The med spa Google Business Profile checklist

A med spa is a local business in the purest sense. Nobody flies to another state for a HydraFacial. Which means the three results Google shows on a map — the "map pack" — are not a marketing channel among many. For a large share of your new patients they are the entire first impression.

And yet the profile is usually something somebody set up once, four years ago, in an afternoon. Here is what to fix, roughly in order of impact.

Get the foundations right

1. Pick the primary category deliberately

This is the single highest-leverage field on the whole profile, and it is the one most often wrong. "Medical spa" and "Skin care clinic" and "Day spa" pull very different search intents and very different competitor sets. Choose the one that matches the treatments you actually want more of — if your margin is in injectables, do not be categorised as a day spa.

2. Then add secondary categories, but not all of them

Add the ones you genuinely deliver: medical clinic, laser hair removal service, facial spa. Adding categories you do not really serve dilutes relevance rather than broadening it.

3. Make your name your name

Do not stuff it. "Radiance Med Spa" is your name. "Radiance Med Spa | Botox Filler Laser Hair Removal Best in Phoenix" is a suspension risk and a competitor report waiting to happen. This rule is enforced more than people expect.

4. Match your NAP everywhere, character for character

Name, address, phone. Suite number formatting, "St" versus "Street," the phone number on your Facebook page from two locations ago. Inconsistency here quietly suppresses ranking and is tedious but genuinely fixable in an afternoon.

5. Set a real service area only if you have one

You have a physical location clients visit, so you are a storefront, not a service area business. Do not hide the address. Hidden addresses rank worse for the searches you care about.

Fill the profile out properly

6. List every service, individually

The services section accepts a long list, and almost nobody completes it. Add each treatment as its own entry with its own description — Botox, Dysport, lip filler, microneedling, Secret RF, IPL, HydraFacial, chemical peel, laser hair removal. These entries are matched against queries.

7. Put prices on the services

Where the field allows it, use it. Same logic as the website: price is the question she came with. See the argument for publishing prices if this makes you uneasy.

8. Write the business description for a human

You get 750 characters. Lead with what you are, where you are, who directs you medically, and what makes you different. Do not spend it on keywords — this field carries little ranking weight and considerable trust weight.

9. Set attributes honestly

Wheelchair accessible, restroom, appointment required, LGBTQ+ friendly, women-owned. These appear in filters and they matter to real people choosing between two similar spas.

10. Hours, including the awkward ones

Special hours for holidays. If you close for a long weekend and forget, Google will happily show you as open and you will collect a one-star review from somebody who drove there.

Photography, which matters more than it should

11. Replace the stock photography

Every med spa profile has the same white-orchid-on-a-towel image. It signals nothing. Real photos of your actual rooms, your actual equipment and your actual team outperform polished stock by a distance, because the thing she is trying to work out is whether this place is legitimate.

12. Get the exterior right

Include a clear photo of the building and the entrance from the road. This is a genuinely underrated conversion asset — it is how she knows she has arrived, and in a strip mall it is the difference between finding you and giving up.

13. Add photos on a schedule, not in one burst

Freshness is a signal. A few images a month indefinitely beats forty images once.

14. Be careful with before-and-afters here

They are powerful, but Google's policies and your state's advertising rules for medical results both apply. Keep them unretouched, keep consent documented, and do not imply guaranteed outcomes.

Reviews: the compounding asset

15. Ask every single time, systematically

Not "when we remember." A text sent within two hours of the appointment, from the person who did the treatment, with a direct link. Manual review chasing always decays; a system does not.

16. Reply to all of them, including the good ones

Replies are visible, they are a ranking signal, and they are read by people deciding. Keep replies short, specific and free of marketing language.

17. Reply to bad ones like an adult

Never argue, never discuss a patient's treatment in public — that is a privacy problem on top of a PR one. Acknowledge, take it offline, leave it. The audience for that reply is not the reviewer, it is the next hundred people reading.

18. Never buy reviews

It is detectable, it is increasingly enforced, and the downside is the profile that books a third of your patients. There is no version of this trade that is worth it.

Then keep it alive

19. Post weekly, and use the right post type

Offers, events and updates all render differently. A monthly treatment focus, a seasonal offer, a new device, a team addition. It takes fifteen minutes a week and almost nobody in your market is doing it, which is exactly why it works.

The one that is not on the list

Everything above is maintenance, and maintenance has a ceiling. Beyond it, map pack position is driven substantially by proximity to the searcher and by the authority of the website attached to the profile — which is why local SEO and the website rebuild are the same project, not two projects. A spotless profile pointing at a slow, thin site will plateau.