Should I roll the dice on creating a 2nd GBP listing (3rd overall)?

[mktgabor]

Hello!

We have a newly-hired doctor who will be working at two locations for the medical group unit of our health system. I rolled the dice once by creating a new listing for her at one of the practice locations (we have several doctors with the same/similar address -- 3 suite numbers -- and the same phone number) and Google instantly verified it. Hooray! The issue is I feel like they're onto me...with the dreaded "Do you mean..." and then they showed me an existing listing for the doctor the next county over.

My question is: would it be better to "Suggest an edit" on her existing listing in the next county to update the address (I'd have a team of perhaps 10 people all do it from their own Google accounts) and if Google updated the address THEN request ownership (if we don't have it by then)...OR would it be better to roll the dice and try to create a 2nd listing for her within the same Google account as the 1st one that Google instantly verified?

I can't believe I managed to type all of that out without my keyboard exploding from all of the sweat...it feels life/death with Google sometimes haha.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I don't think I would bother. In almost all cases I've seen, more profiles is usually worse, not better for practitioners. This is because they generally compete and filter out the practice they work for.

The instances where it is a good idea would be:
1. You don't rank at all in the second area with any profile
2. The doctor can aggressively and regularly get reviews on both profiles.

 

[mktgabor]

I don't think I would bother. In almost all cases I've seen, more profiles is usually worse, not better for practitioners. This is because they generally compete and filter out the practice they work for.

The instances where it is a good idea would be:
1. You don't rank at all in the second area with any profile
2. The doctor can aggressively and regularly get reviews on both profiles.

Thank you for this, @JoyHawkins. This is EXACTLY the case I've been making to higher ups -- if we already have a strong presence in one location for that specialty, we shouldn't create secondary listings. It's impossible for us to get the practice management to procure reviews for more listings and should the doctor one day leave, they either a) take the listing with them (and the local SEO presence) or b) we close the listing. I've argued that we should focus more on practice/specialty listings and that way whenever doctors move from one location to another, we would at maximum need to update the description to add their name in (maybe), add their headshot, and introduce them via updates. This way we can ensure that over time we're building a digital listing that we wholly own that we can direct all of our efforts towards building. I have a meeting later this month to discuss local SEO/listings strategy, so hopefully we can shift to this approach.