The category error that catches most clinics
Open your Google Business Profile and look at the primary category. It needs to be Osteopath. Clinics registered as “Physiotherapist”, “Chiropractor”, “Alternative medicine practitioner” or “Medical clinic” are competing in someone else's results, and no amount of reviews or photos overrides it.
This happens easily. The listing may have been created years ago by whoever built the website, or auto-generated from a directory, and nobody has looked at the category since. It takes a minute to correct and it is the highest-leverage minute available to you.
Secondary categories are worth adding where they are genuinely true — sports injury clinic, paediatric work — because they widen the searches you are eligible for without diluting the primary.
Is the profile verified and under your control?
Check for a verification or suspension notice at business.google.com. An unverified listing barely ranks and a suspended one vanishes, and the notification often goes to an address the practice no longer monitors.
Check who else has access. Clinics that used a website designer or a marketing supplier sometimes find the profile is still registered to them, which means changes made locally never appear.
Reviews, and why recency beats volume
Osteopathy patients choose on trust and Google measures trust partly through review recency. A clinic with a strong historic review count that stopped collecting looks less active than a newer competitor gathering a few each month.
Reviews that name the problem and the outcome — “came in with sciatica, walking properly after three sessions” — do more than generic praise, because they match what the next patient is searching for. Ask at the end of a course of treatment, never in exchange for anything.
Duplicates, symptom searches and proximity
Search your clinic name and phone number on Maps to check no duplicate exists splitting your reviews between two listings. This is common where a practitioner has moved premises or worked from more than one site.
Then consider what you are searching for. Many patients never type “osteopath” at all — they search the pain. Those symptom searches are shared with physiotherapists and chiropractors and are won by pages on your website rather than by the profile, which is a different job from the one this page describes. And if you rank near the clinic but not across town, that is proximity behaving normally.