Google My Business Won't Save Category

[Jay_SEO]

I took control of a physician's listing yesterday (it's been less than 24 hours at this point, for context, if this is all due to a timing issue).

The GMB profile saved a majority of my changes (NAP, website, description, etc.); however, several sections keep getting crossed out in red and not saved with the most concerning being the all-important Category (see attached pic).

Other sections that keep getting crossed out by Google are the COVID-19 info link and the Virtual care link. Does anyone have any insight into this?

I've tried several different related Categories to see if any would take effect, but they all keep getting crossed out. Thanks for the help.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Jay_SEO, I've sent in an edit on the category, so we'll see if that does the trick. Probably not, in which I would wager there are two issues: (1) that the GMB landing page doesn't make it explicit enough (to Google) that the best way to characterize the doc is as a surgeon, and (2) that the other standard directories and industry directories (e.g. HealthGrades) may not use that category or a similar one enough yet. If you only started working for this client or doc recently, it's possible you'll need to do work on the more-important supporting citations.

For the "virtual" and COVID links it should just be a matter of basic optimization of those pages: title tags, H1s, prominent internal links (like in the main nav), and the URL slug (if appropriate). If those pages are buried in your internal linking, or if they're threadbare enough that you don't think they'd even show up as a sitelink result, then Google may gag at them. By the way, when you have a page on your site that's clearly THE page on your site all about telehealth or about COVID measures, sometimes Google will auto-populate those GMB fields with those URLs. Google is on the prowl for those pages, and wants to show them in your knowledge panel, as long as they're clearly the definitive pages on your site on those topics.