Multiple My Business pages affecting local SEO?

[zacgarrison_70]

Hey Moz!

We have a situation with a dentist firm with multiple doctors at the same address. They have two locations for their dental offices, and each of the dentists operate at both offices.

The issue: Each doctor insists on having their own by business page for each location and i'm afraid this is hurting their local SEO. We've been tracking keywords by week and we've seen some big fluctuations in ratings and i'm looking into why this is happening. The office in location 1 has it's own Google My Business page and the three dentists have their own my business page set up at the exact same address. The office in location 2 has it's own Google My Business page as well and the three dentists have their own my business page there also.

This leads the two addresses of the main offices having multiple My Business pages at the same address competing against eachother since they are all are registered with similar names and specialties. Could this be hurting our local SEO? Thanks!

-Z

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Z!

If done properly, practitioner listings should not typically have a detrimental effect on the business' local pack rankings. Google's guidelines allow for their creation, and, up until about a week or so ago, these are the provisos I would make to ensure that you're managing this scenario correctly:

1. Be sure you've got a unique phone number for each dentist at which they are directly contactable, and that this number is being used for them across the board (on the websites, citations, social profiles, etc.)

2. Be sure you've got a unique landing page on each of the websites for each dentist, featuring their complete Name, Address, Phone number and other details. Be sure their citations link to the associated website landing page, rather than the homepage.

3. Be sure you are strictly adhering to Google's naming conventions, as specified in the guidelines: https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en It's incredible how many listings don't adhere to these, and Google spells it out in black-and-white how multi-practitioners should name their listings.

So far, so good, but then Google made a strange move about a week ago that I've covered in detail here. Recommend you read the whole thread, as it may be highly pertinent to your dental client. Basically, in a nutshell, Google appears to be filtering out businesses located at the same location that share the same category. So, in our example in that thread, a Moz member who owns a fishing charter company is being filtered out of the results because other fishing charters (same category) are located at the same address.

Your scenario particularly interests me because it rings bells of a practice I believe I recall Linda Buquet advocating some years back of practitioner listings (dentists, lawyers, etc.) not sharing the same categories. It has been a few years since I've heard Linda address this, and I'd love to know her thoughts on this given this recent Google change.

I think you have a very interesting opportunity here to do some experimentation with the filter if either of your client's practices and associated practitioners were previously all ranking highly.. Here's how I'd do that:

1. Do a Google search for whatever the category + city is that pertains to the dental practice (this might be something like 'Dentist San Diego'). See if the filter is being applied so that only the business or only one of the practitioners is coming up for that term in the local finder view you get to when you click on the 'more' link at the bottom of the local 3-pack. As described in the other discussion I've linked to, zoom in to see if the missing business or missing practitioners show up.

2. Then, what I'd experiment with is whether changing the category for one of the practitioners (changing it from Dentist to something like Pediatric Dentist) affects the results. You'd want to give it a few day and check back. See if changing that category then allows the practitioner to show up at the non-zoomed level when it was previously being filtered out.

In sum, practitioner listings have not been a problem historically when managed correctly, but with the recent filtering rolling out (which may be temporary or permanent), some new questions have just arisen. These issues could possibly be resolved by changing categories, where possible, but experimentation is needed to see how doing so might impact results.

I would love to hear back from you if you do embark on such an experiment, and your question has also made me wonder what Linda Buquet (an expert in Dental Local SEO) might say about shared categories for practitioner listings in 2016. Great topic!

[David-Kley]

I just wanted to say this was a great response. Gets my vote on where to start.

[MiriamEllis]

Thanks, David

[David-Kley]

No problem

I was going to go into a long explanation of how he needs to differentiate the listings from one another, but you saved me the trouble lol.