Most agencies only show you the finish line. This one is published mid race, because the middle is where practice owners actually live, and because everything below can be checked in a single scan.
This client is kept anonymous at their request while the recovery is running. No practice name, no city, no competitor name. Every number below comes from a weekly geo-grid scan.
The practice
A single location general and cosmetic dentistry practice in a mid sized California city. Its market has one dominant competitor that owns the map almost completely, averaging around 1.4 across the grid and visible in nearly every scan cell we run.
What we found
The profile was not merely underperforming. It was behaving like a suppressed profile.
- A previous agency had run CTR manipulation. Paid or botted searches and clicks, meant to fake engagement. Google's spam systems do not reward that for long, and the outcome is exactly what this profile showed: rankings pinned below where the reviews, the proximity and the site quality say they should sit. The agency moved on. The practice kept the damage.
- Identity inconsistencies around NPI and NAP data. The name, address and phone details disagreed across the directory layer Google checks. For a dental practice this bites harder than for a plumber, because healthcare listings are also cross referenced against NPI registry records.
- A half finished profile. Category and service gaps, stale photos, no posting activity.
The recovery plan
- Stop everything artificial. Nothing bought, nothing botted, from day one.
- Fix the identity layer first: NPI alignment, then NAP consistency across the citation set.
- Rebuild the profile properly: primary and secondary categories, individual service entries, real photos, weekly posts, review responses.
- Track roughly ten treatment keywords weekly on a geo-grid and let the grid tell the truth.
The scoreboard so far
Verified grid averages, 20 June to 29 July 2026:
| Keyword | 20 Jun | 29 Jul | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| best dentist, city term | 6.44 | 4.40 | improving |
| cosmetic dentist, city term | 3.56 | 4.24 | still suppressed |
| dentist, city term | 8.08 | 8.80 | still suppressed |
| teeth whitening, city term | 4.96 | 7.00 | still suppressed |
| dentist near me | 11.71 | 13.50 | still suppressed |
One keyword has broken out. The rest have not, and we say so. A suppression recovery is a months long process, because Google has to relearn that the signals on the profile are genuine. The benchmark sits in the same scans: the dominant competitor averages about 1.4 across the grid. That is the gap being closed, and it is not closed yet.
What any practice owner should take from this
- If an agency promises fast map movement through engagement signals, that is CTR manipulation. The hangover lands on your profile after they are gone.
- A suppressed profile recovers through identity consistency and genuine activity, not through better tricks.
- Ask any agency for a geo-grid, not a ranking screenshot. A screenshot can be taken from the one corner where you rank first. A grid cannot be cherry picked.
- Before you hire anyone, ask what they did for a client that did not go well. The answer tells you more than the case studies do.
Why publish this at all
Because a finished win is easy to show and tells you nothing about how an agency behaves when the work is hard. Our other case study, a practice in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, has the live report and the clean before and after. This one has the honest middle.
Worried your profile is suppressed?
A free geo-grid scan will show you the pattern. Suppression looks different from simply ranking badly, and it is worth knowing which one you have.
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