"Is Dr X Good?" Find and Answer Your Reputation Searches in Search Console

Before a patient books, many of them run one more search: the doctor's or hospital's name followed by a word such as "reviews", "good", "complaints" or "fraud". These searches are the last check in the decision. What appears on that results page can settle the booking, and most healthcare marketing teams have never looked at the list of queries that trigger it.

This article is for hospital marketing leads, practice managers and doctors who handle their own online presence. It shows how to pull reputation queries out of Search Console, sort them by what the searcher wants, and decide which ones deserve an answer on your own site, which belong on Google Business Profile, and which you should leave alone.

The stakes are real. In a 2026 survey of 992 patients, rater8 reports that 55% had cancelled or avoided a provider because of reviews. Treat that as one vendor's survey rather than a census, but the direction matches what front desks report: people do check, and they act on what they find.

Why these queries are different from ordinary brand searches

A plain brand search, such as a hospital name on its own, is navigational. The person wants your website or your phone number. A reputation search is evaluative. The person already knows you exist and is asking whether to trust you. The words attached to the name carry the question.

Search Console lets you see these queries for your own verified property, which is more reliable than guessing from keyword tools. It will not show everything. Google anonymises rare queries, so low-volume searches on an individual doctor's name may be missing from the table. The queries you can see still give a working picture, and they are free.

Two points set expectations before you start. First, Search Console only reports searches where your own pages appeared, so a reputation query that never surfaced your site is invisible to you. Second, the report records impressions and clicks, not outcomes. It tells you what people ask. It cannot tell you whether the person then booked elsewhere.

Step 1: Pull the brand and doctor queries

Open the Performance report on Search results. Set the date range to the longest available, which is sixteen months. Then isolate queries that contain a name.

Google added a branded queries filter in November 2025 that splits queries into branded and non-branded groups. Availability varied by property when it launched, so check whether your property shows it. It classifies on your brand and common misspellings, and it may not recognise individual doctors' names as brand terms. Do not rely on it alone.

The dependable method is a custom regular expression on the Query filter. Choose "Custom (regex)", then match each doctor and facility name with its spellings. For a hypothetical hospital called Lakeview Heart Centre with a cardiologist called Dr Anil Mehra, the pattern would combine the names with alternatives such as lakeview, lake view, anil mehra, dr mehra and mehra cardiologist, separated by the pipe character. Google uses RE2 syntax, so keep the pattern simple and test it on a short date range first.

Add the common Hindi-script and transliterated spellings your patients use. Names are spelled several ways in Roman script, and each spelling can appear as a separate query. Export the results to a sheet. The export is limited to the rows the interface shows, so for a large hospital group pull the data through the Search Console API or a Looker Studio connection instead.

Step 2: Tag every query by intent

Sort the exported queries into a small set of intents. A workable scheme for healthcare has six:

• Navigational: the name alone, the name plus "appointment", "contact" or "address".
• Credential check: "dr x mbbs", "dr x qualification", "dr x registration number".
• Quality check: "is dr x good", "dr x reviews", "dr x ratings", "best doctor" with a name.
• Complaint or risk check: "dr x complaint", "hospital x fraud", "hospital x negligence", "hospital x cheating".
• Comparison: "hospital x vs hospital y", "dr x or dr y".
• Price check: "hospital x charges", "dr x fees".

Tag with a formula or a spreadsheet filter on the trigger words, then read the untagged remainder by hand. The untagged queries are often the interesting ones: odd phrasings, regional language terms and misspelled complaints.

Add three columns to the sheet: impressions, clicks, and average position. For each intent group, note the share of impressions. A hospital whose complaint-intent group is a meaningful fraction of its brand impressions has a reputation surface to manage, even if the absolute numbers are small.

Step 3: Look at what those results pages actually show

For each high-impression query, search it yourself in a private window on a phone. Record what occupies the first screen: Business Profile panel, review snippets, third-party directory pages, news items, forum threads, videos, and your own pages. Note which source owns each result position.

This step matters because you control some of these surfaces and not others. A Business Profile panel is partly yours: you can reply to reviews, keep the information current and report policy violations. A directory page is not yours, though you can usually claim and correct the listing. A forum thread or news story is not yours at all, and the right response is usually not to argue with it.

Write one line per query: what the person wants, what they currently see, and who could change it.

Step 4: Decide which queries deserve an answer page

Not every query needs a page. A rule of thumb that keeps work proportionate:

• Credential and navigational queries deserve a strong, accurate doctor or facility profile. Make sure registration details, qualifications, specialities and locations appear in text, not only in an image.
• Quality-check queries are best answered by the Business Profile and by your honest approach to reviews. A page that says "we are good" adds little. For doctors in India, remember that the NMC's advertising rules limit what you can publish about yourself; see our summary of the NMC advertising guidelines and the NMC compliance handbook. Patient testimonials on a doctor's own site are a common breach, so do not solve a reputation query by publishing them.
• Complaint and risk queries need care. Creating a defensive page titled "Is Hospital X a fraud?" repeats the accusation in your own title and can amplify it. Instead, publish neutral pages that a worried person would want anyway: how complaints are handled, the grievance contact, accreditation status with verifiable numbers, and how billing and consent work.
• Comparison queries can be answered with factual service information. Do not name or disparage rivals.
• Price queries are answered with a published range or a clear explanation of what affects the bill, reviewed by your finance team.

A useful page gives a fair, specific answer to the question behind the query. "How we handle patient complaints" is a legitimate page. "Why our critics are wrong" is not.

Step 5: Build the answers on pages you control

For a doctor's profile, include text a cautious patient will look for: full name, registration council and number where the doctor is content to publish it, qualifications with institutions, years in the speciality, areas of practice, languages, and where they consult. Add a short, plain paragraph on what the doctor treats and how a first consultation works. All clinical statements need the doctor's own review.

Mark up the page with schema.org Physician or MedicalClinic where it fits, and keep the markup consistent with the visible text. Structured data does not produce a reputation answer on its own, but it helps search engines connect the person, the clinic and the profile. Our glossary entry on schema markup covers the basics.

Be careful with FAQ markup. Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known government and health sites, so do not expect a visible result from it. Write the questions on the page for the reader and skip the markup chase.

For the grievance and accreditation page, link to the accrediting body's own verification page rather than reproducing a certificate image. A third-party verification link is a stronger signal for a worried reader than self-description.

Step 6: Close the loop with reviews and monitoring

Reputation queries are driven by what the reviews say, and answering them well starts with the Business Profile. Read the recent reviews for each doctor and location, reply in a way that respects patient confidentiality, and never confirm that a named person was a patient. Our guide on Google reviews for doctors covers the reply mechanics and the removal process, and we will not repeat it here.

Set a monthly routine. Re-export the regex query list, compare impressions by intent group with the previous month, and flag new phrasings. A new complaint-intent query that appears out of nowhere is an early warning, often before the front desk hears anything. A Business Profile that suddenly gains a cluster of one-star reviews, or a thread on a public forum, can be checked against the same month's data.

If your team wants alerts rather than a monthly export, a review monitoring tool can send new reviews to one place. AiRatingz at airatingz.com does this for multi-location providers. Whatever tool you use, the decisions remain human: who replies, who escalates, and who speaks to the clinician.

Step 7: Know what not to do

• Do not suppress or buy reviews. Fake or incentivised reviews breach Google's policies and, for doctors, risk regulatory attention.
• Do not publish patient stories without consent and legal review, and for individual doctors in India do not publish testimonials at all.
• Do not threaten reviewers. A legal notice sent to a patient who complained usually becomes the story.
• Do not chase every query. A handful of searches per month on an unusual phrase is not a strategy gap.

A monthly checklist

1. Export reputation queries for the last month and the last sixteen months.
2. Tag by intent: navigational, credential, quality, complaint, comparison, price.
3. Search the top ten by impressions on a phone and record who owns each result.
4. Check each doctor profile for registration, qualifications and consultation details in text.
5. Read new reviews and reply within your agreed window, with clinical review where needed.
6. Note new complaint-intent phrasings and pass them to the patient relations lead.
7. Update the grievance and accreditation page if anything changed.

Search Console will not fix a reputation problem, but it tells you which questions patients are asking about you in their own words. Our reputation SEO service is built around the same routine.