Welcome everyone to Episode #87 of the Chiropractic Marketing Podcast.
I’m your host, Dr. Patrick MacNamara, and today I want to talk about something a lot of chiropractors get wrong when they’re trying to win the Map Pack in a market that’s genuinely competitive — not just “there are other chiropractors nearby,” but the kind of market where three or four practices are all fighting hard for the same top three spots every single day.
Here’s the thing about competitive markets. The basics still matter — your Google Business Profile, your NAP consistency, your schema markup. I went deep on all of that in a previous episode on the local SEO signals that matter most, so if you haven’t heard it yet, go back and give that one a listen. But if you’re in a genuinely competitive market and you’ve already got the fundamentals in place, the basics alone won’t separate you from the pack. Everybody serious in your market already has a complete profile. Everybody’s got their name, address, and phone number matching across the web. That’s table stakes now, not a differentiator. So today I want to talk about what actually creates separation once you’re past the fundamentals.
Let’s start with how Google actually thinks about this, because it reframes everything else we’re going to talk about. Google’s local ranking system comes down to three pillars: relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance is how well your listing matches what someone’s searching for. Distance is exactly what it sounds like — how far you are from the person searching or from the location in their query. And prominence is how well-known and authoritative Google perceives your practice to be. Here’s the important part: you can’t do much about distance. Your office is where your office is. But prominence? That’s the pillar you have the most control over, and it’s exactly where competitive practices create their edge over everyone else in the market.
So let’s talk about what builds prominence, starting with something that surprises a lot of chiropractors — the sheer volume of your reviews relative to your competitors, not just in absolute terms. If your closest competitor down the street has eighty reviews, having ninety isn’t enough to create separation. You want to be sitting at two hundred plus. That’s not an arbitrary number — it’s the kind of gap that signals real authority to Google and to the patient comparing you against the practice next door. And it’s not just about volume. Recency matters just as much. A stack of reviews from two years ago tells Google your practice was active once. A steady stream of new reviews every week tells Google you’re thriving right now. If you want the full breakdown on building a review system that actually produces this kind of consistent flow, I’ve got an entire episode on review management strategies that walks through it in detail.
Now here’s one that a lot of chiropractors completely overlook — the actual name of your business on your Google Business Profile. If your listing is just your name, like “Dr. Smith Chiropractic,” you’re missing a relevance signal that some of your competitors are already using. Practices with more descriptive names — something like “Downtown Chiropractic and Wellness Center” — often get a built-in advantage because that name itself contains language Google associates with relevant searches. DCRank has a full breakdown on how keywords in your clinic name affect chiropractic SEO rankings if you want to dig deeper into this one. Now, I’m not telling you to rebrand your whole practice overnight. But it’s worth understanding that this factor exists and thinking through whether there’s a way to work relevant language into how you’re listed, because in a tight competitive race, small advantages like this add up.
Let’s talk about citations for a minute, because in a competitive market, citation volume and accuracy become a much bigger deal than people realize. A citation is just any place online where your name, address, and phone number show up — Yelp, Healthgrades, ZocDoc, your local chamber of commerce site, industry-specific directories, all of it. In a low-competition market, having citations on the major sites is probably enough. In a high-competition market, you want citations everywhere your competitors are, and ideally in a few places they’re not. I covered the full citation-building process on a previous episode on citation management for chiropractors, but here’s a piece most chiropractors have never even heard of — the data aggregators. These are companies like Neustar Localeze, Data Axle, and Foursquare that feed your business information out to hundreds of smaller directories automatically. If your data is clean at the aggregator level, it cleans up dozens of downstream listings you’d never think to check individually. If it’s messy at that level, you’ve got inconsistency spreading everywhere without even knowing it.
One more piece worth mentioning briefly, because it connects everything we’ve just covered to something bigger — all of this doesn’t just help you in the traditional Map Pack. The same signals that build your prominence for Google Maps — strong reviews, clean citations, a well-optimized profile — are increasingly the same signals that get you cited and recommended by AI-powered search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. DCRank’s approach to local SEO and AI SEO strategies together is built entirely around this overlap. That overlap is a gift, honestly. You’re not building two separate strategies. You’re building one strong foundation that pays off across both.
Now, I want to be honest with you about something. None of this works if the fundamentals underneath it are shaky. If your Google Business Profile isn’t fully built out, if your NAP data is inconsistent, if your website doesn’t have the schema markup Google needs to confirm what your profile is telling it, that’s a website problem before it’s an SEO problem — and it’s exactly why a chiropractic website built for this from day one matters so much. Building review volume and citation depth on top of a shaky foundation is like adding a second story to a house before the first floor’s finished.
Winning the Map Pack in a genuinely competitive market isn’t about doing one clever thing. It’s about doing the fundamentals well, and then layering on the prominence-building work most of your competitors aren’t disciplined enough to keep up with month after month — the review volume, the citation depth, the small relevance signals that add up. That consistency is what separates the practices that dominate their market from the ones stuck watching competitors from page two.
If you’re ready to stop guessing and start ranking, head over to DCRank and get started. The link is in the show notes.
Alright, that wraps things up for today’s episode…
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