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Local SEO for a wellness practice
Most practitioners lose the map pack on a dropdown they set once and forgot.
Local SEO for a wellness practice is the work of getting your business into the map pack, the three local results that sit above everything else when someone searches for a service near them. It covers your Google Business Profile category and attributes, the consistency of your name, address and phone across the web, your review pattern, and location signals on your own website. The Grand Schema does this work for practitioners in Overland Park, across the Kansas City metro, and remotely anywhere in the United States.
(yes, the dropdown. really.)The map pack · top 3 local results
- 01A practice that fixed its categoryRight category, full profile, steady reviews
- 02A practice two suburbs closerProximity: the factor nobody controls
- 03Could be youIf Google knows what you actually do
The category problem
The most common thing I find in a wellness practice’s Google Business Profile is a primary category that puts them in the wrong fight. A sound healer listed as a spa is competing against every spa in the county, on budgets and review counts they will never match, for a search term nobody looking for a sound bath would type.
Primary category is the single heaviest lever in local ranking, and it is a dropdown most practitioners set once during signup and never revisit. Google adds and retires categories constantly. The right one for your modality may not have existed when you registered.
Fixing it costs nothing, takes about ten minutes, and is the closest thing to a free lunch in local search. It is also the reason I will not sell you an ongoing retainer before someone has looked at your profile.
What local SEO work actually involves
Google Business Profile
- Primary and secondary categories chosen for your modality, not the nearest generic match
- Service area set correctly, and the address either shown or hidden depending on whether clients come to you
- Services and attributes filled in completely, because empty fields are ranking signals you are declining to send
- Hours that match your booking system, including the ones you keep forgetting to close for holidays
- Photos that are yours, geotagged, and added on a schedule rather than all at once three years ago
- Questions answered, including the ones you ask and answer yourself
Everywhere else you appear
- Name, address and phone made identical across every directory that lists you, character for character
- Old listings from a previous studio, a previous business name or a previous phone number found and corrected or removed
- Citations built on the directories that matter for wellness specifically, not a bulk submission to four hundred junk sites
- A review request that people actually complete, and a reply pattern on the reviews you already have
- Location signals on your own website: a real NAP block, service area language, and LocalBusiness schema that matches your profile exactly
Why it matters: if your name, address and phone disagree anywhere, Google trusts all of them less. That is the whole reason consistency matters, and it is why this is tedious work rather than clever work.
Where I work
Based in Kansas City? See wellness SEO in Kansas City.
In the Kansas City metro
Intake calls can happen at your studio or treatment room, which means I see the business, not just the website. Being nearby means I know the market, not that I do the job differently. Areas I serve
Everywhere else
The work itself is identical on video. Local search optimization works the same whether your town is twenty minutes from me or two thousand miles.
Questions about local SEO
I work from home. Do I have to publish my address?
No. Register as a service-area business instead. Google lets you hide the street address and define the areas you serve, which is the correct setup for anyone who travels to clients or works from a private space. Publishing a home address you did not want public is a common and avoidable mistake.
How many reviews do I need?
Fewer than you think, and more recently than you think. A steady trickle over the last twelve months does more than a pile from three years ago. Pattern beats total.
Can you guarantee I will be in the map pack?
No, and nobody can. Proximity to the searcher is a factor no amount of work changes, so a practice two suburbs over will beat you for some searches no matter what either of us does. What is entirely in your control is whether you are eligible at all, and most practices are not.
How long does local work take to show up?
Profile corrections can move within days to a few weeks, which makes local the fastest-moving part of this work. Citation cleanup takes longer because you are waiting on other people’s databases. Competitive local rankings still take three to six months.
Free scorecard
Start with what is already broken
Local work is included in the full audit rather than sold separately, because fixing a Google profile without looking at the website it points to solves half a problem. The scorecard will tell you free whether local is your weakest pillar.
Prefer to do it yourself? You Are Here, the local SEO kit, is on the waitlist now.
Keep reading
SEO audit for a wellness practice
$350. All four pillars including local, with a prioritized fix list.
Schema markup for wellness websites
The LocalBusiness markup that ties your website to your Google profile.
Contact
Tell me what is not working and I will tell you whether I can help.