The verdict
Most clinics type six services into their Business Profile from memory. The list should be generated from the site: every service page and every condition page, predefined entries first and custom ones after, then counted against the competitors in the map pack. It is a mechanical job that takes an hour and almost nobody does it.
Open a clinic’s Business Profile and count the services. Then open the site and count the pages that describe something the practice does. The second number is usually three or four times the first.
That gap is not a strategy. It is what happens when somebody fills in a form once, at setup, from memory, at the end of a long afternoon.
The list already exists
It is the site. Every service page, every technique page, every condition page is an assertion that the practice does this thing. The profile should say the same things, and the way to make it say the same things is to build the list from the pages rather than from recall.
Google’s services editor supports this directly. Its own documentation says that when adding services you can choose from suggested options tailored to your business type, and that you can also create and add custom services options. So there is a structured list to draw on and a free-text fallback for anything it does not cover.
How to build it
An hour, once, properly
- Export every URL from the sitemap. Not a crawl of the menu. The menu is the thing that has been out of date the longest.
- Mark every page that describes something you do or something you treat. Conditions count. A patient searching a condition is searching for a service.
- Match each one against the predefined options first. Work through the suggested list before writing anything custom.
- Write custom entries only for what is left. In the practice’s own words, no prices, no phone numbers.
- Count what you end up with, then count the map pack. Eight to ten competitors, same exercise, and look at the gap in both directions.
Why this is worth an hour when posts are not
Because Google names relevance as one of the three things behind local results, and defines it as how well a business matches what someone is searching for, advising that complete and detailed business information helps Google better understand your business.
The services list is one of the few places on a profile where you get to state, in structured form, the full set of things you do. Six entries typed from memory is a partial answer to a question you were asked directly.
What the exercise finds, every time
Three things, and the middle one is usually the most useful.
Services on the profile that no page on the site describes. Pages on the site that the profile never mentions. And a handful of things the practice does daily that appear in neither, because they are too obvious to the people doing them to seem worth writing down.
My note: the third category is where the genuinely good content briefs come from. It is almost always the thing a practitioner says in passing, in the tone of somebody describing the weather.
The order matters, and it is the next post
Predefined entries before custom ones, because they map to something Google already has a definition for. Custom ones are free text and behave like free text. That ordering rule is in predefined first, then custom.
The other two halves of this are the services listed with nothing behind them, in services on your profile with no page behind them, and what the count should be, in benchmarking your service count.
The short version
- The services list should come from the sitemap, not from memory.
- Condition pages count. Somebody searching a condition is searching for a service.
- Predefined options first, custom entries for the remainder.
- Then count against eight to ten map pack competitors, both directions.
- Google names relevance as how well you match the search, and this is where you state it.
- Six services typed at setup is a partial answer to a direct question.
- The best briefs come from what is in neither list, because it seemed too obvious to write down.
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 site get compared line by line.
