Groups, and the brands you inherited
At six locations the problems stop being about ranking and start being about what happens to the names of the practices you bought.
The consolidation decision comes first
A group that has acquired four practices usually owns four websites, four sets of reviews, four Google profiles and four names that local patients still recognise. Every one of those is an asset and a liability at the same time, and the question of whether to consolidate under one brand or keep the local names is the single most consequential decision in the engagement.
It is genuinely two-sided. Consolidation concentrates authority and simplifies everything; it also throws away decades of local recognition and, done carelessly, throws away the reviews with it. We do not have a house answer to this. We have a way of working out which one your specific markets support.
Redirects are where the value gets destroyed
If consolidation is the decision, the migration is the whole risk. Practices lose the majority of their inherited search value in badly executed migrations, and it is usually irreversible by the time anyone notices, because the traffic decline gets attributed to seasonality for two quarters.
Mapping every old URL to its closest new equivalent, preserving profiles rather than deleting them, and staging the change rather than doing it in one weekend is unglamorous and is the entire job.
The provider roster changes constantly
At group scale, audiologists join and leave often enough that entity hygiene stops being a project and becomes maintenance. Departed clinicians leave profiles, bios and reviews behind, and those artefacts keep ranking and keep routing calls long after the person has gone.
Two audiences for one report
Ownership needs the group view and a per-site comparison that shows which locations are underperforming their catchment. Each practice manager needs their own numbers and nothing else. Those roll up from the same data and are two separate documents.
Questions from practices like this
Should we consolidate our acquired practices under one brand?
It depends on how strong the local names actually are, which is measurable rather than a matter of taste. In some markets the acquired name is the most valuable asset in the deal; in others it is a liability nobody outside the building remembers. We measure before recommending.
We have an internal marketing team. Where do you fit?
Usually as the specialist layer: strategy, the audiology-specific decisions, and the work an in-house generalist has no reason to have learned. Plenty of group engagements are us setting direction and their team executing, which is cheaper and works well.
The first call checks two things.
Whether your catchment is open, and whether search is the right lever for what you actually want more of. If either answer is no, that call is short and free.