Google Business Profile for Private Practice
Claim your Google Business Profile properly and local clients searching for what you offer will find you before they find your competitor.
Claim your Google Business Profile properly and local clients searching for what you offer will find you before they find your competitor.
Another clinic is winning your search You've built a proper practice, with a proper treatment table and a proper waiting room. Google, meanwhile, is introducing your patients to the clinic three doors down.
Type "physiotherapist" and your town into your phone. Look at what comes up before your own website does.
Half the time it's a rival with three reviews and a photograph of a treatment table so blurry it could be a bed, a door, or a large grey loaf.
You built the practice. Google decided the shopfront, and it isn't necessarily yours.
The best clinic in town is only the best clinic Google shows you.
Wellness marketing guides: practical guidance on this topic:
Resonant issues: challenges nearby to this:
You picked "Physiotherapist" from the dropdown and closed the laptop, reasonably enough.
Nobody mentions this at the start. You're allowed secondary categories too - sports medicine clinic, massage therapist, whatever else happens on your table.
Leave the field half-filled and you're a house with four bedrooms, advertised as a bedsit.
You've got a testimonials page. Lovely photograph of a smiling client, tasteful font, sits there like a good tablecloth nobody reads.
The same words, left as a Google review, carry weight your own website will never earn. Google decides who sees you next, and it marks its own homework.
A five-star review on Google does more for your bookings than the same sentence framed nicely on your own site.
One review saying "fixed my shoulder in three visits" beats a whole page of your own careful prose.
Your best marketing is a stranger typing five words at ten at night.
Here's a fairly odd statistic: 58% of UK physiotherapy practices run on the associate model. Only 21% work across more than one site.
Do the sum and most Google profiles are speaking for five different practitioners under one shared name plate. Nobody's told the profile any of this.
You know who's in the building on a Tuesday. Your Google profile doesn't, and neither does the client trying to book with you specifically.
Somewhere a woman is booking "the physio" and hoping for the one her friend saw, with no way of asking Google to check.
Try this today. Search your own practice name from your phone, standing in the kitchen, not at your desk with your laptop.
The map pin, the opening hours, the phone number: they sometimes disagree with each other, depending where you're standing and which device asked.
A client ringing a number that hasn't worked since your old landline was disconnected isn't a client. She's a woman leaving a message into the void, then booking elsewhere.
Front of mind: some of our thinking on this topic:
Half your week gets filled by an aunt mentioning you at the school gates, over the fence, in the queue at the chemist.
A whispered recommendation is a fine thing. It's also, to the algorithm, entirely invisible.
The algorithm has never stood at a school gate and never will.
Turn one grateful client's kind word into a written review and Google finally hears what your waiting room already knows.
Ask at the door, while the goodwill is still warm, and half will say yes on the spot.
Keeping a profile current means checking hours, answering reviews, posting the odd update. About twenty minutes a week, indefinitely.
Some practices manage this themselves, briskly, over tea. Others hand it to a specialist entirely and never think about it again.
Both are sensible answers. The wrong answer is the profile nobody's touched since it was set up by whoever had a spare afternoon in 2019.
Twenty minutes a week is nothing. Two years of silence is everything.
Six practitioners under one roof, describing the same three chairs and the same water cooler, in six different ways.
One profile calls it "calm and professional." Another calls it "friendly and approachable," as though describing a different building entirely.
Google has no idea these are meant to be the same waiting room. Neither, frankly, does the client trying to picture it.
You know it's one room, with one slightly temperamental radiator. Say so, once, in one voice, and let that stand.
Claim your Google Business Profile properly and let local clients find the practice you've built. Claim your profile
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