Evidence
Case studies, reported the way we would want them reported to us.
A ranking screenshot taken from a flattering location proves nothing. What follows is profile performance data over a defined window, what we changed, what the client did, and the parts that did not go to plan.
Case study · Legal
A criminal defence attorney in San Diego
Criminal defence in a major US metro is close to the hardest local search environment there is. Competing firms have decade-old profiles, hundreds of reviews, and budgets that dwarf what a single practitioner can spend. The client is a distinguished San Diego criminal defence attorney whose reputation in court was substantially ahead of his visibility on the map. A common and expensive gap.
Below is Google Business Profile performance for the three-month window from February to April 2026, read directly from the client’s own profile.
The shape of the curve matters more than the totals
The opening weeks of the window are the slowest part of the curve. February shows minimal interaction: the profile was live but effectively invisible. Movement builds through March and is clearest by April. That lag is the honest picture of local SEO: category and profile work lands first, prominence built on reviews and citations compounds behind it, and the visible payoff arrives in weeks six through twelve of the roadmap rather than week two.
Direction requests are the figure we watch most closely in a practice like this. A direction request is somebody deciding to physically go to your office. Going from a near-standing start to 166 over the three-month window is a change in who is being shown the profile, not a change in how the same audience behaved.
What we actually changed
- Primary category and services. The single strongest relevance field on a profile, and the first thing corrected. Practice-area services were populated using Google’s predefined entries rather than free text.
- Service area and hours accuracy. Being open at the time of search is now rated among the top five Local Pack factors, and legal searches skew toward evenings and weekends when somebody has just been arrested or charged.
- Baseline geo-grid scan, then recurring scans. Coverage was measured across the metro before anything was touched, so every later claim could be checked against it.
- NAP and citation cleanup across legal directories, where attorney listings are unusually prone to old addresses and tracking numbers.
- Review cadence and responses. The client committed to asking, consistently, and to responding to everything that arrived.
- Schema and entity clarity in the final weeks, so assistants could verify the practice, its location and its practice areas.
What we would flag if we were on the other side of this
Calls did not rise smoothly. There was a real dip in the middle of the window before April’s jump to 18, which we did not predict and which took a cycle to diagnose. Three months is also a short window, and it spans a seasonal pattern that legal practices genuinely experience, so some portion of the movement is not attributable to us. We are showing profile interaction data because that is what we can evidence; we are not claiming a revenue figure we did not measure.
This local SEO case study covers three months of work with a San Diego criminal defence practice, which went from a profile generating almost no measurable interaction to one producing 81 interactions, 50 direction requests and 18 calls in its strongest month. The mechanism was unglamorous: correct categories and services, accurate hours, clean citations, steady authentic reviews, and enough patience to let the opening weeks look like nothing was happening.
Case study · Dental
A general and cosmetic dental practice in Langley, BC
The practice offers general dentistry alongside higher-value cosmetic and implant services, Invisalign, veneers and similar work, so real revenue was riding on whether the right patients could actually find it. When this engagement began on November 21, 2025, a 49-point geo-grid scan across 20 targeted dental searches in Langley came back almost entirely red: invisible (ranking 20th or worse) at most points on the map for general-dentist and specialty searches alike. A handful of scattered yellow points, page-one but not top-three, were the only visibility the practice had outside its own block.
Below is what changed across three geo-grid snapshots taken November 21, 2025, December 9, 2025 and January 13, 2026, each run against the same 20 keywords and the same grid.
| Search term | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Invisalign Langley | #86 | #23 |
| Teeth whitening Langley | #37 | #5 |
| Botox dentist Langley | #27 | #4 |
| Smile makeover Langley | #39 | #13 |
| Porcelain veneers Langley | #22 | #9 |
Daily Google Business Profile sessions, tracked from December 12 to January 10, showed a steady weekday pattern with the expected weekend dip: the shape of real people searching, not a bot or a tracking artifact.
What we actually changed
- Google Business Profile optimization. Strengthening the practice’s core local search presence: categories, services and the fields that carry the most relevance weight.
- Citation cleanup and consistency. Improving the consistency of the practice’s name, address and phone number across the directories Google cross-checks.
- Review-generation signals. A steady, ongoing flow rather than a one-time push, since review recency carries real ranking weight.
- Recurring geo-grid measurement. The same three-snapshot cadence used above, so the market picture, not one rank check, is what the case study is built on.
What we would flag if we were on the other side of this
The improvement was not uniform. By the January snapshot, several of the 20 tracked keywords were still sitting at position 70, 90 or worse, even as the overall picture moved sharply toward the top three. Broad Map Pack visibility does not mean every search term moves at the same rate, and a business reading this case study should not expect a uniform lift across every term it cares about.
What we found once the map moved
A geo-grid win is not the end of the file, it is where the next constraint usually shows up. The keywords still stuck at position 70 and worse pointed at something Google Business Profile work cannot fix: the website itself. The diagnosis found weak mapping between keywords and the service pages meant to rank for them, internal links that did not connect related services to each other, thin content on some service pages, underdeveloped expertise-and-trust signals, and schema opportunities that were not yet in use.
None of that is a profile problem, and no amount of further citation or review work fixes it. Connecting the website’s own relevance signals to the local authority already built is the next phase of this engagement, not a footnote to it.
This case study covers a Langley dental practice’s Google Maps visibility across roughly two months, tracked on three geo-grid snapshots. The practice moved from a map dominated by rankings outside its immediate area to broad top-three coverage across central Langley, with a reported 125% visibility-score improvement and more than 20 keywords showing upward movement, including individual terms moving from as far back as position 86 into the top 25. The mechanism was the same as every case study on this page: profile and citation work first, review generation alongside it, and a geo-grid measuring the real geographic picture rather than one rank check. What is not claimed here is a revenue, lead or appointment number: none were measured, and the honest next step for this engagement is fixing the website-level gaps the visibility gain exposed, not declaring the campaign finished. Dental and other healthcare practices weighing this trade-off should read the dental marketing playbook, and Langley businesses generally can see the wider competitive picture on the Langley market page.
Why we report profile interactions rather than rankings
A ranking number is a poor proxy for a business outcome, and in local search it is barely even a number. It changes with the searcher's location, so any single figure is a measurement taken from one arbitrary point. Profile interactions, direction requests and calls are things that actually happened. Somebody chose to act.
Direction requests in particular are hard to argue with. A direction request is a person deciding to physically travel to a business. It is not a impression, not a click, and not something an agency can manufacture. Going from a near-standing start to 166 over three months in a metro of that size is a change in who is being shown the profile.
What we cannot show you is revenue, because we did not measure it and we are not going to estimate it. If a case study on any agency's site quotes a revenue figure, ask how it was attributed. The answer is usually that it was not.
What produced it
Nothing exotic. The same 12-point checklist we publish free, run properly, in the order set out in the 12-week roadmap, against a dated baseline. The factors behind each step are sourced on the 2026 ranking factors page, and the reason there is no ranking promise attached to any of it is explained in why we do not guarantee rankings. Legal practices in particular should read the law firm playbook, which covers the advertising constraints this campaign worked within.
What a result tends to look like, by industry
One published case study is one data point. Below is the shape we see repeat across engagements, described without numbers we did not measure for your business. This is the method’s pattern, not a client’s result.
Pick the closest fit
Category and services corrections land first, often visible in the geo-grid within the first few weeks near the shop. Coverage then extends outward as reviews and per-town content compound. Calls and direction requests usually move together, with seasonal demand (storms, cold snaps) overlaid on the trend. The common blocker is review supply: the businesses that hit the steeper part of the curve are the ones that ask after every job.
High lifetime value per patient means a small coverage gain in the right neighbourhoods matters a lot, so the geo-grid is read block by block rather than city-wide. Profile completeness and review recency do most of the early work; the practices that stall are usually the ones treating reviews as a one-time push. Hours accuracy matters more here than owners expect, because a lot of the searching happens evenings and weekends. The Langley dental case study above matches this shape closely, including the website-level ceiling that showed up once the map itself turned mostly green.
The hardest local environment: established competitors with decade-old profiles and hundreds of reviews. The opening weeks genuinely look like nothing is happening while category, services and citation work goes in. Movement is clearest between weeks six and twelve. Direction requests are the figure we watch, because they represent someone deciding to physically come in, which an agency cannot manufacture.
Ranking near the shop address means little to a customer fifteen miles out, so the baseline geo-grid covers the whole radius and success is measured as coverage extending across it, not one position improving. Progress is typically uneven: some zones flip to green quickly, contested clusters take longer, and a few points may never move because a competitor sits closer. The re-scan at week twelve shows which is which.
The narrative version of the case study above is in the Sauce post on that San Diego profile. For a market-wide read rather than one account, see the Metro Vancouver Local Search Report, our quarterly Local Search Index. To see additional client dashboards, ask on the assessment call; we walk a current client’s heat-map history with you, with their permission, rather than publishing figures we would have to anonymise past the point of usefulness.
Sources
- Client Google Business Profile performance export, February to April 2026, read directly from the client’s own profile. DHM DATA
- Client geo-grid ranking report, three snapshots dated November 21, 2025, December 9, 2025 and January 13, 2026, for a Langley, BC dental practice. CLIENT DATA
- Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors (2026 edition): Google Business Profile signals, including categories, services and hours accuracy, and review recency, are among the highest-weighted Local Pack factors.
- Google Business Profile Help, Improve your local ranking on Google: local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence, with no way to pay for a better rank.
- The six-to-twelve week shape of the curve is our interpretation of how profile work versus prominence work compounds, consistent with the client data above; it is not a Google-disclosed timeline. DHM INTERPRETATION
How every case study here is reported
- A defined window with real start and end dates, not a cherry-picked span.
- What changed month by month, in the order it happened.
- Business outcome: calls, direction requests, interactions, not just positions.
- What did not work, and what we changed when we found out.
- The client’s own contribution, because review flow and photo supply materially change the result and pretending otherwise is dishonest.
- What we cannot attribute, including seasonality and anything we did not measure.
Next step
Ask to see a live dashboard
On the assessment call we can walk a current client's heat map history with you, with their permission.
Or call 778-200-8644 · One client per industry, per area. No guaranteed rankings.