Who Owns Edmonton Dentistry?
Measuring Local Search Visibility Across 90 Grid Points and 483 Queries.

I.

The short version

Edmonton dentistry has a measured local search market. We tracked 483 distinct keywords, pulled the organic top 20 and the local pack on both desktop and mobile for every one of them, and separately ran a 90-point geo-grid across the entire metro to score every competitor's Share of Local Voice, our name for how much of that grid a business's map-pack listing actually occupies. The two measurements were taken from the same city, in the same window, and they do not agree on who is winning.

Four findings carry the whole study. One: demand is concentrated, not diffuse; the top 10 keywords hold 77.8% of the market's 56,570 monthly searches. Two: the market splits into two genuinely separate contests, organic results and the local pack, and winning one rarely means winning the other; only 28.8% of pack placements also reach the organic top 10 for the same query. Three: a citywide keyword-based pull and a spatial geo-grid sweep measure different things entirely; only 4 of the top 25 businesses in our central pull also appear in the top 25 by Share of Local Voice, and 10 of the grid's top 25 never showed up in the citywide pull at all. Four:the sharpest single illustration of all of this is one business, Albany Dental, the strongest organic name in the market by content quality and the single most instructive absence in the pack.

What follows is the full measurement, in the order each finding actually leads to the next one.

II.

Edmonton dentistry has a query universe

Every local market has an attribute that comes before any ranking question: the actual set of things people type into Google to find it. For Edmonton dentistry, at our July 2026 measurement, that query universe holds 483 distinct keywords, carrying a combined 56,570 searches a month, pulled with the location set to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on both desktop and mobile, to a top-20 depth on each device.

Of those 483 keywords, only 79 carry a nonzero CPC value, averaging $19.59, and only 125 carry a reported Keyword Difficulty score, averaging a modest 16.2 out of 100. Read naively, that reads as a low-difficulty market. It is not. Keyword Difficulty here measures backlink-based organic difficulty; it says nothing about local-pack contention, which is the fiercer and more geography-bound fight this study is actually about. The five highest-CPC keywords in the set are all urgent, transactional intent: after-hours dentist Edmonton at $56.42, dentist open Sunday Edmonton at $49.77, dentist open Saturday Edmonton at $40.94, good dentist Edmonton at $38.70, and cheap dentist Edmonton at $38.20. Advertisers pay the most for the moment someone needs a dentist right now; that is a separate, smaller, and sharper-edged slice of the market than the head terms driving most of its volume.

The query universe itself has an attribute: it groups into intent categories, and the value of that grouping is twelve categories.

III.

The 483 queries group into 12 intent categories, and the categories reveal demand concentration

Sorting all 483 keywords by intent produces twelve categories. The largest by far is general, 222 keywords and 34,030 in monthly volume, a catch-all of near-duplicate head-term phrasing: dentist Edmonton, Edmonton dentist, dentists Edmonton, dentistry Edmonton, Edmonton dentistry, each independently carrying 5,400 searches a month. That is a keyword-expansion artifact of how these tools track near-identical phrasing, not 222 meaningfully distinct intents, and it is worth naming plainly so nobody mistakes category count for market complexity.

Behind general, the next-largest categories by volume are near-me/nearby (12 keywords, 14,270/mo, led by dentist near me at 8,100/mo), cosmetic/whitening (31 keywords, 2,710/mo), orthodontics (18 keywords, 1,970/mo), and pediatric/family (24 keywords, 1,370/mo). At the bottom of the table, emergency/urgent carries 35 tracked keywords but only 100 in combined monthly volume, and insurance/direct-billing carries 7 keywords at zero tracked volume. Category count and category volume move in almost opposite directions across this market: the categories people write the most think-pieces about, emergency and new-patient booking, carry almost none of the measured demand.

What the category breakdown reveals, once you sum it, is the demand concentration shown in Exhibit A above: 77.8% of everything searched in this market sits in ten keywords, and 90.3% sits in twenty. The remaining 463 tracked keywords, the entire long tail of neighbourhood names, procedures, cost questions, and insurance phrasing, carry just 9.7% of demand between them. That concentration is the value this section hands forward: it means the market's real contest is not fought across 483 fronts, it is fought hardest on roughly ten, and everything that happens on those ten head terms is rendered on a results page that is itself split into two separate arenas.

IV.

Demand concentration is contested in two arenas: organic results and the local pack

At our July 2026 measurement, the local pack was present on 93.0% of all 483 tracked keywords, 449 of them, cross-verified two ways: directly against the Local Pack sheets, and independently against the SERP-feature tag on the Keywords sheet, which agreed exactly. Organic results render on 100% of queries by definition. People Also Ask renders on 88.2%, related searches on 87.8%, and AI Overview, notably, now appears on exactly half of all tracked queries, more real estate above the fold than the featured snippet (0.6%) or the knowledge panel (5.4%) combined many times over.

The practical read of Exhibit B is that a dental practice competing for one of this market's head terms is not fighting one battle, it is fighting at least two at once, almost simultaneously on the same page: the organic ten-result list, which rewards on-page content and link authority, and the map pack sitting above or beside it, which rewards a different scoring system entirely. Both are governed by different rules, and the rule governing the pack is the one that decides most of what follows in this study.

V.

The local pack is governed by proximity, demonstrated by device divergence and the central-versus-grid gap

Distance is one of the inputs Google names directly for local ranking, and this dataset shows its footprint in two separate ways. The first is device divergence: 100 of 483 tracked keywords, about 21% of the set, show a different organic #1 winner between desktop and mobile, carrying a combined 16,960 in monthly volume. Albany Dental's organic #1 count nearly doubles on mobile versus desktop, five to nine, attributed to a render-parity build, byte-identical desktop and mobile HTML at 157 KB with 69 lazy-loaded images, giving it the strongest net mobile gain of any domain in the divergent set. Strathcona Dental shows the mirror pattern, six desktop-only #1 wins in the same divergent set, the most of any domain. Since the local pack is materially more prominent above the fold on mobile screens, and since our own 90-point geo-grid sweep was deliberately run on mobile local-finder results to model that exact searcher experience, device and proximity are not separate stories in this market. They move together.

The second, and larger, demonstration of proximity's power is the gap between a citywide keyword-based pull and a spatial geo-grid sweep of the same city. A citywide pull queries "dentist Edmonton" or its near-duplicates from one implicit location context, typically centroid-biased. A geo-grid sweep runs the same underlying query, plainly "dentist," from 90 separate points spread across the entire metro. These are not two ways of measuring the same thing; they are two different instruments, and Exhibit C shows exactly how differently they read the market.

Only 4 of the top 25 businesses in our central, citywide map-pack pull also land in the top 25 by Share of Local Voice across the 90-point grid: Smile Zone, Forest Heights Family Dental, Norwood Dental Alberta Avenue, and Manchester Dental Edmonton. Every one of the other 21 names in the citywide top 25, including the market's second-strongest citywide name, Bridgeview Dental Clinic, either ranks far outside the grid's top 25 or is entirely absent from the 296-business grid roster. Bridgeview is the sharpest case: 125 citywide pack appearances, second overall in the central pull, and confirmed, by direct search of the raw grid-selection log rather than a naming mismatch, absent from every single one of the 90 grid cells. Five more central top-25 names, PerioPartners, Sphinx Orthodontics, Avenue Pediatric Dentistry, Central Aesthetics Denture Clinic, and Strathcona Orthodontics, are equally absent from the entire 296-business grid roster.

Run the comparison the other direction and the pattern holds. Ten of the grid's top 25 businesses by Share of Local Voice, including clinics anchored in Southgate, Avalon, Kensington, Millwoods, Skyview, Hillview, Millbourne Mall, Sherbrooke, Hermitage, and Londonderry, never appear anywhere in the citywide 195-business central pull. These are the suburban dominators a citywide keyword pull structurally cannot see: real, measurable local-pack winners in their own neighbourhoods, invisible to any measurement run from a single implicit location.

Proximity, in other words, is not a footnote on the local pack. It is the mechanism that makes a citywide pull and a spatial grid produce two different market maps of the identical city. Which raises the obvious next question: if a single rank number cannot capture that, what can?

VI.

Proximity is measured by Share of Local Voice

Share of Local Voice is the metric this study built to answer that question honestly. Rather than asking "where does this business rank" at one point, it asks how much of a fixed grid the business actually occupies. Our GroundTruth sweep ran a mobile local-finder search for the single query "dentist" at 90 fixed points, a 10-by-9 lattice spaced 1.8 kilometres apart, covering a bounding box from 53.4657 to 53.6110 latitude and -113.6091 to -113.4123 longitude, the practical footprint of the city. Depth at each point was 20 results. The sweep observed 296 distinct businesses across all 90 points, at a measured cost of $0.11 at checkpoint.

For every one of those 296 businesses, three numbers were recorded: solv3, the count of the 90 grid points where that business appeared in the top 3 local-pack results; solv10, the count where it appeared in the top 10; and solv20, the count where it appeared in the top 20. Across the full grid, 244 total solv3 slots were distributed (of a possible 270, 90 points times 3 positions), 856 total solv10 slots, and 1,733 total solv20 slots. The top-25 roster by this measure holds 59.0% of all solv3 slots, 36.2% of solv10 slots, and 26.9% of solv20 slots, concentration that steepens sharply the tighter the position band gets. A business's Share of Local Voice, then, is simply its share of these slots: a business ranking top 3 at 60 of 90 points has a materially different, and more durable, position than one ranking top 3 at 6 of 90 points, even if a single central rank check would have shown both of them "#1."

This is the value this section hands forward: Share of Local Voice is not a rank, it is a footprint, and a footprint reveals geographic ownership in a way no single query ever could.

VII.

Share of Local Voice reveals geographic ownership

Read the grid's top five by Share of Local Voice and a pattern appears immediately: none of them is a single downtown clinic. The Dentists at Northgate holds the top Share of Local Voice position in the market, driven by the highest review count of any competitor in the top-25 roster, 2,248 reviews at a 4.7 rating, anchored in the north of the city. Forest Heights Family Dental, second, is the market's one true dual-strength performer, ranking well in both the citywide pull and the grid at once, its 965 reviews and 4.7 rating covering the northeast-east corridor. Westmount Dental Centre, third, covers the west and northwest quadrant with 700 reviews at 4.6. Smiles Dental Group, fourth, holds the second-highest review count in the roster, 1,856 at 4.8, in the southeast. Summit Dental, fifth, carries the highest rating in the top five, 4.9, on 1,207 reviews in the northwest.

Geographic ownership, measured this way, looks nothing like organic ownership. Every name on this list wins through proximity across many grid points plus a large, well-rated review base, not through link authority or on-page content depth. That is the opposite mechanism from the market's organic leaders, which is exactly the contrast the next section puts side by side in one business.

VIII.

Geographic ownership answers the question: who owns the city, and where

No business in this dataset states the answer more plainly than Albany Dental, because Albany is, simultaneously, the strongest organic name in the market and the single clearest illustration of what proximity can take away regardless of content quality. Albany carries the highest Semantic Dominance Score of any top-15 organic domain, 81 of 100, built on machine-readable review markup no other tracked competitor carries, entity anchoring to Wikidata and Wikipedia nodes instead of lexical strings, an eleven-section homepage architecture winning ten of its fourteen #1s from a single URL, and a render-parity build explaining its near-doubling of #1s on mobile. Fourteen organic #1s on that page carry $40,750 a month in tracked search volume, roughly 450 times the total monthly value of the market's #1-by-count leader, edmontonemergencydentists.com, whose 70 #1s carry only $90 a month in tracked volume between them, won by covering hundreds of near-zero-volume emergency long-tail phrasings almost nobody else targets. Per #1 rather than in aggregate, the gap is even starker: Albany averages $2,911 a month per organic #1 against edmontonemergencydentists.com's $1.29, a roughly 2,258x difference in what each crown is actually worth.

And yet, at our July 2026 measurement, Albany Dental recorded zero appearances across the entire citywide, keyword-based map-pack pull, all 483 queries. Content authority, at this level, simply could not buy a map-pack position from that pull. Our 90-point grid adds the finer-grained truth underneath that headline number: Albany is not entirely invisible to the pack, it is present in the grid roster at Share-of-Local-Voice rank 48 of 296, and from grid points near its own address, roughly 10 kilometres from the city's commercial centroid, four to eight times farther out than the pack's leading names, its listing reaches the single best rank available, #1. But that best rank shows up at only 1 of the 90 measured points. Geography did not erase Albany from the pack; geography confined it to a sliver of the city so narrow that a citywide, non-spatial query never crosses it.

Set beside edmontonemergencydentists.com's own story, the picture completes itself. Its domain wins the organic #1 count outright, 70, the most of any domain measured, but the physical business behind it, Edmonton Emergency Dentists, sits at central Map Pack Leaderboard rank 11 and grid Share-of-Local-Voice rank 104 of 296, present, but far from spatially dominant. One business wins the content war and loses the geography war. Another wins geography and barely competes in content. A third, Forest Heights Family Dental, is the only name in this whole study to place well in both. That scarcity is the answer to the question this study set out to measure: ownership of Edmonton dentistry is not one throne. It is dozens of small, geographically bounded thrones, and almost nobody sits on more than one of them at a time.

That correlation figure is the whole market's version of the Albany paradox, stated statistically instead of anecdotally. Two-thirds of pack appearances in this dataset correspond to zero organic top-10 presence for that same business and query. Winning the pack and winning organic are, for most of this market, two separate jobs, done by two different kinds of business, using two different kinds of evidence.

IX.

Methodology and honesty notes

A geographic-ownership claim as specific as "dozens of small, bounded thrones" is only as credible as the measurement behind it. Two instruments produced everything in this study, and both are described here in full so any number above can be checked.

The citywide SERP pull. 483 distinct keywords, location set to "Edmonton, Alberta, Canada," pulled for both desktop and mobile at a top-20 depth on each device. The pull was retrieved from a paid task cache timestamped 2026-07-20 23:15:38 UTC; no keyword in this dataset was re-pulled live for this study. Raw tasks retrieved totalled 1,002, deduplicated to 957 after the source run double-posted. A duplicate re-pull consistency check across 35 keywords found 28 identical #1 results, with the remainder attributable to normal SERP flux rather than a measurement error. Across the full pull, 1,007 distinct domains appeared somewhere in the organic top 20, and 716 domains accumulated enough presence to earn a row in the Domain Share of Voice sheet (701 clinic or practice sites, 15 directories and informational domains). The pull also captured 1,052 unique People Also Ask questions and 18,146 raw ranking rows across every tracked query.

The 90-point Share of Local Voice grid. A single query, "dentist," run on mobile local-finder results at a depth of 20, across a 10-by-9 lattice of 90 fixed points spaced 1.8 kilometres apart, covering the footprint bounded by 53.4657 to 53.6110 latitude and -113.6091 to -113.4123 longitude. The sweep observed 296 distinct businesses and cost $0.11 at checkpoint. Every business's solv3, solv10, and solv20 counts were computed directly from that raw selection log, and every "absent" claim in this study (Bridgeview Dental Clinic among them) was verified by direct search of that log, not inferred from a name-matching miss.

Honesty notes. Both instruments are single-window measurements, taken in the same July 2026 period, and local rankings move. Nothing above should be read as a permanent verdict on any named business; it is a dated measurement, defensible against a repeat pull, not a character judgment. The citywide pull's device-and-depth setting (top 20, both devices) is broader in query coverage than the grid, which trades query breadth for spatial breadth by running one query at 90 points instead of 483 queries at one point; the two instruments were built to answer different questions and neither substitutes for the other. Keyword Difficulty and CPC figures reflect backlink-based organic difficulty and advertiser demand respectively, not local-pack contention, and should not be read as a map-pack difficulty score. Any claim in this piece about how Google weighs proximity, relevance, or prominence in local ranking is confined to what the measured data shows or to what is independently and currently documented by Google itself; no folklore ranking factor is presented as fact.

X.

What this means if you run a local business, or an agency

A measurement held to that standard of honesty stops being just a record and becomes a decision instrument. Measured local search visibility is the problem domain this whole study sits inside, and every product in the DecodeLocal toolkit measures a different slice of it. If this case study is the map of one city's dental market, these are the instruments that draw the same kind of map for your own market, at your own address.

GroundTruth explains measured visibility the way section VII and VIII did above: it runs the same kind of geo-grid sweep against your business and your competitors, and turns Share of Local Voice, review evidence, and market gaps into a plain-language report instead of a raw selection log. CitySweep maps competitor visibility across an entire city the way Exhibit C did, a citywide grid built to show you who the suburban dominators are before a client ever asks. RankCheck measures where a single business stands today, organic and map pack, on both devices, the same two-arena read Exhibit B ran across an entire market, scoped down to one business for $4.99 a run. And the Engine takes all of that measured evidence, relevance signals, distance exposure, prominence gaps, and turns it into a prioritized list of what to fix first, the way this study prioritized Albany's geography problem over its content problem, because the data said that was the larger gap.

The practical takeaway for an owner reading this is not "buy more content" or "buy more reviews." It is: measure your own grid before you decide which lever to pull, because the lever that pays off depends entirely on where your weak square is, and averaging your rank across the city, the way a single rank check does, hides that square every time.

XI.

Questions people actually search

Decisions like that raise their own questions, the same ones owners and agencies keep typing into Google about their own market.