Merging a listing

[hotcoffee]

Hi, I have a client with 3 listings at one address. Two are with the business name and one is the practitioner's name but they want just a single map listing with the business. Since I can't merge a practitioner into the one with the business name, per Google's chat, is it best to rename the practitioner listing with the business name and let it go through + then try to merge it once the name updates?

Thanks!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Any chance you can provide the URLs of all three listings? Would help to take a look at them in order to be able to give you the best advice.

 

[hotcoffee]

It's for a client through white labeled work for an agency so I'd rather not but it's pretty simple I think, just not super sure if anything new is out there in terms of guidance.

Listing 1 Acme Dental Group
Listing 2 Acme Dental Group
Listing 3 Dr. Acme, DDS

All same address, but since there are multiple dentists in the office GMB support won't let me merge 3 into 2 or 1. Ultimately want to end up with 1 listing for the office and not any individual practitioners.

My thought was to just change the name on #3 to Acme Dental Group and then do the merge.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Just a thought, since there are so many dental related categories inside GMB, why not take advantage of the practitioner listings and target them towards other services other than the main dentist keywords?

 

[hotcoffee]

It's just a cosmetic dentist so they are limited a few anyways and this way we could focus on strengthening 1 core listing for the limited kw's

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Yes but if they want to show up for searches for dentist, as well as cosmetic dentist, and also for things like dental implants and teeth whitening you can optimize the practitioner listings for those things.

Google may be able to merge the two main listings that have the same name but it might be tricky having them merge in the practitioner listing since as you mentioned, there's multiple practitioners.

I wouldn't advise changing the name on the practitioner listing to the main practice name because then you'll have three listings with the same name and you might trigger duplicate flag.

Definitely a tricky situation, but if it was me I would take advantage of the multiple listings by just optimizing them for different things.

 

[hotcoffee]

Thanks for the advice Colan, I appreciate it. So you would say in a setting of a multi-practitioner dentist office or say a personal injury law office you would target the more general categories (cosmetic dentistry, personal injury) and possibly use the practitioners to target other things (like in PI it would be subsets of personal injury like workers comp etc)?

Is that something you would do from the beginning or do you prefer, if possible, to just start and keep the one listing per office model? What is your preferred method if you had a choice?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

I actively deploy this as a strategy. So yes if we take on a new project and there's currently only one listing for the main practice and there's an opportunity to create practitioner listings, I will.