Review Profile For Location OR Individual?

[Benjamin Beck]

Hi Everyone,

How do you handle building out review profiles for local service businesses where each location can have several individuals. (Lawyers, Doctors, Dentists, etc)

Do you build a review page for the location alone (aka Joe & Schmo Lawyer Associates) OR do you try to get reviews for the location & each individual person (aka Location & Lawyer Joe & Lawyer Schmo,etc)

Any articles that I should be reading?

Thanks in advance!

 

[James Watt]

Joy recently wrote a great article that might answer some of your questions, you can read it here.

My two cents, if I understand your question correctly, is that it depends. If you don't have many reviews anywhere yet, I'd focus on the primary listing. If you have high review flow and a lot already in the archives, and you're in a low competition area where you can potentially get good exposure with both the primary listing and a practitioner listing, then spread it around. Another question too, do a lot of customers look up one of your practitioners by name? If that practitioner is definitely going to be with the company for a long time, then it might be worth investing at least some there so that people who see the knowledge panel for that practitioner will get a good impression.

Some of the pros here who focus on businesses with practitioners might have some other things to add too.

 

[mborgelt]

Another reason to focus on reviews on the primary listing is that they usually outrank the individual profiles. You don't want to go building up reviews for a profile that doesn't show up in search. When the individuals outrank the firm is when it gets a little tricky.

 

[Linda Buquet]

I was going to mention something both James and Michael sort of touched on.

Often you spend all your time optimizing the practice and a single practitioner takes over the lead. Could be one that's getting ready to retire or that the owner does not like much. BUT anytime the practice with all the reviews drops out, the company is usually unhappy.

Part of keeping the practice listing ranking is using my strategy for MINIMIZING practitioner listings. There are things you can do to make them less dominant and therefore compete less with the main listing.

So I think building reviews and citations gives MORE strength to the practitioner listing, which is usually counter to what the business wants and hurts rankings.

The only exception I can see could be like what James said. IF there was like a famous practitioner, well known, or the main atty had a big ego and people search for them, then maybe you want them to look good and have reviews.

Client just needs to realize they may make practitioner rank and knock main practice listing out of the running.