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A Google Business Profile is your business listing on Google. When you search Google maps or search for a local term, these profiles display. It is one of the easiest and fundamental ways to rank on Google, taking very little time to set up and manage, and allowing you to rank at your location almost immediately. It also allows customers to leave reviews.
Google Business Profile used to be called “Google My Business”. You still hear people refer to GMB instead of GBP, and some tools still use that name (such as “GMB Everywhere”).
Sometimes you will set up one GBP for the clinic, sometimes GBPs for individual practitioners, and sometimes both. This is discussed further below in “Grey Hat GBP Tactics”.
Generally if you are a clinic with practitioners working in it and being paid by the clinic, you will set up a GBP for the clinic and the clinic will keep all the reviews.
If practitioners are working under their own names and simply hiring a room from the clinic and dealing with their own billing, they will set up their own GBP, and keep all their reviews when they move elsewhere. The clinic might also have its own GBP.
If you have multiple clinics you simply set up a GBP for each. There is no way to set up “branches” of the same business in GBP.
Setting up a new Google Business Profile (GBP) is easy. There is a guide from Google here.
Google’s guidelines state that you should call the GBP exactly the name of the business, without trying to sneak in the names of your services or location if they aren’t already in the official name.
However, if you do include your primary service and location keywords in the name, you will be at a distinct SEO advantage. So for example if your clinic is called “Tom’s Clinic”, you will appear in more searches is you are able to name your GBP “Tom’s Clinic – London Physio” or similar.
Technically this is called “Namespamming” and you could be reported to Google, but the vast majority of people get away with it. Many people also only use the search term for their GBP – e.g. Tom would call his GBP simply “London Physio” – or create a duplicate GBP to target the term they want.
Once your GBP is set up you’ll see a screen like this, and we can start filling it out.
Google is a big fan of completeness. There are various sections on a GBP and we want to make the most use of them we can. Avoid leaving a section blank if you can.
Click on “edit profile” and this screen will appear
“Business category” allows you to select one primary category and several secondary categories.
Your primary category is the most important factor when ranking your business, and you can only choose one. For some clinics this isn’t really an issue – for a dentist for example “dentist” or “dental clinic” are both fine. For a physiotherapist and sports injury clinic however, you have to make a choice based on which of those categories you want to rank higher for. For a multidisciplinary clinic this is a real pain, but that’s the way it is.
Add as many secondary categories as are relevant as they will help you rank. For a dentist that might be “dental hygienist”, “orthodontist”, etc.
Underneath the categories we have space for a 750 character description.
Use this space to write an appealing description of what you do, including human values like “friendly clinic” and any USPs you have like “free telephone consultation”.
Also include any keywords that aren’t covered by your business name and category, such as other services you provide and locations people might be typing in, but keep it human and don’t keyword stuff as many people will be coming to you via your GBP and reading that description.
You can use the elevator pitch you created when working on your marketing messaging for your clinic marketing guide to fill out the GBP description.
You can put an opening date in the future if you haven’t opened your clinic yet.
Your phone number, website, etc. This will allow people to contact you directly from Google.
You should also add a booking link if you have an online booking system. You may not be able to do this in the edit profile section, but may have find the link from your business profile knowledge panel instead.
Google has options to enter your address, and also to create a service area.
There is a Google guide here to how this is intended to work. Essentially you should only put your address if you have a physical shopfront and permanent signage. If you go to visit your customers then it’s a service area. So if you have a shop and you also deliver, then you have both. If your clinic doesn’t do home visits, then you shouldn’t put a service area.
There are 2 problems with this system. Firstly if you’re a single therapist treating patients in your home without a big sign attached to the outer wall, then technically you’re not eligible for a GBP, which is an SEO catastrophe. You could just create a service area business instead, but that brings us to the other problem, which is that service area businesses generally rank badly when compared to physical location businesses, despite Google telling us they won’t.
If Google asks you to verify your business, they might ask you to send a video showing the permanent signage, in which case you may never be able to verify your location if you don’t have that, and will have to make do with a service area listing.
Some say that you are more likely to get instant verification if you build your website and some citations before creating your GBP, so if you’re concerned then try doing it this way (making sure Google has indexed the site and citations before you do so).
Although technically you should only fill out “service areas” if you visit people as well as offering a service in your physical clinic, there is SEO value to be gained from filling them out even if you don’t. Put in the main areas your patients come from and which you serve.
Fill out your opening hours. Here you have two options – open with main hours or open with no main hours. Our advice is to put the typical hours you work. If you sometimes work evenings and weekends then include these two as Google is more likely to return your business profile if it is open at the time of the search.
You could also try choosing open with no main hours, and doing an experiment to see if it has any effect on your SEO.
Lastly in the edit profile section you have a slightly random selection of questions which seem to reflect Google’s social agenda more than anything else. You can select that the business “identifies as women-owned” (although you can’t say the business identifies as Black-owned), select whether it is a transgender safe-space or whether there is a “nursing room” available. Nothing wrong with this; I hope all businesses these days would consider themselves LGBTQ- and trans-friendly, and explicitly stating this is extremely reassuring to people from these communities who want to come to your business. Unfortunate however that you can’t select more universal factors like whether there is parking, whether you can bring food and drinks inside, whether dogs are welcome or whether there is somewhere to lock up your bike.
From an SEO perspective it is worth filling out as many of these positively as you can. Google has previously stated it ranks websites higher if they use inclusive language (e.g. “firefighters” instead of “firemen”) so although there’s no direct advice on these social agenda factors on ranking, it would be a shame to miss out on rankings and business just because you (quite literally) forgot to check the LGBTQ box.
One of the most useful parts of your GBP is the link to give to patients to get more reviews. Reviews not only help with conversion as people are far more likely to choose a clinic if it has positive reviews, but also with SEO. Google will rank businesses higher if they have more positive reviews.
Ensure you have a system in place to send the review link to everyone who has a treatment at your clinic. This may be something you do manually, something that’s done automatically through your appointment booking system, or you can get an agency like us to implement an Net Promoter system and review collection. It doesn’t matter, so long as you get it done.
You should also reply to all reviews as soon as you can, even if it’s just to say thanks. With negative reviews you should also post a reply, explaining calmly your side of the story. Everyone gets the occasional 1* review from an unreasonable customer, and people are aware of this. It’s actually been shown that customers trust businesses with a rating of 4.5 – 4.9 more than a business with only 5* reviews.
You can’t have reviews removed from your GBP just because you don’t like them or disagree with them.
However, if you have received negative reviews from someone who has never used your service (e.g. a competitor is leaving you negative reviews or someone has a personal dislike towards you) then there is a system to have them removed. Joy Hawkings of Sterling Sky has done an excellent video about this process here.
Google is a big fan of photos, and a big fan of keeping photos current and relevant. Include photos of the outside of your clinic, the inside, the reception area, the treatment rooms, the bathrooms, and of the staff who work there.
As far as possible, keep updating with new photos regularly. Appreciated this is difficult for a clinic where things don’t really change from one week to the next, so try things like taking a photo of your Christmas tree, putting up things like Happy Easter signs and taking photos of them, the occasional photo of something you use for treatment and a clinician holding it, and so on.
Google will allow you to add both services and products to your Google business profile.
Technically services are intangible services you provide. This will form most of a clinic’s offerings – for example a free assessment, a 30-minute appointment, a shockwave treatment, and so on.
Products are intended to be tangible products, for example a cup of coffee, an exercise ball, a toothbrush and so on.
However, we want to fill out both these sections. The reason being that products are a vastly more powerful part of your Google Business Profile because they appear in your profile when a user comes to it online.
As you can see these “products” are really helpful. They allow the user to immediately see your services and prices without having to visit and search your website, and also some categories which they fall into, giving the user a quick overview of what you do.
Unfortunately there is little control over which products and categories appear by default (i.e. before you click on “View all”). You can try adding the products you want to appear most prominently last and this sometimes works, but not always.
Adding products is easy. Just click on “add products” and add as many as you like. You can use a stock image or an image from your website for the product image, and be sure to link back to the page on your site which is most relevant (i.e. if it’s a dental checkup, link back to your “checkup” or “general dentistry” page).
Services do not display on the front-end of your Google Business Profile, but are useful for SEO.
Services are based on your business profile categories, so you add services under each category assigned to your business profile. Be sure to add a service for each of your treatment keywords.
There’s no need to be as granular as the above example and add every appointment type and price. It’s enough to simply mention the service and set a minimum price.
You can do this by clicking on the service once you have set it up, which brings you to this screen where you can add details on each particular service you offer.
Add each service you offer under the appropriate category. This is a good way to hit niche SEO terms, for example “myofascial release”, which you may not optimise for explicitly but can add as a service in case anyone is searching.
Google Business Profile also allows people to ask the business a question and for the business to reply. Both the question and the reply are public.
This is a good way to build out your GBP further, and to answer common questions that your patients might ask, e.g. “are you covered by my health insurance”, “is there parking”, “is there somewhere to lock my bike”, “how many sessions will I need”, etc.
Questions don’t need to be asked by a member of the public. You can ask and answer your own questions, or ask others to ask the questions you want to answer.
When adding questions and answers, make them useful, and include your keywords.
There are a few different GBP tactics which come under the heading of “grey hat” – i.e. they’re not exactly cheating (in the way that say leaving fake negative reviews is) but they’re not always entirely legit either.
You should know about these techniques so you can see if competitors are doing them, and know the risks or other factors involved if you choose to do them yourself.
This is simply including your service name and location in your business name – for example “Trisha’s Teeth – London Dentist” rather than simply “Trisha’s Teeth”.
There is a risk that you could be reported for namespamming and either have your profile suspended until you fix it, or incur a drop in SEO as a penalty. However, in clinic marketing it’s extremely common, and our industry doesn’t seem to be so cutthroat that people report it. Whilst we sometimes report our clients’ competitors if they’re breaking the rules, we generally let this one go and other agencies seem to as well.
Another tactic which works well is to set up a new brand which is just the service and location, and set up a website and GBP with this name – so for example London Dentist on the GBP and londondentist.com or similar for the website. Although Google say this doesn’t work, it does, and we have seen clients get SEO results in weeks using this tactic which they haven’t been able to achieve in years doing everything the right way.
GBP rankings are highly affected by proximity, so another tactic is to create GBPs in a whole bunch of locations where you don’t actually have a clinic (e.g. with a virtual office address, staff’s houses, etc) to gain more traction on the map. Often, clinics move locations and keep the active GBP at the old location as well as creating a new one, for the same reason.
This is something we wouldn’t really do. It’s confusing for patients and in the long run is only likely to annoy your patients and give you a bad name locally. If you find your competitors doing this, mark their businesses as “permanently closed” using the “suggest an edit” feature on Google Business Profile, and take it up further with Google if the GBP remains.
If you see people in-clinic, you should set up your GBP with the physical address of your location. If you visit people you should set up a service area. It is no problem to have both on one profile.
Some people will instead set up 2 profiles, one with the location and one with the service area.
Although you’re unlikely to rank higher per se, having multiple profiles means that you can now take up two places instead of one. If someone does a search and Google returns three results (as it does for the map pack), then you are now two thirds of the results rather than one third.
The downside to this is that it can be confusing for patients, you will have twice as much GBP admin to do, and you will split your reviews across two profiles. However, we have seen people use this tactic effectively.
A similar tactic that is in fact entirely legitimate (Google said so) is to create one profile for your clinic, and another profile for each practitioner who works there, with the same address.
The benefits of this are as above – you will take up more room in search, and you can also set each practitioner’s primary category to their actual service, avoiding the problem multidisciplinary clinics have of picking a single business category. It also allows patients to see more information on individual practitioners, and their individual reviews.
The downside, as above, is that it can become very confusing for patients, and you are splitting your reviews between various profiles.
Google prefers profiles that are active and regularly updated. There are 5 ways you can do this:
Of course, you should also update your profile if things actually change e.g. if you change your prices or add a new service.
If you have more questions about your GBP, we’ll be happy to help. Feel free to reach out, come and ask a question in Free Webinar Friday, or book a free strategy call.
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