three explanations that usually aren't it

These three come up constantly. None is confirmed by Google.

• A 30-day activity cliff, where a profile decays if you stop posting. Active profiles do tend to outperform abandoned ones, but there's no published cliff and no evidence a quiet month costs you a place.
• A minimum number of reviews per month. Google publishes no threshold at all. Steady does beat bursty, which is a real effect, but the specific number you were given was invented by whoever gave it to you.
• Posting frequency as a ranking factor. Posts are worth writing for the people who read them. They aren't a lever on where you sit in the box.

This matters because all three send you off doing busywork while the actual cause, usually an edit or a suspension, sits unaddressed for another month.

What to check in the first 48 hours

• The dashboard, for a suspension notice.
• The live profile read field by field against what it should say, the name, address and primary category above all.
• Your review count, against the last number you remember.
• Duplicates, searched under your practice name, your address and each provider's name.
• The pack itself, sampled from several points around your service area rather than from your desk.
• Only after all of that, what the three listings currently in the box are doing better than you.

Telling them apart

The fixes aren't the hard part. Each one is straightforward on its own once you know which you're dealing with. The hard part is that from behind the front desk they all produce the same symptom, and a wrong guess costs you a month.

Sorting that out is the job the free audit does on a drop like this one. I read the live profile against what it used to say, check for a suspension, count the reviews, hunt for duplicates, and sample the pack from around your service area, then tell you which of these it was and what order to work in. It comes back inside 24 to 48 hours at no cost. If the answer turns out to be the competitor one, you'll get told that too, and that one has no quick fix.

Written by Ashikur Rahman

Founder of Proximity Ranker, with nine years in SEO and a law background that shapes the medical and legal work we do. Meet the founder.

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