The verdict
List every social profile your website links to. List every one your Business Profile links to. They will not be the same list. Ten minutes of reconciliation, and the point is not vanity metrics: these are the public places that confirm you are one business with one name, and half of them are usually orphaned accounts nobody has posted to since 2019.
Two lists. The icons in your website footer, and the links on your Business Profile. Write both out.
On most local sites the two lists overlap by about half. There is a platform linked from the site that the profile does not know about, a profile linked from the profile that the site does not mention, and at least one account that has not been posted to in years and still carries the old branding.
What this check is actually for
Not engagement. I have no interest in whether a clinic posts on any of these.
It is about the same thing as the rest of the NAP work: whether the set of public places representing this business agree that it is one business, at one address, under one name. Google describes prominence as resting partly on how many websites link to your business, and your own profiles are a controllable part of that web of references.
An abandoned account under a former trading name is a reference pointing somewhere else. That is the problem, not the fact that nobody posts.
How to run it
Ten minutes
- Write the two lists. Footer icons on one side, profile links on the other.
- Search the business name on each major platform. Not just the ones you know about. This is where the forgotten accounts turn up, usually created by a previous marketing agency.
- Open every one. Check the name, the address if it carries one, the phone, and the profile image.
- Categorise: active, dormant but correct, or wrong. Only the third category is urgent.
- Reconcile the two lists. Anything active and correct should be linked from both.
What to do with the dead ones
An account you will never post to again but which carries the correct name and details is harmless. Leave it. It is a consistent reference and it costs nothing.
An account carrying an old name, an old address or an old phone number is the one to deal with. Update it if you can get into it. If you cannot, that is a genuine problem and worth the time to recover access, because an abandoned profile under a previous brand is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a rebrand ambiguous for years.
Do not delete accounts as a tidiness exercise. A deleted profile is a broken reference wherever it was linked from, and the link equity and the entity signal both go with it.
Why it matters more now
Because more of the deciding happens before anyone reaches your site. SparkToro’s clickstream analysis found 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click in early 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024.
When somebody searches your practice name, what assembles in front of them is drawn from every public surface carrying that name. If three of those surfaces disagree about your phone number, that is what gets assembled.
The one that surprises people
A video platform account, usually created years ago, with the old logo and one upload. Clinics forget these exist because nobody thinks of a video account as a profile. It is, it carries a name and a description, and it is frequently the most out-of-date thing representing the business anywhere.
This is check six of eight in the profile audit order, and it pairs directly with the address work in the four places your NAP disagrees with itself.
The short version
- Write both lists. Site footer, and profile links. They will not match.
- Search the business name on every major platform. The forgotten accounts are the point.
- This is not about engagement. It is about one business, one name, one address.
- Dormant but correct is fine. Leave it alone.
- Wrong name or old details is the urgent category. Recover access if you have to.
- Do not delete as tidying. A deleted profile is a broken reference.
- Check the video account. It is usually the most out of date thing you own.
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 treats the profile, the site and the other public surfaces as one entity problem.
