The profile Google wrote about youGoogle Business Profile optimization for audiologists
Categories, services, hours, providers and photos: the fields that decide the map pack, filled in properly.
The problem
For most people choosing between two practices, the Google Business Profile is the practice. They read it in the map, call from it and never open the website. At the average practice it was set up once, years ago, and has not been touched since.
It is a page, and most of it is blank
A profile carries far more than a name and a pin: categories, a services list with descriptions, products, attributes, hours, holiday hours, appointment links, photos, questions and answers, and separate profiles for individual providers. Most practices fill in the first few fields and leave the rest empty, and every empty field is a question the profile cannot answer for someone deciding where to go.
The category is the ranking decision
The primary category tells Google what kind of place this is, and it shapes which searches the profile is eligible for at all. Audiologist and Hearing aid store surface for different searches and invite different comparisons. Most practices that test and dispense want Audiologist as the primary and the store category as a secondary. The reverse positions the practice as retail and walks it into the price comparison it cannot win.
Services, written out
Listed services can be shown to people searching for that service, so each line the practice genuinely offers gets its own entry in the words patients use: hearing test, tinnitus evaluation, ear wax removal, hearing aid repair, custom hearing protection. It is plain work and it is almost always undone.
Hours, holidays and the review they cause
Wrong hours produce the worst kind of review: a patient who drove over and found the door locked. Holiday hours are the ones nobody updates, and they are the ones that cause it. Keeping them right is dull, and it protects everything else on the profile.
Providers who left years ago
Individual clinicians often have their own profiles, created by Google or by a former employer, and those profiles keep ranking long after the person has gone, sometimes above the practice itself and sometimes routing calls to a number nobody answers. Finding them and claiming, merging or retiring them is usually the first real movement a profile makes.
What a profile cannot do
It cannot put a practice in the map pack for a town it has no office in. Proximity does too much work in this category for that to be reliable, and we will not sell it. What a well-kept profile does is win the searches that are genuinely close by, which are most of the ones that become appointments.
Questions about this piece
Should our primary category be Audiologist or Hearing aid store?
For most practices that test and dispense, Audiologist, with the store category as a secondary. It keeps the practice in the clinical comparison rather than the retail one. A practice that is genuinely retail-first is the exception, and the audit will say so.
We lost access to our profile. Can you get it back?
Usually, through Google's ownership request process, though it can take weeks when a former employee or agency still holds it. Whatever we recover sits in an account you own.
Do Google posts help rankings?
Not in any way we can show. They are useful for telling patients something they would want to know, such as new hours or a new clinician, and we treat them that way rather than as a ranking lever.
This one rarely works alone.
The audit decides which pieces you actually need and in what order. You keep it whether or not you continue.
Works with
- 8 kHzLocal SEO & Google Maps
The three results above the fold when someone types hearing test near me.
- 250 HzReviews & reputation management
Volume, recency and response, collected in a way that discloses no care.
- UnaidedSEO audit (the practice audiogram)
The unaided test: where the practice can be found, where it cannot, and the order to fix it in.