Individual practitioner NAP - unique "N", repeated "AP" Help!
-
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!
-
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
-
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.
-
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!
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
-
"Duplicate" on Google Local - Attorney and Business Listing
For our law firm, we have a Google Local listing for the firm (Riddell Law LLC). Google also created a local listing for one of the attorneys (Riddell) (we didn't create it, but are in the process of verifying it). Both listings are at the same address. Moz Local says these are "duplicates" - is that true? Would Google penalize us for this? I am not sure how to fix it - both the individual attorney and the business are in fact at the same address. If anyone has any advice I would greatly appreciate it! Thank you!!
Local Listings | | bpurdue0 -
Client Being Outranked by Horrible Websites with No SEO--Help!
Hi guys, We have a client that we are having some issues with. We have done extensive directory work for them, website enhancements, etc. so this is unusual. Hermantown is an extremely small city in MN so companies there normally target Duluth. Our client is hardly ranking locally in Google maps or organically yet their competitors are showing up who have horrible websites, no SEO, and located in the same city—Hermantown yet showing up locally for Duluth searches. We just can’t seem to move up the ladder no matter how hard we try. Here is the company: www.mmtheating.com We are completely at a loss for next steps on how to help this client improve. We’re wondering if there may be a penalty against them for some reason but we always have had very ethical practices. Thanks in advance for your insights!
Local Listings | | JohnWeb120 -
Local Business Audit Help.....
Hello Every one, I recently got a big project for cleaning up some old listings (around 120 locations), witch means to claim and delete them, as you guys know most of the directory's don't give the option to delete the listing after you claim that. I am trying to figure out the approach for something like that.......considering time consuming and efficiency! any help will be appreciated!! Cheers
Local Listings | | steve2150 -
address on my websiteto help with local searches
If I put my address on my website, does it help that page to rank for local searches? especially if it's the same address that i am using for moz local and all my citations? I want my other pages to rank in different cities as well as i have a service that travels to all cities in my state. Will that address of my home town on my home page make google think that i don't service other cities? Thanks, Ron
Local Listings | | Ron100 -
Help with Google Places, local listings & Google+ please!
Hi all, I work for enterprise app development & mobile consultancy, Mubaloo. I recently asked a question around getting better rankings for London-based search results. One answer was to set up a local listing for Mubaloo's London office. I thought I had done by setting up our London office up on Places for Business - is this the same as a local listing? In addition to this, I can't connect our existing Google+ page to our local Mubaloo Bristol & London listings as Google has created separate pages for each! Is anyone else having this issue? Can it be resolved?
Local Listings | | donaldsze0 -
Is this a NAP inconsistency or is it fine?
All my citations are built with this zip code: 34655, but Bing Places wants me to add the +4 to it. 34655-4700. Will this cause a problem for inconsistency? I can override it and just use "34655," but I'm not sure if Bing would considered that some sort of error and penalize my listing for it. Any thoughts? Thanks! Ruben
Local Listings | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Google Maps Help
Hello, I'm helping 2 clients with Google Maps Client 1
Local Listings | | ogdcorp
Has 4 Locations, I claimed all 4 but when searching his name only 3 are showing up on the first page.
All 4 show up when clicking on "More results" Client 2
Has 3 Locations, all of them were claimed by another company 1 year ago. But now I cant re-claim them unless the other company releases them but that wont be easy. Any suggestions? Also, when dealing with multiple locations is it better to have 1 email address for all or 1 email for each? Thanks0