Adding Make Appointment Button to GMB

[MatGee]

Hey there,

I currently am managing a medical office website, and you all graciously pointed me in the direction of creating a practice GMB page and each provider an individual GMB. Thanks so much!

Currently, the practice is set up as a Medical clinic, and each Provider is set up as both a Medical office and Nurse Practitioner; however, only Medical Office comes up when I google them. Something tells me that a few things are off...

Regarding the practice

1. Medical clinic doesn't make sense in the US, at least in the NE. Would it make more sense as a Medical Office?
2. Currently, the practice has appointment links, but none of the providers do. Would changing the practice from Medical Clinic to Medical Office impact the appointment links showing up?

Regarding the providers

1. Medical office does not make sense for a single provider; should I remove that?
2. How can I get the individual providers to have/show an appointment link. I do not see "Appointment Links" in GMB > Info. I do see them for the practice. Each individual provider has their own appointment links, and I'd like them to show up on their GMB profile pages.

Thanks so much!
M

 

[Phil Rozek]

Hey @MatGee,

Some GMB features, like "appointment" links, tend to be category-specific. Practices/practitioners with certain primary categories get certain features, whereas GMB pages that use different primary categories may not have those options.

So what I'd do is select one practitioner's GMB page as your lab chimp, and then see whether that page has the "appointment link" feature or others you're interested in.

(One little hack I found - for a similar GMB feature - is to switch the category, specify the link, and then switch the category back. That can cause issues, though. A story for another day.)

If you try what I described on a test basis and you get both the categories you want and the "appointment links," great. But if it becomes a choice of one or the other, I'd just pick the most-commonsense categories (at least for your primary categories) and forget about the appointment links for now.

Speaking of which, "Medical office" and "Nurse practitioner" do seem like the best-fitting categories for the practice and for the practitioners, respectively.