Individual practitioner NAP - unique "N", repeated "AP" Help!

[OneMedical]

We have a business where we have a number of doctor's offices, and at each office there are a few individual doctors. Customers often search for either the overarching brand or the specific doctors.  Our hope is to optimize our listings so that we can rank in local SEO for both the brand name and doctor names.

We have set up our local listings in Google My Business for all of the offices (common brand name, unique address, unique phone, unique landing page), but would like to explore adding individual doctor names in the listings too. The challenge is that each doctor within an office shares the address and phone number.  They do have unique names (obviously) and landing pages, although the doctor landing pages don't have any specific contact information on them.

My understanding is that we should have unique phone numbers for each listing. Unfortunately, this is a management and IT maintenance challenge.

My question is - if we didn't use a unique phone number and instead used both the same address and phone number across multiple listings (office and doctors practicing there), are we violating Google's guidelines / damaging our overall rankings for all the listings? Does anyone have a sense of how bad this might be, so we can understand the risk/benefit?

And secondly, would we make things worse by adding the non-unique address/phone to the individual doctor pages? Would this just reinforce inconsistent NAP, right on our site?

Thanks!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Robert!

Though I don't know the complete details of your scenario, you've done a good job providing some clues. Here is what I'd suggest:

1. These do sound like two distinct businesses. There is no obvious connection between a roofing contractor and a window washing company. So, good on this.

2. I am assuming the 2 companies are fully differentiated with different names, phone numbers, separate websites that don't interlink and totally unique content on the two websites. Any other approach would be problematic.

3. However, both of your business models are likely SABs (service area businesses) unless customers are actually visiting either company at the place of business. That seems unlikely for either a roofing contractor or a window washer. If both are SABs, you should be hiding the Google My Business listing address for both.

4. Providing you are doing everything in point #2 correctly, there is no reason not to include complete NAP on each website for the company. You don't need to hide the address on the website or on other citations. You only need to do that on Google, because it's their unique requirement.

Hope this helps and please let me know if you have any further questions!

[BuhvDesigns]

Thanks for your response Miriam.

We have a similar situation in that a client operates multiple business out of the same location (a roofing company and window cleaning service). Each business has a unique name and phone number. We currently have the primary business (roofing contractor) set up to "show" the address and the secondary business (window cleaning) we have chosen to hide the address and set a service area for all local directories.

I have tried to find information on best practices for this specific situation but all resources seem to focus on business with multiple locations rather than multiple business at a singular location. So, I m not sure how to best approach these situations in regards to local directories.

You'd have to imagine someone has some insight into this as "shared" office spaces are gaining in popularity.

[MiriamEllis]

Great question! Unless each doctor has his/her own phone number, then I would strongly advise against creating Google My Business listings for them. You've done a 100% excellent job up to this point of keeping your locations separate with unique phone numbers and unique landing pages. If you then begin to degrade NAP clarity by creating a whole bunch of new listings that share the practices' phone numbers, you will be dimming that clarity and putting the listings at risk for merging and potential ranking issues.

Is it a guideline violation for practitioner to share a phone number with the practice. Technically, it isn't, as the guidelines read:

Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible

So, Google is speaking specifically about locations here, rather than practitioners. They aren't stating that practitioners HAVE TO have a unique phone number, but later on in the guidelines, they do state this about them:

He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours

So, one can sagely infer from this that Google wants a person rather than a call center to answer the practitioner's phone number if called, but Google really doesn't spell this out in terms that are as black-and-white as I'd like.

Nevertheless, whether it's a guideline violation or not to share phone numbers, it's not a best practice, given the problems it can cause, so, unless the doctors are willing to have unique phone numbers at which they can be contacted directly, I wouldn't advise creating GMB listings for them.

Hope this helps!