Evolve, LLC — Free Visibility Audit
Aspen Dental — Albany, NY
Here’s where the Aspen Dental office at 979 Central Ave stands in the Albany market for general dentistry. Every number below comes from live data — Google Maps, a 95-point geographic ranking grid, live search results for Albany, page-speed testing, and AI-readiness probes run against your site.
Agency Audit Overview — Free Visibility Audit
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Core Visibility 53% On Track |
AI Visibility (AISO) 33% Needs Attention |
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Strategic Readiness 72% Strong Foundation |
Technical Maturity 74% Strong Foundation |
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Gaps Found 9 |
Critical Priority 5 |
Overall · On Track 56% 0.35·53 + 0.25·33 + 0.20·72 + 0.20·74 = 56 |
Not Appearing in the Map Pack
You do not rank in the top 20 for “dentist” across 88% of the search area.
The rest of this audit is scored on its own merits below, and the fundamentals may well be strong — but map-pack placement is how local customers actually find you. Until that changes, the strength of everything else is potential rather than traffic.
This is an unusual profile, and the split is the whole story. The website behind this office is one of the strongest dental web properties in the country — deep service content, clean architecture, and an enormous link profile. Strategic Readiness and Technical Maturity both land in the top band because of it. Core Visibility is the weak axis: on the ground in Albany, this office is barely present on the map. AI Visibility is weaker still, because a site with that much authority is publishing zero structured data for the systems that now answer “who’s a good dentist near me.” The national platform is strong. The Albany footprint isn’t inheriting it.
Score Breakdown — Core Visibility
| Dimension | Score | What the data shows |
|---|---|---|
| Google Profile Strength | 10/14 | Claimed profile with 815 reviews — the largest review base of any dental practice in this comparison set — but a 4.0 rating that sits below the 4.3 threshold where Google’s local trust signals start compounding. |
| Map Pack Visibility | 2/20 | Across 95 scanned map points around Albany, this office lands in the top 3 on 1% and is not in top 20 on 87%. Only 12 of 95 pins returned it at all. |
| Review Authority | 10/14 | 815 reviews beats Albany Dental Care’s 269 by 3x on volume, but 4.0 stars against their 4.8 loses the comparison a patient actually makes — you lead on one dimension and trail badly on the other. |
| Competitive Position | 5/12 | This office doesn’t hold the #1 spot anywhere on the scanned grid. Western Dental Care holds #1 on 16 of the 95 pins and Albany Dental Care on 9 — between them they own a quarter of the map’s top spot. |
| Review Velocity | 10/10 | The newest review Google sampled landed 7 August 2026 — about three weeks before this scan. Reviews are arriving right now, which is the one Core signal that’s working in your favour. |
Core Visibility: 37/70 · 53%
Where You Rank Across Albany
A live 11×11 grid scan of Google Maps ranking around 979 Central Ave. Each pin shows your position when someone searches for a dentist from that exact spot; the colour key is on the map.
Scanned for “dentist” · 11 grid
Open full interactive heatmap →
Ranking Breakdown — 95 pins scanned
5% in top 10
8% ranked 11–20
87% not in top 20
The single most important number here is 87% — that’s the share of the 95 scanned points where this office doesn’t rank in the top 20 for a dentist search. Your business doesn’t currently hold the #1 spot anywhere on the grid, and it reaches the top 3 on a single pin. Average position across the grid works out to roughly 19, with unranked pins scored as 20, so treat that as directional rather than exact: it means “mostly absent.” We cross-checked this against Google’s own ranked list of dentists for Albany, and the result matched — across the top 20 local results Google returns for “dentist” in Albany, this office does not appear once. Meanwhile Western Dental Care takes the top spot on 16 of the 95 pins and Albany Dental Care appears somewhere in the top 20 on 80 of them. That’s a practice with 269 reviews out-covering a practice with 815. The map isn’t rewarding volume here — it’s rewarding rating, relevance, and local signal strength, and that’s where the gap sits.
VERIFY WITH CLIENT
Is the Albany office at 979 Central Ave managed independently from the Rensselaer / East Greenbush office, or do both sit under the same ownership group? Two nearby offices under one brand can compete for the same map pins, and how we sequence the fix depends on whether that’s one budget or two.
3 Critical Gaps
You’re outside the top 20 on 87% of the Albany map
Of 95 scanned points around your office, 83 returned no listing for you in the top 20. You reach the top 3 on one. We confirmed the same pattern in Google’s ranked list of Albany dentists: 20 practices are listed and you aren’t among them — including Bethlehem Town Family Dental, The Smile Zone, and Dental Wellness of Albany, all of which sit further from the city centre than you do.
Business impact: “Dentist” alone draws roughly 720 searches a month in this market, and paid clicks on that term run around $8.45. You are currently paying nothing to be invisible on it, and capturing nothing — while the practice three miles away collects the calls.
A 4.0 rating in a market where the visible practices sit at 4.7–4.9
Albany Dental Care is 4.8 across 269 reviews. Western Dental Care is 4.8 across 377. Albany Dental Team is 4.8 across 266. Alvarez Dental is 4.7 across 127. You have more reviews than all four combined, and the lowest rating of the group. Reviews are still arriving — the most recent one Google sampled is three weeks old — which means the rating is movable, not fixed.
Business impact: Rating is the first filter a patient applies, and it is one of the signals Google weighs when deciding which practices to surface on the map. At 4.0 you are being filtered out twice — once by the algorithm before the patient ever sees you, and again by the patient when you do appear.
Mobile page speed is throwing away a genuinely elite link profile
Your domain has 3,909 referring domains and over 561,000 backlinks with a near-zero spam score — authority most local practices could never build. But the mobile experience scores 41 out of 100 on Google’s performance test, with a largest-contentful-paint of 8.2 seconds. Desktop is far healthier at 1.8 seconds. Nearly every dental search starts on a phone.
Business impact: An eight-second wait on mobile means a meaningful share of the patients who do find you never see the page. You’ve already won the hardest part of SEO; the page load is where that advantage leaks out.
Your Top 2 AI Visibility Gaps
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are becoming the first stop for “who’s a good dentist near me.” Here’s where the Albany practice is invisible to them right now. The good news first: all four major AI crawlers are allowed through your robots.txt, so nothing is blocking them. The problem is what they find when they arrive.
Pillar 1 — Structured Data & Schema
0 / 7 — Critical Status
We fetched your homepage and found zero JSON-LD structured data blocks — no Dentist or LocalBusiness entity, no Service definitions, no FAQPage, no AggregateRating. For a site with 78 mapped pages covering dentures, implants, aligners, oral surgery, and emergency care, there is nothing machine-readable telling an AI system what any of it is.
Business impact: When someone asks an AI assistant for a dentist in Albany, the systems that answer read structured data first — and yours gives them nothing to read, so they describe someone else’s practice instead of yours.
Pillar 5 — Content Freshness & Depth
0 / 3 — Critical Status
None of the pages we sampled carry a visible publish or updated date, and no most-recent-publish signal could be detected anywhere on the site. Your service content is substantial, but it is undated from a machine’s point of view.
Business impact: AI systems weight recency heavily when deciding which source to cite on health questions — undated content reads as content of unknown age, and unknown age loses to a competitor’s dated page every time.
Want the full 6-pillar AI Visibility breakdown? See what Medium and Full audits include →
Strategic Readiness — 72% (Strong Foundation)
This is your strongest axis and it isn’t close. The site serves transactional intent (a scheduler, an appointment path), local intent (a dedicated Albany office page at 979 Central Avenue with its own dentures, implants, oral surgery, emergency, and clear-aligner sub-pages), and commercial-comparison intent (cost pages, financing, a savings plan, insurance). Topic depth is genuinely deep — the dentures hub alone runs seven sub-pages, implants six. Where it thins out is architecture and local specificity: we found seven problem URLs, including four duplicate-intent paths where the same topic lives at two addresses (dentures sits at both /dentures/ and /patient-resources/dentures/) and three slugs carrying marketing words rather than search terms. No sitemap.xml was detected either, which means Google is discovering those 78 pages the slow way. And the Albany office pages are national templates — they say Albany, but nothing in them is about Albany.
BIGGEST STRATEGIC GAP
Templated local pages with no Albany substance — add genuinely local content to the 979 Central Avenue pages: named clinicians, accepted Capital Region insurance carriers, neighbourhoods served, and Albany-specific patient answers, so the page competes on local relevance and not just on the brand name.
Medium + Full audits dig into the 4 Strategic dimensions individually.
Technical Maturity — 74% (Strong Foundation)
Off-page authority is exceptional — 3,909 referring domains, 561,296 backlinks, 283,351 of them dofollow, and a spam score of 1. That is a fundamentally clean, fundamentally powerful link profile, and it is the single biggest asset in this audit. Content architecture is strong too: every service has its own page and every page is one click from the homepage. Conversion paths are well built, with a scheduler in the hero and click-to-call throughout. The two weak dimensions are performance and on-page hygiene. Mobile performance scores 41 with an 8.2-second largest-contentful-paint, and total blocking time runs 754ms on mobile and 1,094ms on desktop — that’s JavaScript holding the page hostage. On-page health is dragged down by the duplicate-intent URL pairs, which split ranking signals between two versions of the same page.
BIGGEST TECHNICAL GAP
8.2-second mobile load — audit third-party and tracking scripts on the mobile hero, defer everything not needed for first paint, and get largest-contentful-paint under 2.5 seconds. Nothing else on this list returns as much per hour of work.
Medium + Full audits expand into Lighthouse + page-level on-page audit + content architecture + brand positioning.
Competitive Snapshot
| Practice | Rating | Reviews | Pins in Top 20 (of 95) | #1 Pins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aspen Dental (you) | 4.0 | 815 | 12 | 0 |
| Albany Dental Care, P.C. | 4.8 | 269 | 80 | 9 |
| Western Dental Care P.C. | 4.8 | 377 | 46 | 16 |
| Emergency Dental Service New Rochelle | No reviews | 0 | 40 | 1 |
Read the last row carefully. A listing with no rating and no reviews at all is covering 40 of the 95 pins — more than three times your coverage. That tells you the map is not being won on reputation alone in this market; it is being won on category relevance and local signal strength, and there is a listing exploiting that gap while you sit on the largest review base in the comparison. Albany Dental Care is the one to watch properly: 80 of 95 pins with a fraction of your reviews and a fraction of your domain authority.
Citation Breakdown
The directory scan didn’t return data for this location on this run, so we can’t report a NAP-accuracy count. What we could verify directly is below — and for a practice operating under a national brand, the directory question matters more than usual, because inconsistent office-level details across directories are exactly what causes a strong national brand to underperform at a single address.
Dental Authority Directory Presence
General citation directories matter for Google Maps trust. Dental-specific authority directories matter for how Google ranks practices in healthcare results and which practices AI systems cite when someone asks for a dentist. We searched each of these directly for the Albany location:
Verification Summary — 2 of 5 dental directories list your Albany practice
| Directory | Status | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Zocdoc | NOT FOUND | Booking-platform first-stop in most metros; profile + booking widget directly drive appointment volume |
| ADA Find-a-Dentist | NOT FOUND | American Dental Association authority directory; consumer-trust signal Google reads for dental results |
| Healthgrades | PRESENT | Highest-traffic medical/dental review aggregator; ratings shown directly in Google healthcare results |
| 1-800-DENTIST | UNCERTAIN | National referral aggregator ranking for “dentist near me” intent in nearly every metro |
| Yelp | PRESENT | Universal consumer-review signal; second-most-trafficked source after Google for local dental searches |
Two present, two missing, one inconclusive. Healthgrades carries a live group-directory profile for the Albany office and Yelp has one too — though the Yelp profile shows 49 reviews against your Google total of 815, and it’s currently categorised under Oral Surgeons rather than Dentists, which is a category mismatch worth correcting. The two absences are the ones that cost you. Zocdoc is where a patient who has decided to book actually goes, and the ADA’s find-a-dentist tool is the directory Google treats as a consumer-trust signal for dental queries. Both are addressable. Also worth noting: we found a Bing-indexed Better Business Bureau profile and a Birdeye profile carrying 1,008 reviews for this office — a third review count, different from both Google’s 815 and Yelp’s 49, which is exactly the kind of fragmentation that dilutes a practice’s entity signal.
Accessibility & ADA Readiness
96/100 mobile · 100/100 desktop — your site already passes most automated accessibility checks, which is a strong foundation. The one flagged issue is touch-target sizing on 15 mobile elements — buttons and links too small or too tightly spaced to tap reliably.
A Medium audit ($49) runs the full WCAG-aligned audit and names the top 3 specific fixes. ADA accessibility lawsuits against healthcare providers are rising every year — this is one of the highest-leverage protections you can put in place, and you are starting from an unusually good position.
3 Quick Wins — This Week
1. Put structured data on the Albany office page
We fetched your site and found zero JSON-LD blocks. Add a Dentist entity to /dentist/ny/albany/979-central-avenue-suite-400/ with the address, phone, opening hours, accepted insurance, and a Service entry per treatment offered at that office — plus AggregateRating reflecting the real Google figures. Here’s the part that makes this urgent rather than routine: we also checked your competitors’ schema. Albany Dental Team has none. Western Dental Care has one block and it contains no business entity at all. Delmar Family Dentistry blocked our check. Nobody in this market has claimed this ground yet, and you have the domain authority to take it in a single deployment.
2. Create a Zocdoc profile for 979 Central Ave
We searched Zocdoc for this practice in Albany and found no profile. Zocdoc is where a patient goes once they’ve decided to book rather than browse, and it integrates with most practice-management systems. While you’re there, fix the Yelp category — your Albany profile is filed under Oral Surgeons, not Dentists, which keeps it out of the exact category listing where 49 of your reviews could be doing work for you.
3. Start a same-day review request from the front desk
You are already earning reviews — the newest one Google sampled arrived three weeks ago. The issue is the mix, not the flow. Send a review request by text within 24 hours of every completed appointment where the patient left satisfied, and respond publicly to every review from the last 90 days, positive and negative. At 815 reviews you need sustained new five-star volume to move a 4.0, so start the cadence now rather than after the other fixes land — this is the one item where the clock genuinely matters.
What a Full Audit Reveals
This report shows two of your six AI Visibility pillars. A Medium audit opens the complete 6-pillar AISO scorecard with a strategic read on each — and a Full audit benchmarks all six against five named Albany competitors so you can see exactly where the AI-search gap sits in this specific market. Beyond that: a keyword gap analysis against the practices currently outranking you, a page-level on-page and technical SEO audit, a full schema markup specification for the Albany office, a WCAG-aligned accessibility audit with a prioritised fix list, a 90-day strategic roadmap with phased actions, and a content calendar mapped to the four search intents patients actually use — including the People Also Ask questions Google is already surfacing for dental searches in Albany, such as “Who is the best cosmetic dentist near Albany, NY?”
Want to Turn These Gaps Into Growth?
This snapshot only scratches the surface. Book a free strategy call with Jim at Evolve — we’ll walk through your numbers, answer your questions, and map out exactly what it takes to start winning in your market.
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No pressure. No pitch deck. Just a straight conversation about where you stand and what’s possible.
Analysis prepared using live Google Maps data, a 95-point geographic ranking grid scan, live Albany search results, page-speed and accessibility testing, backlink analysis, and direct directory verification. Generated August 2026.
Evolve, LLC
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