This lesson turns chapter one into a sequence. The order matters more than the speed: each week makes the next one work better, and doing them out of order means redoing work.
Week one: claim and verify
You cannot fix what you do not control. Establish ownership first.
- Claim your Google Business Profile for every staffed office. If one already exists and you do not own it, start the reclaim process now, because it takes the longest.
- Claim Apple Business Connect and Bing Places. Both are quick and both are widely neglected.
- Search for duplicates of each office and note them. Do not merge anything yet.
- Gather the documents verification tends to require: a utility bill or lease, signage photos, practice registration.
Expect verification to be slower for healthcare than for other categories. Start it and move on rather than waiting.
Week two: fix your core data
Now define the truth and push it outward.
- Write down your canonical NAP for each office, exactly as it should appear everywhere, including how the suite is formatted.
- Decide the practice name that matches your real-world signage, with no keywords appended.
- Correct your Google, Apple, and Bing profiles to match it exactly.
- Set your primary category, add secondary categories, and populate the services list.
- Make your website office pages match, character for character.
This week produces most of the eventual gain. It is also the least interesting week, which is why it is usually skipped.
Week three: the directories that matter
Work outward in order of influence.
- Correct your records at the major aggregators, since they feed the long tail.
- Claim and complete the two or three vertical mental health directories your patients actually use.
- Check your entry in every payer directory you participate in, and submit corrections.
- Retire orphaned provider listings for clinicians who have left.
Resist buying a package of hundreds of low-quality citations. Accuracy at the source beats volume at the edges every time.
Week four: measure a baseline
You will want to prove this worked, which means recording where you started.
- Capture your current profile performance numbers for each office.
- Record your directory coverage: how many are correct, wrong, or missing.
- Run a fixed set of prompts across the AI assistants and record whether you are named.
- Note the date of every change you made, so later movement can be attributed honestly.
Without a baseline captured before the work, any later claim of improvement is a guess. Chapter nine covers this properly.
What to ignore for now
Deliberately postpone:
- A website redesign. It will not fix a data problem and it will consume the whole quarter.
- A blog content programme. Useful later, useless on a broken foundation.
- Paid search. It can work, but it will paper over the accuracy problems you are trying to find.
- Chasing rank positions daily. They vary street by street and will only mislead you this early.
Thirty days of unglamorous accuracy work beats a year of sophisticated marketing on top of contradictory data. That is the whole argument of this chapter.