The verdict
The website field on your profile should point at your home page. Not the booking system, not a landing page, not a tracking URL that redirects twice. The single exception is a multi-location listing, where each profile points at its own location page. This is the most valuable link the profile gives you and clinics routinely spend it on a form.
Somebody taps your profile, reads the reviews, decides you are worth a look, and taps through to the website. That tap is the profile’s job finished and the site’s job starting. Where it lands decides what happens next.
On a surprising number of clinic profiles it lands on a booking form.
Why the home page
Because the person tapping has not decided yet. They have decided you are worth investigating, which is a different thing, and a booking form gives them one option: commit now or leave.
The home page gives them the reviews page, the conditions, the clinicians, the fees, the location and the booking link. It is the page built to route somebody who is still looking. A booking form is built to close somebody who has finished looking, and the profile does not know which of those two people just tapped.
Google’s own setup guidance is mechanical rather than strategic here. It says to enter the full URL including the protocol, make sure Googlebot is not blocked on your site, and check Search Console for penalties, and notes that some categories can add extra links for things like appointments and reservations. That last part is the answer to the booking problem: the appointment link is a separate field, so you do not have to spend the website field on it.
The three ways this gets wasted
What I find in the field
- The booking system. Usually a third-party subdomain. It converts the ready and loses everybody else, and it hands your most valuable profile click to a domain you do not own.
- A campaign landing page. Built for an ad, kept after the ad stopped, with no navigation and no way back into the site.
- A tracking URL that redirects. Sometimes twice. It works, it is just slower and more fragile than a direct link, and every hop is a chance for something to break silently.
The third one is the most defensible and I still argue against it. If you want attribution, use a parameter on a direct link rather than a redirect through a third party. The profile click is worth protecting.
The exception
Multi-location. Each profile points at that location’s own page, not at the shared home page.
This is not a nuance, it is the difference between a location page that has a reason to exist and one that is a template with a town name in it. The profile link is the strongest signal you can send that this page belongs to this place, and sending all of them to the home page collapses that.
If you are running one location and wondering whether to send the profile at a city page instead of the home page: no. One location, one profile, home page.
How this fits the relevance argument
Google’s description of local results rests on relevance, distance and prominence, with prominence resting partly on how many websites link to your business. The profile is not a backlink in the ordinary sense, but the field is the formal statement of which page on the open web represents this business.
Pointing that statement at a third-party booking subdomain says something you almost certainly do not mean.
This is check five of the eight I run, and it takes about ten seconds to verify, which is why it is embarrassing how often it is wrong. The full order has the rest.
The short version
- Point it at the home page. The person tapping has not decided yet.
- A booking form closes the ready and loses everyone else. Use the separate appointment link field instead.
- Not a campaign landing page. No navigation, no way back into the site.
- Not a redirecting tracking URL. Use a parameter on a direct link if you need attribution.
- Multi-location is the exception. Each profile points at its own location page.
- One location means the home page. Not a city page.
- Ten seconds to check and it is wrong more often than it should be.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the work I do. SEO for chiropractors covers where the effort belongs in a practice, and local SEO is where the profile and the pages behind it get treated as one job.
