Google My Business for Group Dental Practices: I’d Rather Have a Root Canal
Date: July 25, 2014Category: Author: Lori Shepherd
Creating a Google My Business account for group dental practices is an important step in getting a practice noticed in local search results. For comparison, creating this account for one dentist is fairly straightforward. You create one Google My Business account for the practice, claim the listing for that account, and delete duplicate listings. For group dental practices, however, there are guidelines that have lead this Local SEO to wish that she had her head back in a chair with a dentist ready to drill into a molar. Google guidelines state that, “Individual practitioners may be listed individually as long as those practitioners are public-facing within their parent organization.” Google does not use strong language that says you MUST do this but trying to set pages up with their help center indicates that setting up individual listings for each practitioner in a group dental practice is exactly what they want.
I recently spoke with a Google My Business specialist, asking for help in claiming a My Business listing for a group dental practice. I wanted to merge the listings so we could consolidate all the reviews for the practice in one place. He wouldn’t do it. He said that I could claim all the listings for the practice, but the listing I had already claimed needed to have the name of the individual dentist and could not be deleted or merged.
This Google process is complicating things for patients looking for reviews for a practice. While Google insists on having individual listings for each dentist plus another for the entire practice, only one Google My Business page can be linked to Google search results. This means that if a patient has left a review for an individual dentist, it will not be seen in Google search results. A patient would specifically have to do a Google Plus search for that dentist to see their reviews, which they’re not going to do. With the growing importance of reviews, this means that potential patients are missing out on seeing reviews which could mean losing them altogether. I recently asked local search expert Mary Bowling, whom we hire for consulting services, about this very dilemma and here was her response:
This is a tough one for everybody. It has never really worked the way Google envisioned it, but it’s totally tied to Google+ and Google has specifically said they will not remove practitioner pages. To compound the issue, Google gets feeds for medical professionals from sources it trusts, which can produce duplicate and near duplicate listings. So we’re stuck with them whether we want them or not.
Google’s thinking is that sometimes the person is reviewing the practice and sometimes they are reviewing the professional. They want the professional’s reviews to appear on his/her listing and the practice’s review to appear on the dental office’s listing. If the dentist moves to another practice, his/her reviews follow them. Of course, the reviewers don’t really know that and can’t be expected to so you end up with situations like the one you describe.
If you are asking people for reviews and/or have a system in place that prompts people to review the practice, you can try to direct all of them to leave reviews on the practice’s listings via a link to it. This would probably cut down on the number of reviews ending up on the dentists’ listings.
The only way to be able to deal with all of the listings is to claim them all into one account. I would make it the account for the practice, since that is probably the one that you want to concentrate your efforts on. Once you have control of them, you can assign posting access to the dentists, if they are active there.
Google also wants the reviews to be hooked to the correct business or professional that is being reviewed. So if there are reviews on any of the dentist pages that are clearly about the practice, you can probably get Google support to move them over to that listing.
It’s also supposed to be effective to downplay (in the rankings) the dentist listings by stripping out photos, posts, details, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will stop ranking, especially if a listing has reviews and/or citations from trusted places or if the dentist is in many circles or otherwise active on Plus.
I will continue to navigate these guidelines with Mary Bowling’s advice. In the meantime that root canal is looking pretty tempting. . . .