Search for a service and a place on a phone and the first thing you see is usually a map with three businesses under it. Most taps go there. Ordinary web results sit below, often below the fold.
Getting into that block is a different exercise from ranking a page, and it rewards different work.
The three things that decide it
Google describes local ranking as a combination of relevance, distance and prominence. That framing is more useful than it first appears.
Relevance is how well your listing matches the search. This is the part you control most directly, through categories, services, and the content on the page you link to.
Distance is how close you are to the searcher. You cannot change this, and it is why a practice cannot realistically rank in the map results for a neighbourhood on the other side of the city. It is also why trying to is wasted effort.
Prominence is how well known and well regarded you appear to be, built from reviews, mentions of your practice elsewhere on the web, and the general strength of your online presence.
Verification comes first
An unverified listing will not compete. Verification in Nigeria is usually by postcard, phone or video, and can take a couple of attempts. It is the prerequisite for everything else, so start it before any other local work.
Reviews carry real weight
Both the number and the recency matter. A practice with a steady trickle of recent reviews looks alive; one with a burst of reviews two years ago does not. Responding to reviews, including critical ones, is visible to both patients and Google.
Ask patients at the point where they are most satisfied, which is usually just after a good outcome rather than at the desk on the way out. Never buy reviews. It is detectable, and the penalty is losing the listing.
Consistency across the web
Your name, address and phone number appear on directories, association listings, health portals and social profiles. Where those disagree, they weaken the signal that you are one established business at one address. Auditing and correcting them is dull work with a real payoff.
The page you link to
Point the listing at the most relevant page, not reflexively at the homepage. For a multi-branch group, each listing should point at that branch's page. The content of that page feeds the relevance judgement.
What does not work
Creating multiple listings for one location, using a virtual office address, stuffing keywords into your business name, or listing an address where patients cannot actually attend. All of these are against the guidelines, all are enforced, and losing a verified listing with years of reviews is a serious setback.
The honest version of this work is slower and it holds. Our local search service covers the listing, the citations and the page behind it as one piece, because improving any of them alone tends not to move the map.