Citations for multiple practicioners in an office (real estate, dentists, etc)- Best Practices

[AvalancheSearch]

We're just about to breakout our citations as we've added listings for a few real estate offices and dental offices for the individual real estate agents/dentists.

I didn't see any discussions on best practices, so I thought I'd start the discussion (please point me elsewhere if I missed it)

1. Is it even a good idea to build citations for a practitioner in an office (Dr. Who, Dentist, in addition to Whoville Dental Office)?

2. Name will be different, address will be the same, but what about phone #? Should they use the office phone # and their extension? Or a separate (cell) #?

3. Website citation: Should it go to their "profile" page on the website? Or home page?

Thanks in advance for any input

[MiriamEllis]

Hi AvalanceSearch,

Great questions. Let me address them in order.

1. Personally, I'm not a fan of taking advantage of Google's offer to let partners in a practice build their own Google+ Local pages in addition to the main practice page. My hesitation stems from two things - Google's historic issues with merging similar listings and Google's historic refusal to delete doctor/dentist dupes (read: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-duplicates-merges/861-dr-dupes-google-local-user-edits.html)

That being said, it is certainly permissible to go this way, just so as you have a sense of historic problems that could potentially come up for clients.

2. It's fine to have a different name and same address in the multi-partner scenario. But, if you can, do give each partner a different phone number at which they can be directly contacted during stated business hours. The main reason for doing so is to lessen the chances of merged listings.

3. Yes, definitely point an individual practitioner's citations to his unique page on the website. Again, this helps reduce the likelihood of merges and provides a better user experience.

Hope this helps!

[mosquitohawk]

1. I would argue there are (as you might expect) pros and cons for both approaches.  For example-

• By having "Dr. Who, DDS" and "Whoville Dentistry" as separate entities and creating citations for both, you easily address users who might search for them in both ways.  For example, I never can remember the name of my Dentist's office, but I do know his name and that's how I search for him.  Same sometimes for other services where you associate with the provider much more than the name of the business.
• One con of the above example, is you now have two (or way more, thinking real estate) separate entities to maintain and twice the work in building citations to them.

2. If it were me I would go with direct line or extension and make sure all citations were formatted exactly the same and reserve the main, primary number for the business entity.

3. It depends on if this is a single-location brick and mortar or one of many branches.  If a single location, go for the home page.  If multiple locations, to the profile page of that location on the main website.  Same for the individual person entity, it should go to their personal profile page on the website.

So those are some thoughts of mine.