Local SEO: NAP consistency, reviews, and pages that answer questions

What NAP consistency actually fixes

NAP stands for name, address, and phone number — the three fields listed on your Google Business Profile, Psychology Today, Healthgrades, your state licensing board's directory, and dozens of aggregator sites that scraped your information without ever asking. Search engines and directory algorithms cross-reference these fields as a trust signal, and a mismatch across sources gets treated as a red flag to discount, not a puzzle to solve in your favor.

The three fields worth auditing first: - Name — use the exact form on your license and your primary listing, not a shortened version on one site and a full credential string on another. - Address — a telehealth-only practice should register as a service-area business, a distinct Google Business Profile category from a storefront listing; mixing the two confuses the signal. - Phone — one number, forwarded if you need it to ring somewhere else, not a different tracking number planted on every directory.

Fixing the source record does more for practice marketing than correcting each directory by hand one at a time — a scraper copies from somewhere, and forty wrong listings usually trace back to one field entered wrong, once, years ago.

Reviews: solicited honestly, or not at all

The FTC's 2024 rule bans buying reviews, writing them yourself, and suppressing negative ones — and it created civil penalties for violations, which makes review strategy a compliance question, not just a marketing one 1Ref 1Federal Trade Commission (2024).Federal Trade Commission Announces Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials.That the FTC bans fake, purchased, and suppressed reviews with civil penalties, framing review-solicitation practice as a compliance question.. A practice that asks every patient for a review, regardless of how the visit went, is on the safe side of this line; a practice that asks only patients it expects to leave five stars, or asks staff and family to post reviews of a practice they don't attend, is not.

The FTC's endorsement guidance adds a second layer: a review must reflect the reviewer's honest experience, and any material connection between the reviewer and the practice has to be disclosed 2Ref 2Federal Trade Commission (2023).FTC's Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking.That endorsements must reflect honest experience and that review gating (soliciting only likely-positive reviewers) violates FTC policy.. Review gating — routing happy patients to a public review link and unhappy ones to a private feedback form — is the single most common violation the FTC's guidance calls out, because it manufactures a public record that doesn't match the average experience. Ask everyone the same way, every time, and let the ranking algorithm see reviews the way patients actually left them.

Testimonials touch HIPAA before they touch your website

A testimonial or before/after story that identifies a patient is a use of protected health information for marketing, and HIPAA requires a signed authorization before you publish it — separate from any release your web platform's terms of service might ask for 3Ref 3HHS Office for Civil Rights (2026).Marketing.That HIPAA requires signed authorization before using identifiable patient information, such as a testimonial, for marketing purposes.. The authorization has to name what's being disclosed and where it's going; a verbal "sure, go ahead" during a session doesn't satisfy it, and a review a patient posts unprompted on their own is a different thing entirely from a testimonial you solicit and publish yourself.

The safer default for a solo practice: quote what a patient posted publicly on a third-party review site (attributed the way they posted it, not edited into promotional copy), rather than soliciting a written testimonial to feature on your own pages. It sidesteps the authorization question because the patient made the disclosure, not you.

Accessibility is part of the ranking, not just the law

Title III of the ADA applies to a private practice's office as a public accommodation, and that obligation extends to the practice's public-facing website under current DOJ guidance — screen-reader compatibility, sufficient color contrast, captioned video, and forms that work without a mouse 4Ref 4U.S. Department of Justice (2026).The Americans with Disabilities Act.That Title III of the ADA applies to private health care offices as public accommodations, extending to website accessibility obligations.. A site built with those basics also tends to rank better, because the same structural clarity — clear headings, real text instead of text baked into images, descriptive link labels — is what a search engine's crawler needs to understand what the page answers.

A quick check that catches most gaps: run your homepage and one interior page through a free automated accessibility scanner, then tab through the booking flow using only the keyboard. Fixing what surfaces there is cheaper before a complaint than after one.

Texting a patient to ask for a review needs consent first

The TCPA requires prior express consent before a practice sends an autodialed or templated text — including a post-visit review request — and the FCC treats a blanket "by scheduling with us you agree to receive texts" line in an intake form as thin cover if the patient never affirmatively opted in to marketing messages specifically 5Ref 5Federal Communications Commission (2026).Telemarketing and robocalls.That the TCPA requires prior express consent before sending automated or templated texts, including post-visit review-request texts.. Practical fix: separate the consent checkbox for appointment reminders (which patients expect and usually will opt into) from the checkbox for review requests and newsletter content (which they may not), and only text the review ask to patients who checked the second box.

A single unsolicited review-request text to a patient who never opted in is a TCPA exposure with per-text statutory damages — a bad trade for one more review.

Pages that answer a question outrank pages that describe a service

A services page that lists "individual therapy, couples counseling, medication management" answers nothing a search engine can quote back to a searcher. The FAQ page that spells out your specific answer to "do you take Medicaid," "what's your cancellation policy," or "do you see clients under 18" is the page that gets pulled into a featured snippet, because it resolves a real question in the reader's own words. The same logic favors a small, complete site over a sprawling one — five pages that each answer a distinct question outperform twenty thin pages that all restate the same service list.

The content doesn't have to be new copywriting. The expert quote you gave a local reporter, the outline from a community talk you gave last spring, and the questions referring clinicians ask before sending a case your way are all raw material for an answer page — and the same consistent, well-sourced content that strengthens local search also becomes the material a referring provider pulls into a referral packet when they're deciding whether to send you a patient.