Whether you’re a single physician practice or have multiple doctors working under a single organization, having an up-to-date Google My Business (GMB) account is crucial for your patients and potential patients. However, as physicians, you may opt to have a public-facing profile for yourself separate from the organization you primarily work for.

What is Google My Business?

Google My Business is a way to get your practice listed in a highly valuable Google search result position for keywords like “near me” or with your city and state. GMB is an account you create within Google to display information such as your business name, hours, address, and photos. Google then prioritizes this profile you create when people search, for example, “plastic surgeon in Philadelphia.” Profiles that match this description are shown in what’s called the Local 3-Pack, where Google displays a map of the searcher’s location and three local businesses that are relevant for its searcher.

Without a complete and up-to-date GMB profile, your business or your physicians have little chance of out-competing others who do have full profiles, and who therefore rank above the top spot for non-3-Pack search results.

How to Optimize Google My Business for Medical Practices

Optimizing your GMB profile can be as simple as making sure your hours are correct (especially around holidays or unusual hours), adding photos of your practice location and staff members, and responding to positive reviews. However, this gets trickier for practices with multiple physicians and multiple locations. This is when you may want to consider having GMB profiles for both the practice as a whole as well as the individual physicians.

Single Physician Organizations

In short, if you’re the only practicing doctor or healthcare professional within your organization, you should not have multiple GMB profiles for the business and the doctor. This is because you don’t want to compete with yourself or confuse potential customers. Imagine how someone might react to seeing the exact same address, hours, and website attached to multiple listings in search results. At best, they’ll end up in the same place with extra work needed on your end to keep up both profiles, but worst, they’ll think the multiple listings are spam and avoid clicking on either one.

The way to optimize this type of GMB profile is to put the name of the practice first, followed by a colon and the doctor’s name and medical designation. This ensures people know who the attending doctor is at this site while reducing the confusion that may accompany the doctor having their own separate profile with the same information as the practice.

Multiple Physician Practices

If your practice has one location and multiple practicing healthcare professionals, ask yourself this question: are the physicians public-facing? As in, are they a community leaders or practicing professionals outside the medical practice? If so, you can create a separate physician profile for each professional who fits this description. This distinguishes them as contactable outside of the practice listing, while clarifying that they do provide services for this practice, just not exclusively.

After creating the practice’s GMB profile, create additional GMB accounts for each doctor who works outside the practice as well. Don’t include photos of the practice, the practice name or location, or any other details that are attached to the practice. Only the doctor’s name, designation, and separate contact information should be associated with this account.

Multiple Locations and Physicians

If your organization has multiple locations, you’ll definitely want to create multiple GMB accounts to clarify where exactly you’re capable of serving people. When creating multiple profiles for different locations, be sure to include the main city or region that location serves, for example, “Health Associates – Denver.”

And if multiple physicians serve at these locations, create accounts for each of them. Again, don’t include information about the overall practice location, name, or photos when creating physician GMB profiles. It should only include their name and designation to inform potential patients who they may end up seeing when they go to the nearest location.

When creating the location listings, be careful not to duplicate information such as photos, descriptions, or reviews, as duplicate content will be a flag to Google that you may be spamming their GMB service.

Comprehensive Medical Marketing By DLM

If you’re looking to beef up your online presence, a rich, full Google My Business profile is an essential place to start. However, medical marketing is much more than just this one account. From website management and content production to data tracking and analytics, there’s so much to monitor, produce, and keep up to date that can be overwhelming for those in the medical field who aren’t necessarily trained to manage. That’s where DLM’s marketing tools and services come in. We’re capable of building and managing your marketing efforts from advertising to website design and are uniquely suited to serve medical practices nationwide. To learn more, call our team or contact us online today.