Patients pick from whoever shows up nearby — not from your best review.
A patient searching for a GP, a physiotherapist or an orthopaedic specialist almost always starts with the Google Maps pack near where they live or work, and that pack looks completely different two kilometres away. A practice can sit at the top near its own front door and be invisible in the next district over — and a single "are we ranking" check never shows where that boundary actually is. SeoMap grids the whole catchment area and colours every point by where the practice actually ranks.
Built around what you actually do all day.
- 01
Finding where visibility drops off outside the immediate area
A 7×7 or 9×9 grid centred on the practice usually shows green near the door and, in most dense areas, amber or red starting a few kilometres out — a different practice or clinic takes the top spots instead. That's the map a practice manager needs before deciding where to focus a marketing budget.
- 02
One scan per specialty, not one generic check
"GP", "paediatrician" and "orthopaedic specialist" can return completely different map packs at the same address — and a multi-specialty clinic or MVZ needs to know which service line is actually visible. Run a separate scan per specialty, or import the practice's Google Search Console data to pre-fill the terms patients actually searched in the last 90 days.
- 03
Reviews decide the call when positions look similar
Clicking any grid point shows the full top 20 results at that coordinate, including rating and review count — not just rank. In healthcare, where trust is the deciding factor between two similarly-ranked practices, that competitive read matters as much as the position itself.
- 04
Multi-location practices and clinic groups without the mix-ups
Each project is matched by Google CID/Place-ID, not by name — so a clinic group with several locations doesn't get its branches confused with each other, or with an unrelated practice that happens to share a name. Run each location's grid separately and compare them side by side.
- 05
Proving a Google Business Profile clean-up actually worked
After updating opening hours, adding specialty categories or cleaning up a Google Business Profile, scan comparison lays the old and new grid side by side and shows the delta per point — improved, dropped, new, lost. That's what goes into the next practice-management review, not just a claim that things improved.
What a medical practice’s catchment area actually looks like on a map
Healthcare search behaves a lot like other hyperlocal search, with one difference: trust and reviews weigh heavily on the decision once two practices show up at similar positions. Patients rarely travel across a city for a routine GP visit or a physiotherapy session — they pick from whoever shows up in the map pack near their home, their office, or their child’s school — but for a specialist, orthopaedic surgeon or a clinic with a strong reputation, the radius people are willing to travel is much wider. A single “are we ranking” check can’t tell you which situation you’re in.
A grid scan makes the actual boundary visible instead of assumed. Centre a grid on the practice’s address, size it to the specialty — tight for a GP, wider for a specialist clinic — and run it on the search term that matters most. The map fills in point by point: green near the practice, amber further out, and red where a different practice or clinic group starts taking the top spots instead. ATRP (Average Total Rank Position) counts every point where the practice didn’t show up at all, not just where it did — which matters here specifically, because “we’re not in the top 20” is common at the edge of a catchment area and easy to hide if a metric quietly drops those points.
For a group running several locations or a multi-specialty MVZ, that same grid run separately per practice or per specialty — matched by CID/Place-ID so two branches, or two unrelated practices sharing a name, never get confused — turns into a comparison of which location or service line has the widest real reach, and which one needs attention before the next marketing budget gets allocated.
Prepare your measurement
Questions we actually get asked.
We rank well right by the practice — why don't patients from the next district find us?
Google Maps rankings are calculated per coordinate, based on proximity, relevance and the profile's own signals — not as one global position. A grid scan is the only way to see the actual boundary of your catchment area instead of guessing from a single check.
Can I track different specialties or services as separate searches?
Yes — run one scan per term ("GP", "paediatrician", "physiotherapy", "urgent care"...). Each can surface a different set of practices at the exact same location, so treating them as one ranking hides real differences between service lines.
We run a clinic group with several locations — will they get mixed up?
No. Every project is linked by Google CID/Place-ID, not by name, so two practices in the same group — or a practice sharing a name with an unrelated one across town — stay separate.
What grid size makes sense for a medical practice?
It depends on the specialty. A GP or dentist-style practice usually sees its real boundary within a 5×5 to 9×9 grid at tight spacing; a specialist clinic that draws patients from further away often needs an 11×11 or 13×13 grid with wider spacing.
Is there a way to try this before committing a practice's marketing budget?
Yes — 500 free credits on signup, no credit card. Enough to run a couple of real scans on the practice's main search terms before deciding on a plan.
Can I pull the data into another tool, or do I need to read every scan myself?
Both are covered. A read-only REST API ships with every plan — self-managed, revocable keys, endpoints for projects, scans and individual grid points — so you can wire results into Zapier, n8n or your own reporting. Every completed scan also gets a short AI-generated analysis paragraph automatically, on top of the existing rule-based breakdown, so you're not staring at a raw grid trying to figure out what changed.
Lay the map over your service area.
The first scan takes under three minutes. After that you’ll see your visibility the way your customers do.