Are you curious about practitioner listings and how they can benefit various professionals, from lawyers to fitness trainers? Practitioner listings offer a tailored approach to online business directories, allowing individual experts to showcase their skills and connect with potential clients seeking specialized services.
In this article, we’ll explore the pros and cons of practitioner listings, offering insights into how they can enhance your online presence. Plus, we’ll delve into effective management strategies and show you how BrightLocal’s tools, such as Citation Tracker, can simplify the process. Whether you’re a medical practitioner, legal expert, wellness coach, or beauty professional, this guide will help you harness the power of practitioner listings to reach your target audience more effectively.
What are practitioner listings?
A practitioner listing is an individual Google Business Profile entry designed for public-facing professionals who belong to a larger business but offer independent services, such as lawyers, doctors, and hair stylists. It offers them the opportunity to establish a distinct online presence apart from the main business entity.
Practitioner listings offer a tailored approach to online business directories, enabling individual professionals to highlight their expertise and connect with potential clients seeking specialized services.
Consider a scenario where your local dentist employs four dental practitioners, each with their own area of expertise. One dentist specializes in teeth whitening, while another excels in Invisalign braces. This is precisely what a practitioner listing is meant for—enabling each dentist to create a personalized listing that highlights their unique expertise and offerings.
What types of businesses are eligible for practitioner listings?
- Medical and Healthcare Professionals: Doctors, dentists, chiropractors, and other healthcare practitioners.
- Therapists and Mental Health Practitioners: Psychologists, counselors, therapists, and mental health professionals.
- Legal Experts: Lawyers, attorneys, and legal consultants.
- Wellness and Fitness Specialists: Yoga instructors, personal trainers, nutritionists, and wellness coaches.
- Beauty and Aesthetic Professionals: Hair stylists, makeup artists, tattoo artists, skincare specialists, and other beauty experts.
- Educational Tutors and Coaches: Academic tutors, life coaches, career advisors, and mentors.
What are the pros and cons of practitioner listings?
Practitioner listings can offer several advantages and disadvantages.
Pros
- Increased Visibility: Practitioner listings can boost the online visibility of individual professionals within a larger business entity.
- Personal Branding: Practitioner listings allow professionals to build and promote their personal brand, which can be essential for establishing trust and credibility among clients. Professionals can also keep this listing in the event that they move businesses/practices, allowing them to maintain their brand independent of their current business.
- Customization: Each practitioner can customize their listing with unique information, such as hours of operation, services offered, and customer reviews, showcasing their specific expertise and services.
- Local SEO Benefits: Having separate practitioner listings can improve the local SEO for the business, increasing the likelihood of appearing in local search results.
Cons
- Management Complexity: Maintaining multiple practitioner listings can be time-consuming and complex, especially for larger businesses with numerous professionals. Ensuring consistency in information across all listings can be challenging.
- Potential for Confusion: Customers might get confused if there are multiple listings for a single business, each representing a different practitioner. This confusion can lead to misunderstandings or miscommunications.
- Risk of Negative Reviews: Practitioner listings can receive negative reviews, which may impact the overall reputation of the business. Managing and responding to these reviews becomes important.
- Dependency on Individual Practitioners: If a practitioner leaves the business or relocates, their listing may need to be updated or removed, which can be a hassle.
Effective management can help mitigate some of the drawbacks associated with practitioner listings. Let’s look at how some of BrightLocal’s tools can be utilized to efficiently oversee practitioner listings and address certain challenges linked to them.
How to Use BrightLocal to Help Manage Practitioner Listings
Citation Tracker
Citation Tracker can help you by automating the process of finding and auditing your citations, enabling you to quickly see where a business is listed, what data is displayed about the business, and where competitors are listed but your business is not. This is going to help you eliminate the challenge of ensuring consistency in information across all listings.
Start by creating a Citation Tracker report for the business. Once the report is set up, go to the Live Citations tab, and using the Site Type column, filter the Found Citations table to get a list of the niche directories.
The aim here is to make sure that the most important existing niche listings for the business are correct and up-to-date. You can do this by clicking on the blue arrow in the Actions column which will take you to the citation where you can check that it has the correct information and make any changes.
Next, go to the Competitors Citations tab and using the Site Type column, filter the table to get a list of the niche directories.
If you notice that there are citations that your competitors have but you don’t, then it’s a good idea to go after them and level up the playing field. You can do this by clicking on the plus sign button in the Actions column which will take you to the site where you can then claim your listing.
If you have a lot of citations that need claiming/building you can save yourself some time by ordering a Citation Builder campaign and we’ll do the hard work for you.
The report should have also identified any existing practitioner listings (i.e. GBPs and niche listings), they will also be in the Live Citations tab. As mentioned earlier, customers might get confused if there are multiple listings for a single business, each representing a different practitioner.
If there are practitioner listings in the report, now is a good time to see how they could be strengthened and any confusion minimized.
For example, if the business has many practitioners that specialize in different aspects, then it could be a good idea to strengthen each individual listing, to help the company’s visibility for various search terms.
For example, a law firm might have someone specializing in criminal law and someone else who specializes in family law. Updating their practitioner listings to reflect these specialisms will not only minimize confusion but also help those listings rank for more specific searches.
If there are several practitioners it might be worth running Citation Tracker reports for each one of them to get a deeper look at what niche citations exist and could be claimed to further enhance search visibility.
Google Business Profile Audit
Setting up a Google Business Profile Audit report for the business will help you to understand what primary categories competitors are using for your chosen search terms.
You’ll see a tab for each of the search terms/keywords that you entered when setting up the report at the top of the table. The table in each keyword tab shows you the top 10 businesses that rank for each search term and where your business comes in that list. It also shows you the primary business category that each of your competitors is using in their Google Business Profile (GBP).
If the majority of competitors are using the same category but you have something different and you want to rank for the search term, then you might want to consider updating the primary category on your GBP.
This is also a good place to see if any individual practitioner GBPs show up in the top 10 local search results and if they might be improved by updating their GBP category as well. Just like you did before, now is a good time to see how they could be strengthened and any confusion minimized.
For example, updating practitioner GBP categories to reflect their specialisms will not only minimize confusion but also help them rank better for more specific searches.
Local Search Grid
To dig a little deeper and further enhance the business and practitioners’ GBPs, you can run a Local Search Grid report for each search term and see what secondary categories competitors are using.
Similar to GBP Audit, look at which primary and secondary categories your competitors are using and see how your business and any practitioners match up.
Conclusion
Practitioner listings offer a unique opportunity for professionals across various fields to showcase their expertise and connect with potential clients in a personalized way. While they come with both advantages and challenges, effective management can help harness their full potential.
Citation Tracker, Google Business Profile Audit, and Local Search Grid offer powerful solutions to streamline the management of practitioner listings, ensuring accuracy, consistency, and improved visibility in local search results.
By leveraging these tools, you can not only enhance your online presence but also provide a seamless experience for clients seeking specialized services. Practitioner listings are a valuable addition to any professional’s digital marketing strategy, and with the right management approach, they can be a game-changer in reaching a target audience effectively and building a strong online reputation.
Contents
Building citations?
You're in the right place! Save yourself hours—let us do the work.
