Citation audit.

What an audit actually pulls

Every public mention of the practice's Name, Address, and Phone number across the dental-specific directory ecosystem and the broader local-citation surface. ADA Find-A-Dentist, the relevant state dental society directory, the relevant specialty board directories (AAO Find an Orthodontist, AAOMS Locate a Surgeon, AAP Find a Periodontist, AAE Find an Endodontist, AAPD Find a Pediatric Dentist), Healthgrades, ZocDoc, Yelp, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, plus general-business citations (BBB, Chamber of Commerce, local newspapers). Variants get logged: a missing suite designation here, a tracking number there, a legal-name-vs-brand-name split somewhere else.

The output is a ledger of every inconsistency, the source it appears on, the surface that carries the canonical value, and the fix path for each. The work is the local pack optimization foundation. Without a clean baseline, the downstream signals (the GBP ranking, the directory citation density, the local-pack triggering) all read noise. The local citations and directories hub covers the ecosystem map; this page covers the diagnostic that runs over it.

Which inconsistencies actually hurt

Address discrepancies on the highest-authority surfaces (ADA Find-A-Dentist, the relevant state dental society, Google Business Profile) carry the heaviest weight. Phone-number splits across surfaces (a tracking number on the GBP and the main number on directories) trigger entity-disambiguation problems in Google Maps and risk the automatic entity-merging that corrupts multi-practitioner GBPs. Name variants where the legal entity name and the brand name diverge across surfaces dilute the entity signal. Stale closed locations still listed on lesser directories carry lower per-citation weight but compound over time.

For DSO-scale groups, the multi-location surface multiplies the drift rate. Each location's GBP primary and secondary categories have to match the practitioner's actual scope. The risk surface at multi-practitioner facilities is the Google Maps automatic entity-merging that combines individual practitioner Profiles into the practice Profile when NAP isn't compartmentalized. The audit catches that class of problem before it corrupts the entity data.

Cadence

Annually as a baseline. Plus on any structural event: a move, a phone-number change, a brand rename, a new associate joining or leaving, a multi-location group acquiring or divesting a location. Dental directories accumulate stale listings without an active correction cadence. For multi-location DSOs, quarterly because the per-location surface multiplies the drift. The work routes back to the SEO for dentists program as a recurring maintenance event rather than a one-time fix.