First: is the profile verified, and is it actually you?
Sign in at business.google.com and check the profile shows as verified with no notice about suspension or pending verification. An unverified clinic barely ranks, and a suspended one disappears entirely — owners routinely miss the email because it went to a practice address nobody checks.
While you are there, check nobody else is managing it. Clinics that once used a marketing agency or a practice-management supplier sometimes find the listing is still registered to them, which means edits you make in one place never reach the profile patients actually see.
Second: what is your primary category?
This is the single most common cause and the quickest to fix. Google shows your clinic for “physio near me” when Physiotherapist is the primary category. A clinic set up as “Medical clinic”, “Sports medicine clinic” or “Health consultant” is competing in a different set of results — often against every hospital and GP surgery in town, where it will never place.
Then list your services individually rather than describing them in one paragraph: sports injury rehabilitation, post-operative rehab, women's health physiotherapy, home visits. Each listed service gives Google something specific to match against a specific search.
Third: when did your last review arrive?
Review recency carries real weight, and clinics are unusually prone to letting it lapse — the review push happens when the practice opens, then stops once the diary fills. A clinic with sixty reviews whose most recent is eighteen months old looks dormant next to a competitor collecting two a month.
The fix is a routine rather than a campaign: ask at discharge, make it one tap, and never incentivise, because incentivised reviews breach Google's policies and can cost you the ones you already have.
Fourth: is a duplicate listing splitting your signals?
Search your clinic name and your phone number on Google Maps and see how many results come back. Duplicates appear more often than owners expect — from a previous address, a former practitioner, or an automatic listing generated by a directory.
When two listings exist, reviews and ranking history split between them and both underperform. It is also a common reason a clinic appears under an old address that patients then turn up to.
Fifth: are you sure you are not showing?
Searching for yourself from the clinic, signed in, on your own phone, is the least reliable test there is — Google personalises by location and history, so you see close to a best case. Check in an incognito window with the map dragged to where your patients actually live.
You may find you rank perfectly well near the clinic and drop off a mile away. That is proximity working normally rather than a fault, and it tells you how far your visibility genuinely reaches — usually less far than owners assume.