Google Business Profile Setup for Practices
Fix five things on your Google Business Profile this afternoon and local clients start finding you without ever seeing an advert.
Fix five things on your Google Business Profile this afternoon and local clients start finding you without ever seeing an advert.
Sitting unfound on page two Your website looks lovely and nobody's reading it. Google decides who gets seen before anyone reaches your homepage, and it decides on details most practices never touch.
Sarah Jones Counselling is what's on your invoices. Nobody types that into Google at half past nine on a Tuesday.
Sarah Jones Therapy Manchester wins that search every time. Google favours the name clients type into the search bar, not the one on your certificate.
Change the profile name field this afternoon. Leave the website exactly as it is, the way you'd leave a sleeping dog exactly where it fell.
Your listing name is the first handshake, and Google shakes hands before anyone reaches your homepage.
Wellness marketing deep dives: key ideas that underpin this:
Full picture: practical guidance on this topic:
Google doesn't read your headed paper. It reads what strangers type.
Everyone frets over the map position, the little red teardrop, whether it sits dead centre on the high street.
Meanwhile the category field sits there, ignored, deciding whether anyone finds you at all.
A psychotherapist filed under "Health Consultant" stays invisible to a person searching "psychotherapist near me". A bakery filed under hardware never sells a loaf either.
Good to know: Whatever's on your mind here, and however your practice's specifics play in, this is what specialist agencies take care of - so you can get on with running your practice. Happy to help ease your mind, if it'd be useful.
Thirty-seven per cent of UK adults have sat across from a therapist. Nobody needs persuading that counselling is a normal Tuesday activity.
Clients are already searching. At 11pm, on a phone, under a duvet, typing "counsellor near me" like it's the most ordinary thing in the world.
Social acquisition costs have risen 22% since 2024. Chasing strangers on Instagram now costs more than meeting a reader who's already typing your job title into a search bar.
Your profile meets clients at the exact moment they've decided. Finding you is the only job left.
A review sitting there since March, unanswered, reads like a waiting room with the lights off and last year's magazines still on the table.
A one-line reply fixes it. "Thank you, glad it helped" costs you eleven seconds and tells Google, and the next nervous reader, someone's behind the desk.
Google notices response rates. So does the reader deciding between you and the next name on the list.
An unanswered review is a light left on in an empty room, except the room isn't empty, you've just gone silent.
Opening hours, new services, a fresh photo of the therapy room that doesn't look like it was taken in 2019 - these want updating on a schedule.
Think of it like watering a plant that never asks nicely and never says thank you, but dies without a word if you forget it for six months.
Rate your practice: score your practice:
Some practices handle it themselves, a standing job squeezed between clients. Others hand it to people who do this daily and keep the profile permanently fresh either way.
What matters is one person owns the job for good. You don't personally need to learn to love admin.
See exactly where your practice is losing local searches, in under two minutes. Score your practice
You stayed to the end and here we both are. We have a visual river, a story garden and a listening wind that belong to a practice exactly like yours - and a discovery call where they all make beautiful sense over coffee. Biscuit?
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