Structure is the decision that most determines a growing practice reach, and it is the one most often got wrong. This lesson covers the two dimensions that complicate it: several offices, and several clinicians.
The rule for multiple offices
One profile per staffed physical office. Not one for the practice as a whole, and not one per treatment offered.
Each office profile needs its own address, its own local phone number where possible, its own hours, and its own landing page on your website. Pointing every profile at your homepage is a common and costly shortcut: it gives every office the same page, so none of them has a page that clearly matches its location.
Managing several profiles
Once you pass a handful of offices, structure the management too:
- Keep all profiles under one business account rather than scattered across personal accounts.
- Use location groups so permissions and edits can be handled consistently.
- Maintain a single source of truth spreadsheet or record for every office, which chapter three covers in detail.
- Give each office an owner inside the practice who is responsible for hours and photos.
- Audit all profiles on the same schedule, so they cannot drift apart.
Drift is the real enemy. Practices with several offices almost always find that two of them have different formatting of the same suite convention, or hours nobody updated after a change.
Multiple clinicians at one address
This is where duplicates come from. The default and safest structure is one profile for the practice, with clinicians represented as staff on your website rather than as separate business profiles.
Practitioner profiles are a narrow exception. They are intended for public-facing professionals who effectively are their own practice, and they carry conditions: the practitioner must be public facing, and they should not have several profiles for the same role at the same address. A five-psychiatrist clinic creating five profiles at one suite is a duplicate cluster, and it can put the practice profile at risk alongside them.
Where a clinician genuinely warrants their own profile, for example a well-known psychiatrist with an independent referral base, keep it strictly separate in role from the practice profile, point it at their own bio page, and use the practice address and phone.
The department pattern
Larger organisations sometimes use department profiles for distinct services at one address. For a psychiatric practice this is rarely appropriate and often creates duplicates. A separate profile for your treatment programme at the same address as your main clinic is usually just a second listing competing with your first. Use the services list to distinguish offerings instead.
Finding and fixing duplicates
Audit for duplicates before doing anything else, since they undermine all other work:
- Search each office address on Maps and note every business attached to it.
- Search each clinician name plus your city.
- Search your practice name and look for old names, old addresses, and abbreviations.
- Search your phone number in quotes.
Then resolve carefully. Identify which profile has the reviews and history, keep that one as primary, and request removal or merge of the others rather than deleting the strong one. Never delete a profile with reviews to consolidate onto a cleaner but empty listing, because reviews do not always survive a merge. If the wrong profile has the reviews, correct that profile instead of abandoning it.
Chapter three turns all of this into a permanent system: one record that every listing is generated from.