Do More Google Reviews Improve Local Ranking? I Scanned 76 Dental Clinics to Find Out
I keep reading the same advice everywhere. Get more Google reviews. That is how you rank higher.
I wanted to know if it is true. Not read about it. Test it.
So on 31 July 2026 I ran a scan on the dental market in Seri Kembangan, Selangor, where I live. Here is what I found, including the part where the tool’s own AI gave me advice its own data does not support.
What I actually did
I used a tool called Local Falcon. It works like this.
It puts 25 dots on a map around one business. At every dot it asks Google the same question: who is the best dentist here?
Then it writes down the answer 25 times.
My setup:
- Keyword: dentist
- Grid: 5 × 5 (25 points)
- Radius: 2 km
- Area covered: 16 km²
- Centre: a dental clinic near my house in Taman Serdang Perdana
- Date: 31 July 2026
The scan found 76 dental clinics competing in that area.
First, one word you need
Share of Local Voice (SoLV).
It sounds complicated. It is not.
SoLV means: out of my 25 dots, how many showed this clinic in the top 3?
Top 3 matters because that is the Google Maps pack. That is what people see on their phone. Almost nobody scrolls past it.
So:
- SoLV 60 = top 3 at 15 dots out of 25
- SoLV 12 = top 3 at 3 dots out of 25
- SoLV 4 = top 3 at 1 dot out of 25
Higher SoLV means more people see you. That is the whole idea.
What I expected
I expected a simple line. More reviews, higher SoLV.
That is what everyone says. That is what I believed.
What I actually found
Here are five clinics from the same area. Look at the review column, then look at the SoLV column.
| Clinic | Reviews | Rating | SoLV |
| Primecare Dental Clinic Serdang | 1,681 | 4.9 | 12.00 |
| MyGigi Dental Clinic | 1,071 | 5.0 | 28.00 |
| Ez Dental Clinic | 559 | 4.9 | 60.00 |
| Klinik Pergigian Beyond Dental Care | 265 | 5.0 | 48.00 |
| Dental Cottage Sri Serdang | 117 | 5.0 | 8.00 |
Read the top row and the third row again.
Primecare has 1,681 reviews. Ez Dental has 559.
Primecare has three times more reviews. And Ez Dental appears in the top 3 five times more often.
That is the opposite of what I was told.
It gets stranger
I kept scrolling the report.
Klinik Pergigian Sg Besi Indah has 8 reviews. Eight. Its SoLV is 8.00.
The clinic at the centre of my scan has 70 reviews and a perfect 5.0 rating. Its SoLV is 4.00.
A clinic with 8 reviews has double the visibility of a clinic with 70.
And then this one. Dr Lee Dental Specialist Clinic has zero reviews. No rating at all. Its SoLV is 4.00 — the same as the clinic with 70 reviews and five stars.
At that point I stopped believing the review advice.
So what is actually working?
If it is not review count, what is it?
I went back and read the business names slowly. Remember, the word I searched was dentist.
| Clinic | What is in the name | SoLV |
| Ez Dental Clinic | “Dentist in Seri Kembangan“ | 60 |
| Beyond Dental Care | “Children Dentistry“ | 48 |
| MyGigi Dental Clinic | “Seri Kembangan“ | 28 |
| InSmile Dental Clinic | “Seri Kembangan“ | 20 |
| Primecare Dental Clinic | “Serdang“ | 12 |
Now the pattern is clear.
The closer the business name matches what I searched, the higher the SoLV.
Ez Dental has the exact word dentist and the exact area Seri Kembangan inside its business name. It wins.
Primecare has neither. It has “Serdang” — a nearby area, but not the one I searched. It loses, even with 1,681 reviews.
There is a second clue too. Beyond Dental Care is number 2 with only 265 reviews. Its primary category on Google is “Dentist.” Almost everyone else uses “Dental Clinic.”
I searched “dentist.” The clinic with the “Dentist” category ranked second.
A warning about that
Putting “Dentist in Seri Kembangan” inside your business name is against Google’s rules. The name field is supposed to be your real business name only.
So I am not telling you to copy it. I am telling you what I observed. It is working right now, and that is a fact worth knowing whether you like it or not.
If you are a business owner losing to someone doing this, you can report it to Google. That is the correct answer, not copying them.
The part that surprised me most
The report came with an AI analysis. I read it carefully.
It told me to focus on getting more reviews, because I have 70 and Primecare has 1,681.
But Primecare has 1,681 reviews and a SoLV of 12. That number is in the same report, two pages later.
The AI read its own data and still gave the standard advice.
It also told me I was “performing well in the north with an Average Top-3 Rank Position of 3.5.”
I looked at the heatmap. The entire north row is 20+. Not ranked at all. And with a SoLV of 4%, there is only one top-3 position in the whole grid — and it is dead centre, not north.
I am a student. I have zero clients. And I could still find that mistake in ten minutes, because I checked instead of trusting.
That is not me being clever. That is just the difference between reading a number and believing a sentence.
What I would actually recommend
Based on this data, not on general advice:
- Fix the primary category first. If people search “dentist” and your category says “Dental Clinic,” you are answering a slightly different question.
- Check the search term against your real business name. Not by stuffing keywords. But if your real, legal business name already contains a useful word, make sure it is there correctly.
- Reviews still matter — for people, and for how fresh you look. They are just not the ranking button everybody thinks they are.
- Stop measuring your rank from one spot. Your ranking is different at every street. One number tells you nothing.
What I still do not know
I want to be honest about the limits.
- I ran one keyword on one day. One scan is a photograph, not a video.
- The name pattern held across 5 clinics. That is a pattern, not proof.
- I have not tested whether changing a category actually moves the ranking. That is a different experiment, and I will run it.
So I am not claiming reviews are useless. I am claiming that in this market, on this day, review count did not predict visibility — and two other things did.
What is next
Two experiments:
- Run the same grid again in 30 days and see what moved.
- Find a clinic willing to let me change their primary category, and measure the result.
Also worth saying: out of the 76 clinics in this scan, 51 of them have a Share of Local Voice of zero. Two out of three dental clinics in my area are invisible in the top 3 for the most obvious keyword in their industry.
That is a lot of businesses paying rent and being invisible.
I am a Marketing student at Asia Pacific University in Malaysia, learning digital marketing by running real tests and publishing the numbers — including the ones that fail. You can see my other experiments here.
Scan data: Local Falcon, 5×5 grid, 2 km radius, keyword “dentist”, Seri Kembangan, Selangor, 31 July 2026.
