SEO - Should individual doctors at facility claim a Google My Business profile?

[chrisvogel]

My client is a physician facility with several doctors practicing at the facility. When doing a Google search for some of their practices such as "family practice" one of the doctor's profiles will display in the Google Local pack - however it is not linked to the facility website where their profile exists.

As of right now, we are using YEXT and other tools to claim Google Business Profiles for each practice, not the individual doctors. If there are unclaimed accounts for individual doctors, they are alerting Google that it’s a duplicate and should be taken down.

Is this the right process to follow for SEO best practices or should we be claiming both the business and individual doctor profiles? The reason they are not claiming individual doctor profiles is to cut down on duplicate reviews as part of the Reputation Management Program.

Advice much appreciated!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Jared,

So sorry to hear about your duplicates issue. This may be one of those scenarios which would require a consultant looking directly at your dashboard. You may need to engage someone with good skills to do this ... but, before you do so, can you let me know:

1. Are any of the practitioners sharing a phone number with one another or with the practice, itself?

2. What exact language are you seeing in the dashboard regarding the duplicates?

Thanks!

[JaredBroussard]

I've had the same question with our agency's healthcare clients. We have followed the guidelines that are listed in GMB for multiple practitioners in a practice which I've listed below. However, even after following these suggested practices, our GMB dashboard is showing duplicate address issues.

Google My Business Guidelines on Individual Practitioner Local Listings:

Individual practitioners (e.g. doctors, lawyers, real estate agents)
An individual practitioner is a public-facing professional, typically with his or her own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners. Listings for practitioners may include title or degree certification (e.g. Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).

An individual practitioner should create his or her own dedicated listing if:

He or she operates in a public-facing role. Support staff should not create their own listings.

He or she is directly contactable at the verified location during stated hours.
A practitioner should not have multiple listings to cover all of his or her specializations.

Learn more
Multiple practitioners at one location
If the practitioner is one of several public-facing practitioners at this location:

The organization should create a listing for this location, separate from that of the practitioner.
The title of the listing for the practitioner should include only the name of the practitioner, and shouldn’t include the name of the organization.

Although we have followed the suggested steps to listing individual practitioners in local search, Google is still indicating duplicate address issues between the practitioners and the practice itself.

Any advice on how to handle the duplicate address issue? I appreciate any feedback.

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Chris,

Multi-practitioner business models have the option to either:

1. Promote the practice + promote the practitioners, or

2. Just promote the practice

If you go with the first, the main thing is to be sure that each practitioner has a unique landing page on the website (to which his/her citations link) and that each has his or her own phone number (separate from the practice's main phone number). Taking these precautions should normally prevent any issues with merging, but I am not quite sure what you mean about duplicate reviews. Are you saying that the patients are posting a review for the practice and then posting the same review again for a specific doctor? A little clarification on that might help.

If you go with the second option, then, yes, you can attempt to get rid of citations for the practitioners, but, because you are talking about a medical practice, it's very important to dig into Google's history with not closing doctor/dentist duplicates. It may be that the Yext rep with whom you're communicating is unaware of this. Note Linda Buquet's remarks on this previous Moz thread regarding this: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/dental-practice-google-and-dentist-personal-google

Hope this give some good food for thought.

[ChrisAshton]

You're currently on the right track and for all the right reasons. As a user, I'd rather see the surgery rather than an individual doctor and as you mentioned, splitting your reviews across multiple doctors isn't ideal.

From your side of things, you're obviously better off having the doctor's surgery listed and having the potential to drive traffic to the website.

Another factor that I'm not 100% sure about is how the current situation of individual doctors being listed will play with Google guidelines.