Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
SEO - Should individual doctors at facility claim a Google My Business profile?
-
My client is a physician facility with several doctors practicing at the facility. When doing a Google search for some of their practices such as "family practice" one of the doctor's profiles will display in the Google Local pack - however it is not linked to the facility website where their profile exists.
As of right now, we are using YEXT and other tools to claim Google Business Profiles for each practice, not the individual doctors. If there are unclaimed accounts for individual doctors, they are alerting Google that it’s a duplicate and should be taken down.
Is this the right process to follow for SEO best practices or should we be claiming both the business and individual doctor profiles? The reason they are not claiming individual doctor profiles is to cut down on duplicate reviews as part of the Reputation Management Program.
Advice much appreciated!
-
Hey Jared,
So sorry to hear about your duplicates issue. This may be one of those scenarios which would require a consultant looking directly at your dashboard. You may need to engage someone with good skills to do this ... but, before you do so, can you let me know:
-
Are any of the practitioners sharing a phone number with one another or with the practice, itself?
-
What exact language are you seeing in the dashboard regarding the duplicates?
Thanks!
-
-
I've had the same question with our agency's healthcare clients. We have followed the guidelines that are listed in GMB for multiple practitioners in a practice which I've listed below. However, even after following these suggested practices, our GMB dashboard is showing duplicate address issues.
Google My Business Guidelines on Individual Practitioner Local Listings:
Individual practitioners (e.g. doctors, lawyers, real estate agents)
An individual practitioner is a public-facing professional, typically with his or her own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners. Listings for practitioners may include title or degree certification (e.g. Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).An individual practitioner should create his or her own dedicated listing if:
He or she operates in a public-facing role. Support staff should not create their own listings.
He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours.
A practitioner should not have multiple listings to cover all of his or her specializations.Learn more
Multiple practitioners at one location
If the practitioner is one of several public-facing practitioners at this location:The organization should create a listing for this location, separate from that of the practitioner.
The title of the listing for the practitioner should include only the name of the practitioner, and shouldn’t include the name of the organization.Although we have followed the suggested steps to listing individual practitioners in local search, Google is still indicating duplicate address issues between the practitioners and the practice itself.
Any advice on how to handle the duplicate address issue? I appreciate any feedback.
-
Hey Chris,
Multi-practitioner business models have the option to either:
-
Promote the practice + promote the practitioners, or
-
Just promote the practice
If you go with the first, the main thing is to be sure that each practitioner has a unique landing page on the website (to which his/her citations link) and that each has his or her own phone number (separate from the practice's main phone number). Taking these precautions should normally prevent any issues with merging, but I am not quite sure what you mean about duplicate reviews. Are you saying that the patients are posting a review for the practice and then posting the same review again for a specific doctor? A little clarification on that might help.
If you go with the second option, then, yes, you can attempt to get rid of citations for the practitioners, but, because you are talking about a medical practice, it's very important to dig into Google's history with not closing doctor/dentist duplicates. It may be that the Yext rep with whom you're communicating is unaware of this. Note Linda Buquet's remarks on this previous Moz thread regarding this: https://moz.com/community/q/dental-practice-google-and-dentist-personal-google
Hope this give some good food for thought.
-
-
You're currently on the right track and for all the right reasons. As a user, I'd rather see the surgery rather than an individual doctor and as you mentioned, splitting your reviews across multiple doctors isn't ideal.
From your side of things, you're obviously better off having the doctor's surgery listed and having the potential to drive traffic to the website.
Another factor that I'm not 100% sure about is how the current situation of individual doctors being listed will play with Google guidelines.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Verifying Google My Business After An Address Change
Hello,
Local Listings | | Ben-R
We are trying to verify our Google My Business listing, however, the current unverified listing is using an old address we no longer have access to. The only option for verification is through the mail. We tried requesting an edit but it didn’t go through. Would the best option be to create a new one and try to have the old (unverified) listing removed? Any insight would be appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Best,0 -
Seasonal Setting Options for Google My Business
Hi there, Not sure if anyone will have any insight but I have a seasonal business that I am closed for from September to March. I don't want to mark my business as "permanently closed" through Google My Business as I don't want my customers to think I've gone out of business. I've seen a few times through forums that you can change your business to temporarily closed, but I can't find the specifics on how to do this. Any insight, suggestion or resources would be great! Thanks!
Local Listings | | MainstreamMktg1 -
Google My Business pages for New Construction Communities
I have a number of builders of new homes as clients. Typically, they build out a whole neighborhood at once and give the neighborhood a fancy name. We were planning to create Google My Business pages for these communities but then ran into some potential challenges. As new communities, they are sometimes not on Google's radar yet Some of them have model homes where you might take a tour with a realtor that serves the community exclusively but many don't. So here come the questions... Is there a way to make Google speed up its process of recognizing new addresses? I have to choose an address to associate with the GMB page, probably the address of model home. Is this going to create annoying problems for a buyer who someday buys that model home? Since some communities don't have a model home, I could arbitrarily assign an address of one of the neighborhood homes to the GMB page, but this leads to the same question about creating a GMB page that will exist after the builder has sold all the houses in the community. Will it be weird to have the GMB referring to someone's private residence down the road? My assumption is that claiming a GMB page would help with local ranking if someone searches for something like "new homes" in addition to providing easy driving directions to someone who has done a bit of research and Googles the name of the new home community while out driving and searching for homes. These seem to be the main benefits, but are the challenges associated with questions 1-3 even worth the trouble of trying to claim listings for these communities?
Local Listings | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Google points of Interest / POI
Hello, Looking for some guidance on how to appear and get listed in Google Points of Interest in the Search Engine Results Page. Like when searching for "attractions Seattle" at the top of the SERP these listings appear. Cannot seem to find some good resources on the topic as well. Thanks Conrad
Local Listings | | conalt1 -
Our satellite office isn't showing up on Google maps. How can we add it?
We are trying to include maps to our locations on our "Contact" page, and in taking these maps from Google, we came upon the following issue: We have Google+ listings for several of our satellite offices, which are set up through Carr Workplaces. When we look on maps, we can only find the Carr Workplace listing, rather than the listing for our business at that location. Obviously, we don't want to display the map that way on our own page; we want the map to show our business name. I realize that Google only wants fully-staffed businesses to be displayed on maps, and so whether or not we belong there is up for debate within our company. That said, we'd like to know how to make the maps listing work regardless. Thanks!
Local Listings | | ScottImageWorks0 -
How to deal with wrong location in Google SERP
Hi, If I understand correctly, Google provides search results based on the location of the user. That's fine, because most of my clients are local. But if I look at my own search results, Google thinks I'm in a totally different town. Most likely based on my IP address. Of course I can solve that for myself, but the same goes for my potential clients. Is there a way to deal with this, from an seo perspective? For instance find out where most of the the IP providers are located and target that location?
Local Listings | | Houdoe1 -
How to submit a new business in Factual
I am trying to create citation for my client sites in Factual.com. As, I am not a hardcore developer, I wont be able to use the API as mentioned in the Factual website. It also provides a lit of Trusted Data Contributors, which are paid third party service providers. I would like to know, whether it is possible to create a business listing in Factual, by using any other means than these two options.
Local Listings | | ArthurRadtke1 -
Bing Places for Business - Worth It?
Hey Fellow Mozzers, I am trying to determine if Bing Places for Business is worth the time and effort it takes to create listings. My business has 900 locations, and would take some time to create the bulk upload file to load into the Bing Places for Business dashboard. My question is, since Bing already does a good job of creating business listings using data from 3rd party sources such as Yelp and Citysearch, where I already have a strong presence for each of my locations, is there any value in overriding the automatically created business page for each of my location with information that I upload?
Local Listings | | dsinger2