Med Spa Directories: Where to List Your Clinic and Which Listings Matter

Which directories should a med spa be listed on? Start with the four free map listings (Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and your Facebook page), then claim the aesthetics directories that rank in your city, then ask your injectable and device reps to put you in their provider locators. Skip anything that charges before it can show you patients.

That order matters more than the list itself. Most clinics are already listed on a dozen sites they have never opened, because directories build profiles from public data whether you ask them to or not. The work is not getting listed. It is finding the listings patients actually see, making them correct, and ignoring the rest.

We run one of those directories. ClinicCompass lists more than 9,000 med spas and aesthetic clinics across more than 450 cities in the US and Canada, plus plastic surgeons and dermatologists, so we see what a listing looks like when nobody owns it and what changes when someone does. We will be honest about where we fit, including where we do not.

Why directories still matter in 2026

A patient choosing a med spa rarely goes straight to one clinic’s website. They search “Botox near me” or “best med spa in Dallas”, look at the map, open a few profiles and read reviews. Directories sit in the middle of that path in three ways.

They rank for the searches you want. On “best med spa in [city]” searches, the first organic results are very often lists: Yelp, a “best of” site, a directory page. A single clinic website rarely outranks those for a “best” query, because Google reads that query as a request for a comparison. If you cannot be the list, you want to be on it, and you want your entry to be right.

They feed what AI assistants say about you. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer “where should I get filler in Austin” by reading the web, and directories are a large part of what they read. An old phone number or a treatment you dropped two years ago can show up in an AI answer long after you fixed your own site. We covered that in detail in how to get your med spa recommended by ChatGPT and the follow-up GEO checklist for clinics.

They confirm you are real. Google cross-checks your name, address and phone number across the web. When those match everywhere, your map listing has a cleaner record behind it. When they conflict (an old suite number, a former business name, a call-tracking number on one site and your main line on another), you give Google and patients a reason to doubt which one is right.

The short version: five tiers

Tier	Listings	Cost	Time to fix
1. Map listings	Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Facebook	Free	One afternoon
2. Aesthetics and review directories	RealSelf, ClinicCompass, Yelp, any directory that ranks in your city	Free to claim; paid upgrades optional	20 to 40 minutes each
3. Brand and device locators	Your neurotoxin, filler and device manufacturers’ “find a provider” tools	Free, usually tied to your account	One email to each rep
4. Professional finders	ASPS and The Aesthetic Society for surgeons, AAD for dermatologists, trade associations	Membership	Only if you already belong
5. Booking marketplaces	The consumer side of your booking software, Zocdoc for physician practices	Varies, sometimes per booking	Only if it fits how you book

Work from the top. A clinic with a perfect Google Business Profile and nothing else is in better shape than one with 40 directory profiles and a Google listing that still shows last year’s hours.

Tier 1: the four map listings

These are where most patients first meet you, and all four are free.

Google Business Profile. This one matters most. Use “Medical spa” as your primary category if that is what you are, add secondary categories only for things you actually do, list every treatment as a service, and keep hours, holiday hours and your booking link current. Post photos of your real rooms and real providers, not stock. ScaleHaven has a full walk-through in its Google Business Profile guide for med spas, and reviews, which feed this listing more than anything else, are covered in our post on how to get more Google reviews.

Apple Business Connect. Every iPhone user who asks Siri for a med spa, or opens Apple Maps, sees the Apple place card. Most clinics have never claimed theirs, which means it is running on whatever data Apple picked up. Claiming it lets you set your photos, hours, categories and an action button that can point to your booking page.

Bing Places. Bing powers more than its own search box, and its data reaches other assistants and tools. Bing Places can import your Google Business Profile in a few clicks, so this one takes ten minutes. Do it once, then check it twice a year.

Facebook and Instagram. Your Facebook page behaves like a directory listing: patients search it, it ranks for your name, and its hours and address get read by other sites. Match the name, address and phone exactly to Google. Instagram is where patients go to see your work, so make sure the profile links to the same booking page.

Tier 2: aesthetics and review directories

This is where most owners either do nothing or spend too much. Here is how we would think about each type.

RealSelf. The largest aesthetics review site, built around physicians first (plastic surgeons and dermatologists), with other providers second. If you have a physician injecting or overseeing treatment, a complete profile with real before-and-after photos and answered patient questions can carry weight, especially for surgical and higher-ticket treatments. It sells paid programs. Claim the free profile first and see what it does for you before paying for anything.

Yelp. Yelp ranks for “med spa near me” in most US cities, so your listing will be seen whether you like Yelp or not. Claim it, fix the details, add photos and reply to reviews. Two cautions. Yelp’s guidelines tell businesses not to ask for reviews, which is the opposite of how you treat Google, and its software filters some reviews out of the main count. Yelp ads are rarely the first place to spend a med spa’s money.

Aesthetics directories, ours included. There are several directories built only for aesthetics: some list med spas only, some list surgeons, some focus on “top 3” or “best of” lists in each city. Judge each one with the five questions further down, not by its sales page. The one test that matters most is simple: search your treatment and city, and see whether that directory shows up on the first page. If it does not rank where your patients search, a profile there is a pleasant fiction.

Healthgrades and similar physician sites. These build profiles for physicians from public provider data. If your medical director or a physician injector has one, make sure the practice address and phone on it are yours.

Tier 3: manufacturer and device locators

This is the most overlooked source of qualified patients in the business. When a patient lands on a neurotoxin or filler brand’s website, or on a device maker’s site after seeing an ad for a treatment, they are offered a “find a provider” tool. Those patients already know what they want.

Listings are usually tied to your account with the manufacturer, and sometimes to purchase volume, training or a loyalty program. The rules differ by brand and change often, so do not guess:

• Email each of your reps (neurotoxins, fillers, biostimulators, skin boosters) and ask whether you appear in their provider locator, what it takes to be listed, and how to correct your details.
• Do the same for every device you own: microneedling, lasers, body contouring, facials. Most device makers run a locator, and a $100,000 device that is invisible on its own maker’s site is money left on the table.
• Search your own clinic in each locator once a quarter. Addresses go stale and listings drop off when an account changes hands.

Tier 4: professional finders

For plastic surgeons, the “find a surgeon” tools run by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and The Aesthetic Society carry real trust, because a patient checking board certification often starts there. For dermatology practices, the American Academy of Dermatology’s finder plays the same role. These come with membership, so they are not something you buy for marketing. If you belong, keep the profile complete. If you are a med spa, these do not apply to you, and that is fine.

Surgeons have a longer path to a booked consult than med spas, and directories play a bigger part in it. We wrote the surgeon version of this system in the consultation funnel, and ScaleHaven covers the wider picture in its plastic surgery marketing guide.

Tier 5: booking marketplaces

Some booking tools come with a consumer marketplace where patients can find you and book. If you already use that software, keep the marketplace profile accurate, because it may rank for your clinic name. Physician booking marketplaces such as Zocdoc can charge per new patient booking, which suits some dermatology practices and rarely suits a cash-pay med spa. Read the fee terms before you turn one on.

The bigger point: patients who book through a marketplace sometimes belong more to the marketplace than to you. Wherever you can, send patients to your own booking page, the one your front desk already works from. Nothing about a directory should require you to adopt new software.

Five questions to judge any directory

Use these before you claim, and especially before you pay.

1. Does it rank where your patients search? Search “[your top treatment] in [your city]” and “best med spa in [your city]” in a private window. If the directory is not on page one or two, its traffic is not coming from those searches.
2. Does it send patients to you, or keep them? Look at a clinic profile. Is there a clear way to call, book or reach the clinic’s website? Or does every button lead to the directory’s own form, which it then sells to several clinics?
3. Who gets the patient’s request? If a directory collects consultation requests, find out whether a request goes to one clinic or is shared. A request sold to five clinics is a race to the phone, and the patient learns to ignore all of you.
4. Is anything paid labeled? A directory that sells the top of a “best” list without saying so is misleading patients, and that eventually costs everyone on the list. Paid placement is normal. Hidden paid placement is the problem.
5. Can you fix it yourself? If correcting your hours takes three emails and a week, the listing will drift out of date the next time anything changes.

Keep your name, address and phone the same everywhere

Before you touch individual listings, write down the exact version of your details you want everywhere: the clinic name as it appears on your sign (no keywords stuffed in), the address with the same suite format, one main phone number and one website URL. Every listing gets that exact text.

Three common mistakes:

• Keyword-stuffed names. “Glow Med Spa | Botox Filler Dallas” breaks Google’s guidelines and can get the profile suspended. Use your real name.
• Call-tracking numbers on public listings. If you track calls, set the tracking number as the primary on Google and keep your main line as an additional number, so the main number stays connected to your record everywhere else.
• Old locations. If you moved, search your old address and old phone number. Every directory still showing them needs a correction or a closure request.

A few data companies, such as Data Axle, Foursquare and Localeze, supply business data to maps, apps and smaller directories. Fixing your record with them can clean up dozens of small sites at once, and some of them offer free updates. ScaleHaven’s guide to local SEO for med spas covers how listings fit into local ranking as a whole.

What directories say about you to AI assistants

When an AI assistant describes your clinic, it pulls from many sources and blends them. Three habits help:

• List treatments by their real names on every profile you control. “Botox, Dysport, lip filler, Morpheus8” is more useful to a patient and to an assistant than “injectables and skin tightening.”
• Name your providers and their credentials where a directory allows it. “Nurse injector, eight years” says more than “experienced team.”
• Keep reviews coming on more than one site. Assistants summarize what patients say, and a steady flow on Google, plus a smaller one on whichever review site ranks in your city, gives them more to work from.

None of this involves paying anyone. On ClinicCompass, nothing a clinic pays changes its place on our ranked Best lists or what we say about it, and no directory can sell you an AI citation. Be wary of anyone who claims they can.

Where ClinicCompass fits

You are probably already on ClinicCompass, whether you have looked or not. We build every listing from public data on practices that clear a listing bar (a Google rating of 4.3 or better and a solid review count), and we tag each clinic’s treatments from its own website, not from guesses.

A listing nobody has claimed works, but it can lag behind: a treatment you added last month is missing, the hours are Google’s, and the photo is whatever we found. Claiming your listing is free and takes a couple of minutes. A claimed listing gets:

• A Verified badge, so patients know an owner keeps it current.
• Your own edits to treatments, hours, photos, booking link and your About section.
• Consultation requests sent straight to your inbox.
• Your rank in your city, who is just ahead of you, and what would move you.

Two honest notes. Our links to your website are nofollow, like the links on most directories, so the value of the listing is the patient who arrives, not an SEO boost. And we tag those links so the visits show up in your own Google Analytics under ClinicCompass as the source. You do not have to take our word for what we send you.

Featured is our paid upgrade. It puts your clinic at the top of your city’s pages and every treatment page you are listed for, above your competitors, with your own button (Book now, Call now, or whichever you choose), your own offer, more photos and a star on the map. It is labeled Featured wherever it appears. What it does not do is change your place on a ranked Best list; that order comes from your Google rating and how many reviews back it. The details and current prices are on the list your clinic page. If you are not listed yet, you can add your clinic on the same page, and you can browse every city we cover to see your market.

What not to spend money on

• Bulk citation packages. “We’ll list you on 300 directories” mostly buys profiles on sites nobody visits. The ten listings in this post do more than the other 290.
• Paid upgrades on directories that do not rank in your city. Test with the search above before paying anyone, us included.
• Pay-per-lead directories that sell the same request to several clinics. You pay for a race you often lose, and the patient gets three calls in ten minutes.
• Unlabeled “best of” awards you pay to receive. Patients have learned to read a paid badge for what it is.
• Deep discount marketplaces. They fill chairs with people looking for the lowest price, not patients who come back. A named offer, such as a first-visit neurotoxin offer, does more than 40% off.
• Software you would have to adopt just to be listed. A good directory sends patients to the booking system you already use.

Listings are the base, not the growth

A clean set of listings makes every other channel work better: ads land on a clinic patients can verify, reviews accumulate in the places patients read, and AI assistants describe you correctly. But listings do not create demand on their own. The clinics that grow fastest pair correct listings with providers on camera, named offers, and a front desk that answers every request within five minutes, which we laid out in speed to lead. The full system is in the every-channel guide.

This week

• Write down your exact name, address, phone and website, and use only that version from now on.
• Claim or check Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and Facebook. Fix anything that does not match.
• Search your top treatment and “best med spa” in your city, and claim the directories that show up on page one.
• Email every injectable and device rep and ask whether you are in their provider locator.
• Search your old address and old phone number, and correct anything still showing them.
• Claim your free ClinicCompass listing and check that your treatments, hours and booking link are right.

Listings are work your own team can do in a week, and most clinics should. If you would rather have the visibility work handled for you, from med spa SEO to Google and Meta ads that bring in qualified, booked patients, that is what ScaleHaven does for aesthetic clinics. Leads go straight to your front desk and book into the system you already use.