GMB listings for medical practice with multiple doctors

[Janell H]

Hi experts! Our client has 8 eye doctor practices throughout the Southeast and they have 12 doctors who practice at many of their locations. Right now we have a GMB listing set up for their 8 office locations.

1. What are the best practices for setting up their practitioner GMB listings?
2. Do you even recommend that we create GMB listings for all 12 doctors?
3. How would we choose which office locations to use for the practitioner listings?

We want to follow the best practices, of course, so your expert advise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Janell,

I would create practitioner listings, but only if:

1. The primary GMB category can be different than the main practice GMB listing. For example, if the main GMB is using "Eye Care Clinic" you could create a practitioner listing and use "ophthalmologist".
2. Use a different GMB landing page for the practitioners. For example, if the main practice GMB links to the homepage, make sure the doctor pages link to an internal page like their bio page.

The bottom line from a local search perspective is you do not want multiple GMB's at the same location targeting the same thing.

Here's a few resources to check out:

Google My Business Changes How They Deal With Practitioner Listings - Sterling Sky Inc

About a month ago, Google My Business support changed the process of how they handle practitioner listings. I did announce this to my local SEO training

www.sterlingsky.ca

Properly Setup Practitioner Listings In Google My Business

Find out how to deal with practitioner listings and what the rules are from Google regarding how to set them up compared to your main business listing.

www.yangilbert.com

Why you cannot ignore practitioner listings on Google My Business (case study)

You may have a strong Google My Business listing, but what happens when individual practitioners at your location have their own listings? Columnist Joy Hawkins shares a case study detailing what happened when one such practitioner left her practice to go work elsewhere.

searchengineland.com

 

[Janell H]

Thank you so much, Colan! I really appreciate your thorough answer and for sharing those resources.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

You're welcome, Janell!

 

[Janell H]

@Colan Nielsen When setting up the 12 practitioner listings, how do I choose which office address to use for each doctor? I’m confused on that part.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

You can use whichever office locations they practice out of. So if Dr A practices out of location one on Tuesdays and location two on Fridays you can set up two listings for that doctor and just set the hours to reflect when they'll be at each location.

Does that make sense?

 

[Janell H]

Yes that makes sense, but won’t that (creating multiple listings for each doc) make the reviews gathering process more cumbersome for the practice to handle?

I have a feeling our client won’t want multiple listings for each doctor.

I know Google allows us to have multiple listings for each doctor in this situation, but what are the best, most practical practices?

 

[Janell H]

Also, all of our doctors practice at our main location in Atlanta, but some of the doctors currently have a GMB practitioner listing at their satellite offices.

If we change their current practitioner listings to the main location address & phone number, will their reviews get deleted or will the reviews stay with the listing after the address & phone number change?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Yes that makes sense, but won’t that (creating multiple listings for each doc) make the reviews gathering process more cumbersome for the practice to handle?

Yes, potentially. That's an operations decision they will have to make.

If we change their current practitioner listings to the main location address & phone number, will their reviews get deleted or will the reviews stay with the listing after the address & phone number change?

The reviews can be moved over. If it doesn't happen automatically, GMB Support can help. Why would you want to change the current practitioner listings to the main location address?

 

[Janell H]

Changing the current practitioner listings to the main location address was just an idea to help us streamline everything. Would it be a good or bad thing if we have all 12 practitioner listings in 1 city? If we do that, then our office GMB will probably get lost in results. What are best practices here?!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hey Janell,

I would refer to my first response. I would base the decision of whether or not you're going to set up practitioner listings at a particular address based on the ability to set them up with different categories. If you can set up all 12 practitioner listings with different categories then you're good to go. But I would not proactively create practitioner listings that have the same primary category as the main practice listing.

The exercise that I would do at this point is to lay out all of the locations and their doctors in a spreadsheet. Input the categories that they would be using and then that way you can visualize everything before moving forward.