Google My Business for Medical Practices & Practitioners in 2015

How Medical Practices & Practitioners Should Set Up Google My Business

It's common for multiple medical practitioners to work at a single location, so columnist Will Scott advises how to set up Google My Business so each practitioner is his or her own "brand."

Businesses filled with multiple front-facing professionals and departments, like law firms and hospitals or medical practices, might struggle at times to understand the best way to handle how customers view them online.

This gets especially tricky when trying to manage Google Plus pages properly, as there are many guidelines and best practice solutions that one should adhere to when using the Google My Business product.

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One other issue for folks to be aware of:

Additional listings even if legit practitioner listings, will almost always hurt rankings. Google usually won't rank multiple listings for the same in the pack. She'll pick one - and often it's not the main practice listing that wins. Sometimes it just blocks any of them from ranking.

They can hurt the main practice listing in other ways too. Very often, especially since Pigeon, a bare empty unclaimed practitioner listing with 1 review will knock the main practice listing you WANT to rank out of the pack and replace it. Then client is upset because their beautiful listing for Alpine Dental with all the review stars is gone and John Smith DDS with 1 review and no stars is there instead. That can also fracture the review profile and pts start leaving reviews on the Dr listing that should be on the practice listing.

Since Google won't let you delete practitioner listings I developed a strategy to "MINIMIZE" them.

<a href="http://www.localsearchforum.com/google-duplicates-merges/864-overcoming-google-practitioner-duplicate-listing-problems-dentists-attorneys.html">Overcoming Google Practitioner Duplicate Listing Problems for Dentists, Attorneys</a>

All the consultants that have tried it tell me it works well. And I ran it by Google Local management and they agreed the strategy makes sense.

Typically when I do ranking troubleshooting because the practice won't rank, and I minimize the practitioner listing (providing that's the only ranking problem) the listing pops back up within 2 weeks. That's a pretty fast win in terms of local ranking fixes.

Hope that helps anyone struggling with displaced practice listings in the local pack.

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