It is 9pm and somebody in Indiranagar has a tooth that has gone from annoying to serious.
Watch what they actually do. They search on their phone. They tap the map pack, not the websites underneath it. They read three or four reviews, mostly the recent ones. They check whether the clinic is open tomorrow, look for a phone number, and quite often send a WhatsApp message instead of calling.
That whole sequence takes about ninety seconds and it happens before your website is involved at all.
So the short version. For most specialties your Google Business Profile does more work than Practo, Justdial and your website put together, because roughly eight in ten local medical searches carry a location signal that routes straight through Maps. Fix the profile first.
But there is a constraint on clinics that no local SEO guide I have ever read bothers to mention, and getting it wrong is worse than ranking badly.
You are not allowed to ask patients for reviews
The NMC Code of Medical Ethics prohibits patient testimonials. Not discourages, prohibits. A registered medical practitioner is not to solicit testimonials, and is not to share or amplify content that testifies to a treatment outcome.
The same rules rule out a lot of what marketers reach for by default. No patient photographs or scans. No before and after images. No videos of a recovered patient describing how well the surgery went. No endorsing products or procedures. The NMC has been tightening its review of exactly this behaviour over the last three years, and social media is where most of the enforcement attention has gone.
Read that against the standard local SEO advice, which is to send every satisfied customer a review link and chase the ones who do not respond.
For a dentist in Koramangala or a dermatologist in Jayanagar, that advice is not a growth tactic, it is a conduct risk.
There is a genuine distinction worth understanding. A patient who chooses on their own to write about their experience is doing something the NMC does not control. Your obligation runs to what you do: you must not solicit it, and you must not amplify it afterwards. That leaves less room than most agencies assume when they set up a review automation for a clinic the same way they would for a restaurant.
I am not your compliance advisor and this is not legal advice. Anyone running a clinic should put their marketing plan in front of somebody who knows the current NMC position properly, because the cost of being wrong here is not a ranking drop.
So what actually moves reviews for a clinic
Reviews still matter enormously. You just have to earn them rather than request them.
The things that reliably produce voluntary reviews in Indian clinics are unglamorous and operational. Waiting time against the appointment time you promised. Whether the front desk explains the billing before the procedure rather than after. Whether somebody follows up the next day. Patients who are pleasantly surprised write reviews on their own, and patients who waited fifty minutes past their slot write them too, faster.
When you do get reviews, the reply is where clinics create their second problem.
Never confirm in a public reply that somebody was your patient. It reads as courteous and it is a confidentiality breach. “Thank you for coming in for your root canal last Tuesday, Mr Sharma” identifies a patient and their treatment on a public page. The safe reply acknowledges the feedback in general terms, offers a private channel, and says nothing about whether this person ever visited.
That applies to negative reviews with more force, not less, however unfair the review is.
Practo and Google are doing different jobs
Both belong in the plan, and people muddle what each is for.
Google Business Profile is discovery. It is where the 9pm search lands and it outperforms the directories for most specialties. Practo is booking volume, and it is genuinely good at that, particularly for consultations that patients treat as interchangeable.
The tradeoff with Practo is that you control almost nothing. Not the conversion path, not the patient data, not what appears next to your listing. You are renting a queue. That is a reasonable thing to rent while you build something you own, and a bad thing to depend on permanently.
The one job both do together is corroboration. Your name, address and phone number should be character for character identical on your Google Business Profile, your Practo listing, your Justdial entry and your website footer. Different suite numbers or an old landline across those four is the most common reason a clinic that looks fine does not rank.
Give each doctor a real page
Medical content sits in the category search engines treat most cautiously, because getting it wrong affects someone’s health. That means credentials carry unusual weight.
One page per doctor. Not a grid of photographs on an About page.
On it: full qualifications written out, the state medical council registration number, years in practice, hospital affiliations, languages spoken, and the specific procedures that doctor performs. Languages matter more in Bengaluru than people expect, because a patient deciding between two clinics will often pick the one where they can explain the problem in Kannada or Tamil without translating it first.
Keep the claims factual. Describing a qualification and a procedure is fine. Promising an outcome is the thing that gets a practitioner in trouble on both the search and the regulatory side.
Cut the friction between finding you and booking
A patient touches five to seven things before booking. Your job is to shorten that, and the biggest wins are dull.
Put a WhatsApp number on the profile and the site, and staff it during clinic hours. In India this is the actual booking channel for a large share of patients, and a form that promises a callback within 24 hours loses to a WhatsApp reply in four minutes.
Make sure your hours are correct, including the lunch break most clinics observe and almost none list. A patient who arrives at a closed door at 2pm because Google said open leaves a review about it.
Before lunch
Check the name, address and phone number on your Google Business Profile against Practo and Justdial, character by character, and fix whichever is wrong.
Then look at your review process. If it involves asking patients for reviews, stop it today and take advice on what your practice can safely do instead.
The category and profile fundamentals underneath all this are the same ones I covered in the Google Business Profile settings most businesses never touch, and they apply to clinics too. This post is the part that is specific to medicine.
If you’d like to think through your own clinic’s setup out loud, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch. My notes on SEO cover the general version.