In short: plain-language definitions of 60 terms doctors and clinic owners hear when marketing a practice online, from the local pack and primary category to review gating, schema markup and the 2002 code of ethics. Each one says what it means for your clinic and links to where we explain it in depth.
The map with three businesses that Google shows above the regular results for a local search, such as “dentist near me”. Also called the map pack.
For your clinic: Most patients searching nearby choose from these three. Being fourth gets far fewer calls than being third.
See the Google Business Profile guideThe free listing that shows your clinic on Google Search and Maps, with address, hours, phone, photos and reviews. It used to be called Google My Business.
For your clinic: For many patients it's the first and only thing they see before calling.
See the Google Business Profile guideThe three things Google says decide local rankings: how well your profile matches the search, how far you are from the searcher, and how well known you are, from reviews and mentions across the web.
For your clinic: You can't move your clinic, so relevance and prominence are where the work goes.
See the Google Business Profile guideThe one category that says what your business is, such as Dentist or Dermatologist. You can add up to nine additional categories.
For your clinic: Industry surveys rank it the most important setting for Maps rankings.
See the Google Business Profile guideA Google profile for an individual doctor, separate from the clinic's. Allowed for doctors who see patients at that location during the hours shown.
For your clinic: Useful for consultants; for a solo doctor, Google prefers one profile for the practice.
See the Google Business Profile guideA profile that hides its address and shows the areas it serves instead, for businesses that visit customers.
For your clinic: Suits home-visit physiotherapy or nursing. A clinic patients visit should show its address.
See the Google Business Profile guideGoogle's check that your business is real and at the address you gave. Google chooses the method: video recording, live video call, phone, email or, less often now, a postcard.
For your clinic: For clinics, a video showing the signboard, entrance and inside of the clinic is the usual route.
See the Google Business Profile guideWhen Google disables a profile for breaking its guidelines, often over keywords in the name, an address without signage, or duplicates.
For your clinic: Fix the cause and appeal with registration documents. Don't create a new profile.
See the Google Business Profile guideA change to your profile proposed by the public or by Google, such as new hours or a different phone number. Some go live without your approval.
For your clinic: Check your profile monthly; wrong hours or numbers can appear without you knowing.
See the Google Business Profile guideHours you set in advance for holidays and one-off closures, overriding your regular hours for those days.
For your clinic: Set them before every festival, so patients don't arrive at a closed clinic.
See the Google Business Profile guideA second Google profile for the same clinic or doctor, often created by a patient, a former employee or an old agency.
For your clinic: Duplicates split your reviews and can get both profiles flagged. Report or remove them.
See the Google Business Profile guideHaving the same Name, Address and Phone number everywhere your clinic is listed: Google, Practo, Justdial, your website and social media.
For your clinic: Mismatched details confuse patients and weaken Google's trust in your listing.
See the reputation management serviceAny mention of your clinic's name, address and phone number on another website, such as a directory or a local news site.
For your clinic: Accurate citations on trusted sites support prominence.
See the Website SEO serviceA way of measuring Maps rankings from many points around your clinic, shown as a grid of numbers on a map.
For your clinic: Rankings change street by street. A grid shows where you're visible and where competitors win.
See the Google Business Profile guideThe section of your Business Profile showing searches, views, calls, direction requests and website clicks.
For your clinic: Calls here count taps on the call button, not answered calls. Google stopped showing call history in 2024.
See the Google Business Profile guideGemini-powered features in Google Maps that answer questions about places using profile details and reviews. Google has also been replacing the public Q&A section with an AI “Ask” feature.
For your clinic: Missing services, attributes or hours now mean the AI can't answer a patient's question about you.
See the Google Business Profile guideAsking only the patients you expect to be happy for reviews, or filtering people before sending them to Google.
For your clinic: Banned by Google. Ask every patient the same way.
See the patient reviews guideAnything offered in return for a review: a discount, a free follow-up, a gift or entry into a draw.
For your clinic: Banned. It can lead to reviews being removed and new reviews being blocked.
See the patient reviews guideA review from someone connected to the business: staff, family, friends, or other doctors you know.
For your clinic: These are the most common reason genuine reviews later disappear too.
See the patient reviews guideA penalty where Google blocks new reviews for a period, hides existing ones and shows a warning that fake reviews were removed. It applies in India.
For your clinic: It follows fake or incentivised reviews. Recovery is slow.
See the patient reviews guideHow recent your latest reviews are. Most patients look for reviews from the last three months.
For your clinic: A steady flow each month beats a burst after a camp.
See the patient reviews guideA direct link, or QR code, that opens the review box for your profile. Created from the “Get more reviews” option in your Business Profile.
For your clinic: Patients review far more often from a link than from “search for us on Google”.
See the patient reviews guideKeeping what patients see about you accurate and trustworthy: reviews, replies, and matching details on every platform.
For your clinic: Most of it is routine: asking, replying and correcting old listings.
See the reputation management serviceYour public response under a review. Google checks replies against its content policy before posting them.
For your clinic: Never confirm the reviewer was your patient or mention their treatment, even in a thank-you.
See the patient reviews guideEverything that helps you appear for searches in your area: your Google profile, reviews, citations and location-specific pages on your website.
For your clinic: For most clinics it brings more patients than any other channel.
See the Website SEO serviceThe behind-the-scenes work that lets Google find, read and trust your website: speed, mobile layout, indexing, redirects and structured data.
For your clinic: A beautiful website Google can't read properly won't rank.
See the Website SEO serviceA separate page on your website for each treatment or condition, such as root canal or acne scar treatment, covering what it involves, time, cost range and recovery.
For your clinic: One page per treatment lets you rank for each search. A single “services” page rarely ranks for any.
See the website development serviceCode on your website that tells search engines and AI tools exactly what things are: your clinic, doctors, address, hours, services and FAQs. Healthcare types include MedicalClinic, Dentist and Physician.
For your clinic: It helps Google and AI assistants state facts about you correctly.
See the Website SEO serviceGoogle's measures of page experience: how fast the main content loads (under 2.5 seconds is good), how quickly the page responds, and how much it jumps around while loading.
For your clinic: Most patients visit on a phone, often on a weak signal.
See the website development serviceExperience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the qualities Google's quality raters look for in content, applied most strictly to health topics.
For your clinic: Real doctors' names, qualifications, registration numbers and review dates on your pages all help.
See the Website SEO service“Your Money or Your Life”: Google's term for topics where bad information can harm people, including health. Held to the highest quality standards.
For your clinic: Medical content should be written or reviewed by the doctor, never copied from AI tools unchecked.
See the Website SEO serviceAI-written summaries that Google shows above some search results, citing the pages they draw on.
For your clinic: Clear, factual answers on your pages make it more likely you're the source cited.
See the Website SEO serviceMaking your clinic easy for AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI features to understand and recommend: consistent facts, clear answers and structured data.
For your clinic: Patients increasingly ask AI tools which doctor to see.
See the Website SEO serviceA proposed plain-text file at the root of a website that summarises the site for AI tools. It isn't an official standard, and Google doesn't use it for ranking.
For your clinic: Cheap to add and harmless; don't expect rankings from it.
See the Website SEO serviceGoogle's free tool showing which searches your website appears for, how often it's clicked, and any technical problems.
For your clinic: It's where you see whether your treatment pages are actually being found.
See the Website SEO serviceWhat the person searching actually wants. “Toothache relief” is urgent; “teeth whitening cost” is research; “dentist near me open now” is ready to visit.
For your clinic: Pages and ads work best when they match the intent behind the search.
See the specialty pagesA link to your website from another website. Links from trusted, relevant sites support your rankings.
For your clinic: A mention on a local news site or medical association page is worth more than hundreds of paid directory links.
See the Website SEO serviceGoogle's free website analytics, showing how visitors arrive and what they do, including call and WhatsApp clicks when these are tracked.
For your clinic: Pair it with UTM tags to see which profile or ad actually sends patients.
See the Website SEO serviceText ads shown above search results when people search for chosen keywords, paid per click.
For your clinic: Best for urgent and high-value treatments that patients search for by name.
See the Google Ads serviceThe default location setting in Google Ads, which also shows ads to people outside your area who are only interested in it.
For your clinic: For a local clinic, switch to “presence”, or budget goes to people who will never visit.
See the Google Ads serviceExtra placements switched on by default in new Google Search campaigns: other sites' search results and banner ads across websites and apps.
For your clinic: Often low-quality traffic for clinics. We usually switch them off at the start.
See the Google Ads serviceWords that stop your ad from showing, such as “free”, “jobs”, “course” or “home remedy”.
For your clinic: Without them, clinics pay for clicks from job seekers and students.
See the Google Ads serviceWhat you pay in ad spend for each enquiry: a call, WhatsApp message or form.
For your clinic: In our experience a clinic enquiry often costs around ₹250, varying by treatment and city.
See the Google Ads serviceSetting up ads and analytics to record calls, WhatsApp clicks and form submissions, so you know which ads bring enquiries.
For your clinic: Without it, the platform optimises for clicks, not patients.
See the Google Ads serviceA shortcut on Facebook or Instagram that turns a post into an ad with limited control over audience, goal and tracking.
For your clinic: Most wasted clinic ad spend we see comes from boosting on default settings.
See the Meta Ads serviceMeta's rule that ads can't assert or imply something about the viewer, including a health condition. “Struggling with back pain?” is rejected.
For your clinic: Describe the service instead: “Back pain physiotherapy at our clinic.”
See the Meta Ads serviceRunning several genuinely different ads (formats, angles, people) rather than small variations. Meta's ad delivery system, known as Andromeda, favours it.
For your clinic: One ad run for months stops working. Fresh, varied creatives keep costs down.
See the Meta Ads serviceShort labels added to a link that tell your analytics where a visitor came from, such as a specific Google profile or ad.
For your clinic: The simplest way to see which branch profile or campaign sends visitors.
See the multi-location practices pageSince 20 February 2026, India's IT Rules require synthetically generated content, including AI videos and images, to be labelled as such on platforms.
For your clinic: AI video ads for clinics should carry a clear label.
See the AI video ads serviceA Google Ads campaign type that runs across Search, Maps, YouTube, Display and Gmail automatically from one set of text, images and videos.
For your clinic: In our experience it only works for clinics with solid conversion tracking; otherwise it drifts to low-quality placements.
See the Google Ads serviceThe Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002. Restored by the NMC in August 2023 and in force for modern medicine doctors.
For your clinic: It's the rulebook your state medical council applies to advertising.
See the advertising rules guideThe NMC's Registered Medical Practitioner (Professional Conduct) Regulations, 2023. Notified on 2 August 2023 and held in abeyance from 23 August 2023.
For your clinic: Not in force, but a clear signal of the regulator's thinking on social media and testimonials.
See the advertising rules guideSeeking patients directly or indirectly through self-promotion. Clause 6.1 of the 2002 code calls it unethical.
For your clinic: Information about your clinic is fine; praise of yourself is not.
See the advertising rules guideA patient's praise used in your promotion: quotes, videos or thank-you letters.
For your clinic: Risky under every medical code, and treated as an endorsement in ads under consumer law.
See the advertising rules guideA 1954 law barring ads that suggest a medicine or remedy can treat any of 54 listed conditions, including diabetes, obesity, blood pressure and infertility in women.
For your clinic: Especially important for AYUSH clinics and anyone dispensing their own medicines.
See the advertising rules guideThe Advertising Standards Council of India, a self-regulatory body that handles complaints about misleading ads. Healthcare was its most-violative sector in 2023–24.
For your clinic: An ASCI complaint can force an ad to be changed or withdrawn.
See the advertising rules guideThe Central Consumer Protection Authority, which can penalise misleading ads up to ₹10 lakh, and ₹50 lakh for repeat offences.
For your clinic: “Free consultation” and guaranteed-result ads fall under its guidelines.
See the advertising rules guideA 2010 law, adopted by several states including Uttar Pradesh, under which clinics must register and display their rates for each service.
For your clinic: Showing fees on your website and Google profile is consistent with it.
See the advertising rules guideThe Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. Its main consent and notice duties apply from 14 May 2027.
For your clinic: Start collecting patients' consent for WhatsApp messages at registration now.
See the patient reviews guideClause 7.13 of the 2002 code: a doctor's signboard may show name, qualifications, titles, specialty and registration number with the state council, and shouldn't be unusually large. A self-photograph on it counts as advertising.
For your clinic: Your Google profile and website should match your signboard.
See the advertising rules guideTell us where you practise. We'll send your visibility report on WhatsApp within two working days.
