Amrut Services

Mehul Dedhia

SEO Consultant · Amrut Services

Author: Mehul Dedhia

  • The address inside your structured data

    The verdict

    There is a fourth copy of your address on your website that no human has ever read: the one inside your structured data, emitted automatically by your site builder on every page. It is the one where formatting genuinely matters, because a parser reads it rather than a person, and it is the one most likely to be wrong.

    Your footer and your contact page are read by people, so somebody would eventually notice a wrong phone number. The JSON-LD block is read by machines, which do not complain, so nobody notices anything.

    View source, search for the block, and read it. Most practice owners have never done this and are surprised by what is in there.

    Why formatting matters here and not elsewhere

    On the contact page, “Suite 130” and “Ste 130” mean the same thing to the person reading. In structured data they are two different strings in a field with a defined meaning, being read by something that is trying to resolve your business against everything else it knows.

    Google’s local business documentation asks for the physical address as a required property and says to include as many properties as possible, with a primary contact phone number recommended. It also says to use the most specific applicable business sub-type, which for a clinic has a trap in it worth knowing about separately.

    Included properly, the address becomes structured: a street, a locality, a region, a postal code, a country, each in its own field. Included badly, it becomes a string with a comma in it, which is worth considerably less.

    What goes wrong in an auto-generated block

    What I actually find

    • The second address line is dropped. The settings panel has a field for it and the generator ignores it, so the suite number vanishes from the machine-readable version only.
    • The region is spelled out rather than abbreviated. The field expects the short code and the panel accepted whatever was typed.
    • The phone is formatted for a human. Brackets, spaces, no country code. Readable, not parseable.
    • A day appears twice in the opening hours, with two different sets of times, because the panel allowed both and nothing validated it.
    • Service area entries put the town, the region and the country into the locality field, so a field meaning “the town” contains three things.
    • The identifier is the bare site URL, which means nothing else in your markup can reference the business as an entity without redeclaring it.

    None of these are catastrophic alone. Together they describe a business that is subtly not your business, published on every page, for years.

    The rule that decides what goes in

    Everything in the markup has to be true of the page and visible on it. Google’s structured data guidelines put it directly: your structured data must be a true representation of the page content, and you should not mark up content that is not visible to readers of the page.

    Which means the fix is not only to correct the markup. If the markup says Suite 130 and the footer does not, correcting the markup alone has made the two sources agree about a fact the page does not state. Put the suite number on the page first.

    What to do about the generator

    Do not add a correct block alongside the wrong one. Two descriptions of the same organisation, disagreeing about the address, with no shared identifier, is worse than either alone.

    Find the switch, turn the generator off, and publish one block you control. On most platforms the setting is under business information rather than anywhere labelled SEO, which is why people spend an hour looking in the wrong menu. What your website builder already says about you in JSON-LD covers that in full.

    Where this sits

    It is one quarter of the NAP check, and the quarter nobody does. Your NAP is in four places and they disagree has the other three and the order to work through them.

    The short version

    1. There is a fourth address on your site and no human has read it.
    2. Formatting matters here. A parser is reading it, not a person.
    3. The dropped suite number is the classic. The panel has the field, the generator ignores it.
    4. Phone formatted for humans is not parseable. Neither is a locality field containing three things.
    5. A bare URL as the identifier stops anything else referencing the business.
    6. Only mark up what is visible. Fix the page before you fix the markup.
    7. Turn the generator off rather than adding a second block.

    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 technical SEO is where markup gets checked against what the page actually says.

  • The footer and the contact page do not match

    The verdict

    The footer and the contact page are the two most-read blocks on a local site and almost nobody has ever compared them character by character. They were written at different times by different people, so they disagree about the suite number, the phone line, or the opening hours, and the disagreement has been published on every page for years.

    Two blocks of text. One appears on every page of the site. The other appears on the page people go to when they have decided to get in touch. Between them they carry the whole of your contact information, and they were written eighteen months apart.

    Put them side by side and read them as strings rather than as information. That is the check.

    Why these two drift

    The footer goes in at build time. Whoever set up the theme typed the address into a widget, and from then on it is one of those things that is technically editable and practically never touched, because editing it means finding which of four places in the theme settings controls it.

    The contact page gets written later, usually by somebody at the practice rather than by the developer, with more care and more detail. Parking instructions. Which door. The second phone number for the other thing.

    Then the practice changes something. A new line, a suite renumbering, a different set of hours on a Saturday. The person who makes the change updates the page they can find. That is the contact page, because they can navigate to it. The footer stays as it was.

    What I find, in rough order of frequency

    The common disagreements

    • The suite or unit number is in one and not the other. The single most common finding, and it is the detail a delivery driver and a parser both need.
    • Different phone numbers. Usually a tracking number on one and the real line on the other, or an old line that still forwards so nobody noticed.
    • Hours that do not match. Often because the footer lists a simplified version and the contact page lists the real one, including the lunch closure.
    • A different business name format. With and without the legal suffix, or with and without the practitioner’s name attached.
    • Two email addresses. A generic one in the footer and a personal one on the contact page, or the reverse.

    Why it is worth an hour

    Google’s guidelines for representing a business are about the profile describing the business as it actually is, using the details the business actually uses. When your own site publishes two answers, there is no single set of details for anything else to match against.

    And the practical cost lands before any of that. Somebody drives to a building and cannot find the suite. Somebody rings a number nobody answers any more. Those are not ranking problems, they are lost patients, and they happen on the two blocks of text most likely to be read by someone who has already decided to come.

    The version that should win

    Usually the contact page, because it was written by somebody who knew the details. But do not assume: ask the practice which is current, because occasionally the contact page is the one carrying a number that was retired and forwarded.

    Then make the footer match it exactly. Same order, same abbreviations, same punctuation. Not because a small formatting difference is harmful on its own, but because once the two are identical, the next person who changes one will notice the other.

    Then do the other two

    The location pages and the structured data are the other half of this, and the markup is the one where formatting genuinely matters because a parser reads it rather than a person. Schema.org splits an address into named parts for exactly that reason: PostalAddress, the mailing address, with separate properties for the street address, the locality, the region and the postal code, which means a suite number sitting in the wrong field is a different fact rather than a formatting quirk. Your NAP is in four places and they disagree has the full check and the order to fix them in.

    Complete and current business information is one of the things Google names as helping local ranking, alongside verification and reviews. Two contradicting versions on your own domain is the cheapest thing on that list to fix and the one nobody looks at.

    The short version

    1. Two blocks, written eighteen months apart, and never compared.
    2. The footer is hard to edit, so it is the one that goes stale.
    3. Missing suite number is the most common finding. Then phone numbers, then hours.
    4. Read them as strings, side by side. Not as information.
    5. The contact page usually wins, but ask rather than assume.
    6. Make them identical, not just equivalent. Then the next change gets noticed.
    7. The cost lands before ranking. Somebody cannot find the suite or rings a dead line.

    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 an SEO audit is where the four versions get stacked up and compared.

  • Your NAP is in four places and they disagree

    The verdict

    NAP consistency is not a directory problem. It is four places on your own website that disagree with each other: the footer, the contact page, the location pages, and the structured data nobody has ever read. Fix those four before you pay anyone to synchronise listings, because the site you control is the one contradicting itself.

    Ask any local SEO about NAP consistency and you will get an answer about citations. Directory listings, aggregators, a monthly subscription to keep them synchronised.

    Almost every time I audit a local business, the disagreement is not out there. It is on the client’s own domain, in four places, and nobody has ever compared them.

    The four places

    Where the four versions live

    • The footer. Written once when the site launched, copied to every page, and never revisited. If the practice moved suite, added a floor, or changed a phone line, this is the version that did not get updated.
    • The contact page. Written by a different person at a different time, usually with more detail and a different format. Frequently the most accurate of the four and almost never the same string as the footer.
    • The location pages. Generated from a template, so whatever was in the template is what is on all of them. Consistent with each other and often with nothing else.
    • The structured data. Emitted automatically by the site builder from a settings panel somebody filled in two years ago. Published on every page, read by machines, never seen by a human.

    Four versions. On a typical site at least two of them disagree, and on a site that has moved premises, three do.

    Why it matters more than the directories

    Google’s guidelines for representing your business are built around the idea that the profile should describe the business as it actually exists, using the name and details the business actually uses. Your website is the primary evidence for what those details are.

    If a directory has an old phone number, that is one third-party record being wrong. If your own site publishes two phone numbers in two places, you have made the question genuinely ambiguous, and you have done it on the most authoritative source available.

    Google describes local results as resting on relevance, distance and prominence, with relevance being how well the profile matches what someone is searching for and complete, current information being the way you feed it. A site disagreeing with itself is the opposite of complete and current.

    How I check it, in about ten minutes

    View source on the home page, find the footer address, copy it into a document. Do the same from the contact page. Do the same from one location page. Then find the JSON-LD block and copy the address out of that.

    Four strings, one under the other. The differences are obvious the second you see them stacked, and they are invisible otherwise, which is the entire reason this survives on so many sites.

    In the audit report I quote both versions when they disagree. Not a summary, the actual strings. People do not believe this finding until they see their own two addresses next to each other.

    What counts as a difference

    Formatting differences matter less than people fear and content differences matter more than people think.

    “Suite 130” against “Ste 130” is a formatting difference. It is worth tidying and it is not urgent. A missing suite number entirely, a different street number, a phone line that was replaced, a town name that changed when the boundary was redrawn: those are content differences and they are the ones to chase.

    The one exception is the structured data, where formatting does carry weight because a parser is reading it rather than a person. That case has its own post at the address inside your structured data.

    The order to fix them in

    Pick the true version first, which sounds obvious and requires somebody at the practice to actually decide. Then the structured data, because it is machine-read and published site-wide. Then the footer, for the same reason. Then the contact page and the location pages.

    Only after all four agree is there any point looking at directories, and by then you will have a canonical string to give them.

    This is the third of eight checks in the profile audit order I run every time, and it is the one people skip because it is boring. It is also the one that is wrong most often.

    The short version

    1. The disagreement is on your own site, not in the directories.
    2. Four places: footer, contact page, location pages, structured data.
    3. Stack the four strings in one document. The differences are invisible until you do.
    4. Content differences matter, formatting differences mostly do not. Except in the markup.
    5. Quote both versions in the finding. Nobody believes it otherwise.
    6. Fix the markup first, then the footer, then the rest.
    7. Directories come last, once you have a canonical string to give them.

    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 and the pages behind it as one job.

  • Twenty towns, tiered

    Twenty towns, tiered

    The verdict

    Twenty slots, ranked in three tiers rather than picked off a map. Tier one is the communities your patients actually come from. Tier two is realistic secondary catchment. Tier three only gets used if slots are spare. Ranking by commercial reality rather than by radius is the whole method, and it produces a shorter, better list than drawing a circle.

    The usual way this gets done is a circle on a map and everything inside it, in whatever order the interface accepted them. That produces twenty entries where the fifteenth is a village nobody has ever driven from and a community that supplies a tenth of the practice sits at number nine.

    Here is the version I build for clients, which takes about half an hour and is done once.

    Tier one: where patients actually come from

    Start from the practice management system, not from the map. Postcodes of active patients, sorted by count.

    That list is usually shorter and stranger than anyone expects. Practices are routinely surprised by which neighbouring community supplies the second-largest share, and it is almost never the one closest by road. Referral patterns, commuting routes and which supermarket people use all distort it.

    Everything on that list goes in first, in that order, regardless of distance.

    Tier two: realistic secondary catchment

    Places you get occasional patients from, plus places that are genuinely plausible on the same basis as tier one but where you currently have nobody.

    The test for a tier two entry is whether you could name the reason somebody would come. A transport link, a large employer, a referral relationship, a neighbouring community with no equivalent practice. If the only reason is “it is nearby”, it is tier three.

    Tier three: only if slots are spare

    Small communities on the edge of the range, satellite villages, places you would accept a patient from but would not expect one.

    These go in last and only if you have not reached twenty. This is the tier where padding happens, and padding is the thing to resist: a list of twenty where five are aspirational reads worse than a list of fifteen that is all true.

    What to leave out deliberately

    The exclusions that improve the list

    • Counties and regions. They cover tiers one and two in two slots and read as vague to a person. Named towns are what somebody would say out loud.
    • Postal codes inside towns you have already listed. Overlapping geography, and it spends the budget twice, which is its own mistake.
    • Anything past the point where nobody would realistically travel. Google’s outer limit is about two hours of driving time for the overall boundary, with up to 20 areas, but two hours is a cap and not a target. For a clinic the real limit is whatever people will do weekly.
    • The city centre, if you are suburban and it is competitive. Listing it does not make you visible there and it dilutes what the list communicates.

    What the tiering is actually for

    Two things, and neither is ranking.

    The first is the person reading. A ranked list that starts with the communities you genuinely serve reads as a real description of a practice. A circle on a map reads as a circle on a map. Nothing in the field moves the geometry, because Google measures distance from the business to the person searching, so the audience for this list is human.

    The second is that building it forces the analysis. The half hour spent sorting patient postcodes is worth more than the field it produces, because it tells you which town pages are worth writing and which reviews to ask for. That analysis feeds the three things that actually do help you reach the next town.

    The field itself does not affect ranking, which is the point of the post on what service areas are and are not. The list is a by-product of an exercise worth doing anyway.

    The short version

    1. Start from patient postcodes, not a map. The order surprises people.
    2. Tier one is where patients actually come from, ranked by count, regardless of distance.
    3. Tier two needs a nameable reason. A transport link, an employer, a referral. Not just proximity.
    4. Tier three only if slots are spare. Fifteen true entries beat twenty with five aspirational.
    5. No counties, no overlapping postal codes, no competitive city centre you cannot reach.
    6. Two hours is a cap, not a target. The real limit is what people will do weekly.
    7. The analysis is worth more than the field. It tells you which pages to write.

    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 an SEO audit is where the catchment analysis turns into a page plan.

  • What actually wins the next town over

    What actually wins the next town over

    The verdict

    Three things actually help you appear for the town next door, and the service area field is not one of them. A real page on your own site for that place, reviews from patients who name it, and a services list carrying the words people there use. All three are slow, none is a setting, and that is why the field keeps getting sold instead.

    A practice in one suburb wants patients from the three around it. This is the most common local SEO request there is, and the honest answer starts with a constraint rather than a tactic.

    Google measures distance as how far each business is from the person searching, and you cannot move the building. So nothing you do will make you as visible in the next town as a competitor physically sitting in it. What you are competing for is the space above that competitor on every other axis, and there are three levers.

    One: a page for the place, that has a reason to exist

    Not a service page with a town name swapped in. Twelve of those is how sites get thin.

    A page that earns the place name says something only true of that place: how long the drive is and from where, which of your patients come from there and for what, parking or transport specifics, a local referral relationship, the conditions you see disproportionately from that community. If you cannot write four paragraphs that are untrue of the next town along, you do not have a page yet.

    This is the slowest of the three and the only one that compounds.

    Two: reviews that name the town

    You cannot ask for this directly and you should not try to script it. What you can do is ask at the moment when people naturally say where they came from, and make the request in person rather than by email, which is where the detail gets lost.

    The value is double. A reviewer writing “drove over from the next town every week for six weeks” is producing text on a surface Google reads, and it is also the single most persuasive thing a prospective patient from that town can encounter. BrightLocal’s February 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 97% of people read local reviews. Somebody deciding whether you are worth the drive is reading to find out whether anyone else made it.

    Republishing those on your own site is where the second half of the value is, which is what a reviews page you own is for.

    Three: the services list, in local language

    The services on your profile are free text at the custom level, and they are read by people comparing options. Where the language for a treatment differs between communities, and it sometimes genuinely does, the profile is a cheap place to carry both.

    This is the smallest of the three and the fastest. It is also the one that pairs with the page: a service named on the profile with no page behind it is a content brief that writes itself.

    What I would not do

    Add the town to the service area field and call it done. That field does not affect ranking, which is the whole argument in why service areas are not a ranking radius.

    Open a second profile at a virtual office in the town. That is a fake location, it is against the rules, and the reinstatement process after it gets caught takes longer than doing the real work would have.

    Build twelve near-identical town pages. That is the thin content problem arriving under a different name, and it damages the pages you already have.

    The realistic expectation

    You will not take the top of the map pack in a town you are not in. You can be the best of the results that are not local to it, which for a considered decision like a course of care is frequently enough, because the person deciding is willing to drive if the reading justifies it.

    That is a smaller claim than the one usually made and it has the advantage of being true.

    The short version

    1. You cannot move the building. Distance is measured from your verified address.
    2. A real page for the place, saying something untrue of the next town along.
    3. Reviews that name the town. Ask in person, at the moment people say where they came from.
    4. Services in the local language, and a page behind each one.
    5. Not the service area field. It does not affect ranking.
    6. Not a virtual office. Fake location, and the cleanup costs more than the work.
    7. Aim to be the best non-local option. For a considered decision, that is usually enough.

    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 covers the profile, the reviews and the pages as one job.

  • Do not list a city and its postal codes

    Do not list a city and its postal codes

    The verdict

    You get twenty service area slots. Listing a town and then also listing the postal codes inside that town spends several slots saying one thing, because the geography overlaps and the smaller entries sit inside the larger one. Twenty is a budget. Spend it on twenty different places.

    This is a small thing and I keep finding it, usually on profiles where somebody has clearly tried hard. Twenty slots, all full, and eleven of them describing the same six square miles.

    What is happening

    Google gives you up to 20 service areas and asks you to be as specific and accurate as possible, with the overall boundary staying within about two hours of driving time.

    The instinct that produces the overlap is reasonable: be specific, so use postal codes. Then somebody else adds the town name for clarity. Now the town and the codes inside it are both listed, and the codes are geographically contained by the town. You have said the same thing at two levels of resolution and spent several slots doing it.

    The same applies to the other direction, which is more common than you would think: a county or region listed alongside four of the towns inside it.

    Why it is a real cost rather than a tidiness complaint

    Because twenty is a hard limit and most practices have more than twenty plausible places.

    Every slot spent on a redundant entry is a town you could have named and did not. If your catchment realistically covers twenty-six communities and eleven of your slots are duplicated geography, you have named nine of the twenty-six. That is the cost, and it is invisible because the field looks full.

    It also makes the list worse to read, and a person reading it is the main reason the field is worth filling in at all, given that service areas do not affect ranking. Google’s own description of local results turns on relevance, distance and prominence, with distance measured from the business to the person searching, so no amount of list-building changes the geometry. The list is for the reader.

    Named towns beat everything else

    Given a choice between a county, a postal code and a town name, use the town name.

    A county covers a lot of ground in two slots and reads as vague to a person deciding whether you are a realistic option. A postal code is precise and means nothing to most people, who do not know which code they live in. A town name is what somebody would say out loud if you asked them where they live, which makes it the version that does the job the field is actually good at.

    How to rebuild the list cleanly

    • Write out every community you would realistically travel to or draw from. Ignore the limit for now.
    • Delete anything that contains another entry. Counties, regions, metro areas. If you have named the towns, the container is redundant.
    • Delete every postal code where you have the town. Keep a code only where it identifies an area with no useful name.
    • Rank what is left by how likely a patient is to come from there. Not by distance. Commercial reality, not geometry.
    • Take the top twenty. If you have fewer than twenty, stop. Padding with places nobody travels from helps nothing.

    The wider point

    This is the same mistake as claiming both a specific and a general category, and as declaring a region in your structured data alongside the cities inside it. Saying one thing twice at different resolutions feels thorough and is just a way of using a budget up.

    Ranking the list properly is the part worth spending time on, and I have set out how I tier one in twenty towns, tiered.

    The short version

    1. Twenty slots is a budget. Overlapping entries spend it twice on one place.
    2. A postal code inside a town you have already named adds nothing.
    3. So does a county alongside its towns. Same mistake, opposite direction.
    4. The cost is the towns you did not name. Invisible, because the field looks full.
    5. Prefer town names. It is what a person would say out loud.
    6. Rank by likelihood of a patient coming from there, not by distance.
    7. Fewer than twenty is fine. Padding helps nothing.

    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.

  • Never hide your street address

    Never hide your street address

    The verdict

    If patients come to you, never remove your street address from your Business Profile. Hiding it converts the listing to a service-area business, and the verified address is what Google measures distance from. You trade the single strongest ranking asset a clinic has for a longer list of town names that do not affect ranking at all. It is the most destructive change a local practice can make on purpose.

    It gets suggested with the best intentions. The practice wants to look like it serves the whole region rather than one suburb, somebody notices that hiding the address lets you list service areas more prominently, and the change takes four seconds.

    Getting it back takes a reverification and, in the meantime, the profile is competing on a different basis entirely.

    What the change actually does

    Google’s instruction for becoming a service-area business is direct: remove your address and only enter your service area, which is the right advice for a plumber who works at customers’ homes and has no premises worth visiting.

    A clinic is the opposite case. People come to you, at an address, and stay for an hour.

    The reason it matters is in how local results work. Google names relevance, distance and prominence, and defines distance as how far each business is from the person who is searching. Distance is measured from a point. Remove the point and you have removed the input that was working hardest for you, for a practice whose whole catchment is people within a sensible drive.

    The trade you are actually making

    On one side: the proximity signal from a verified address in the suburb where most of your patients live.

    On the other: a list of up to twenty town names in a field that, as far as anyone has been able to test, does not affect ranking. Sterling Sky’s ongoing tracking of a hidden-address profile found that the service area does not impact rankings and the verified physical address determines them instead. They are an SEO agency testing their own listing, which is worth stating, but the finding matches what I see and it is the same conclusion from the opposite direction: the address is doing the work.

    So the trade is a real asset for a cosmetic one.

    When hiding it is correct

    When it is true. A mobile therapist who treats people in their homes and has no clinic. A practitioner who rents a room by the hour in a building that is not theirs and where nobody can turn up unannounced. A practice run from a residential address where the practitioner does not want the address public.

    That last case is a genuine conflict and I do not pretend otherwise. If you are treating people from home and are not willing to publish the address, you are choosing safety over a ranking signal, which is an entirely reasonable choice. Just make it knowingly, and know what it costs, rather than being told it is an optimisation.

    My note: a hybrid profile is allowed. You can keep the street address visible and still list service areas. That is the correct setup for almost every clinic and it is what people think they are choosing when they hide the address. They are not.

    How to tell if it has already happened to you

    Look at your own profile in search results as a member of the public. If it shows a full street address, you are a storefront listing. If it shows a phrase about serving a region and no address, you are a service-area business, and unless a person made that choice deliberately, somebody made it for you.

    This is one of the checks I run every time, and it takes about fifteen seconds. The rest of what service areas do, and mostly do not do, is in the post on why service areas are not a ranking radius.

    The short version

    1. If patients come to you, keep the address visible. Always.
    2. Hiding it converts the listing to a service-area business. That is Google’s own instruction for doing so.
    3. Distance is measured from the verified address. Remove it and you remove the input.
    4. Service areas do not replace it. They do not appear to affect ranking at all.
    5. A hybrid profile is allowed. Visible address plus service areas is the right setup for nearly every clinic.
    6. Hiding it is correct when it is true, including for safety at a home address. Choose it knowing the cost.
    7. Check your own profile as the public sees it. Fifteen seconds.

    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 an SEO audit is where this kind of setting gets found before it costs you a year.

  • Service areas on a clinic profile do not do what you think

    Service areas on a clinic profile do not do what you think

    The verdict

    Service areas on a Business Profile do not expand your ranking radius. Rankings come from your verified physical address. Service areas are a clarity signal for the person reading the profile, worth filling in properly, and worth nobody’s monthly retainer. If someone is selling you service-area expansion as a way to rank in the next town, they are selling you a field that does not do that.

    The pitch is intuitive and wrong. Add twenty nearby towns to your profile, start appearing in twenty nearby towns. Every local business owner I have explained this to has believed the intuitive version first, and so did I once.

    What the field actually is

    Google allows up to 20 service areas, and says the boundaries of your overall area should not be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where the business is based. That is the whole of the published guidance on limits.

    What Google does not say on that page is whether the field affects ranking. Its separate description of local results names relevance, distance and prominence, and defines distance as how far each business is from the person searching. Distance from the business. Not distance from the edge of a list of towns you typed in.

    Sterling Sky have tested this directly by tracking their own profile, which has a hidden address and lists a major city as a service area while being based well outside it. Their conclusion, published in 2020 and still carried as current after a 2025 update, is that the service area listed in a Business Profile does not currently impact rankings, and rankings follow the verified physical address instead. Worth naming the limits: they are an SEO agency, the primary test case is their own listing, and it is one profile tracked over time rather than a controlled study. I find it convincing because it matches what I see across client profiles, not because of the sample size.

    So why fill it in at all

    Because a person reads it.

    Somebody two towns over, looking at your profile, wants to know whether you are a realistic option. The service area list answers that question directly, before they have to work it out from an address. That is worth the twenty minutes it takes to do properly.

    It is also a relevance statement rather than a ranking one. Telling Google which places this business associates itself with is not nothing. It is just not a lever, and the distinction matters because one of those is worth paying for monthly and the other is not.

    What to do instead, if you want the next town

    Three things actually move it, and none of them is this field. Pages on your own site for the places you want, reviews that mention those places in the patient’s own words, and the services list on the profile carrying the language people use there. What actually wins the next town over covers all three.

    The trap that comes with this

    Because service areas feel like coverage, the next suggestion is usually to hide the street address so the profile looks like it serves the whole region.

    Do not. Google’s own instruction for becoming a service-area business is to remove your address and only enter your service area, and for a clinic with a treatment room that people physically attend, doing that throws away the strongest ranking asset you have. That one has its own post: never hide your street address.

    Where this sits

    Seventh of the eight profile checks I run, and seventh for a reason. It is worth doing, it is quick, and it will not change your visibility. The order I run them in is itself the argument about what matters.

    The short version

    1. Service areas do not expand your ranking radius. Rankings follow the verified address.
    2. Google defines distance as distance from the business, not from a list of towns.
    3. Up to 20 areas, within about two hours’ drive. That is the entire published limit guidance.
    4. Fill it in anyway. A person two towns over reads it to decide if you are realistic.
    5. It is a clarity signal, not a lever. One of those is worth a retainer and the other is not.
    6. Never hide the address to make the coverage look bigger. That trades your best asset for a longer list.

    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.

  • Where your profile website link should point

    Where your profile website link should point

    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

    1. Point it at the home page. The person tapping has not decided yet.
    2. A booking form closes the ready and loses everyone else. Use the separate appointment link field instead.
    3. Not a campaign landing page. No navigation, no way back into the site.
    4. Not a redirecting tracking URL. Use a parameter on a direct link if you need attribution.
    5. Multi-location is the exception. Each profile points at its own location page.
    6. One location means the home page. Not a city page.
    7. 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.

  • The 750 characters most clinics waste

    The 750 characters most clinics waste

    The verdict

    You get 750 characters and most of them are never read, because the description is collapsed behind a more button on the surface where it matters. So the order decides everything: the first sentence has to carry the service, the place and the thing that separates you, and the rest is for the small number of people who expand it. It is also not on Google’s list of things that improve local ranking, so treat it as copy rather than as a field to optimise.

    Seven hundred and fifty characters is about a hundred and twenty words. Google’s guidance is short: do not exceed 750 characters, do not include URLs or HTML, and cover what you offer, what makes you special, how long you have been in business and anything else helpful, while staying away from promotions, prices and sales.

    What that guidance does not tell you is that the reader sees roughly the first line and a half before it truncates.

    Front-load or waste it

    Most clinic descriptions open with a warm-up. “At our practice, we believe in a holistic approach to wellness, and our dedicated team is passionate about helping you achieve your health goals.”

    That is 140 characters saying nothing. It is also, on a phone, the entire visible description. The service is not in it, the town is not in it, and there is no reason to expand it.

    The version that works puts the concrete facts first and the philosophy last, if at all. What you do, where, for whom, and the one thing about the practice that is checkably different. Then the softer material for whoever taps more.

    What I actually do with it in an audit

    I rewrite it. In the report, in full, ready to paste.

    Flagging a weak description as a finding is not useful. The client already suspects it is weak and does not know what a good one looks like. Two hundred words of critique produce nothing; 750 characters of finished copy get pasted in that afternoon. It is the single easiest item in the entire audit to action and it should arrive actionable.

    The shape I use

    • Sentence one: what and where. The service in the words patients use, and the town. This is the only sentence you can count on being read.
    • Sentence two: who it is for. The specific presenting problems, not “all your wellness needs”.
    • Sentence three: the checkable difference. A credential, a year the practice opened, a piece of equipment, the fact that you take a claim type others do not.
    • Then the rest. Approach, philosophy, team. Fine, just not first.
    • No URLs, no prices, no offers. Google names all three, and an offer will be stale in a month anyway.

    The honest part

    The description is not on Google’s published list of things that improve local ranking. That list names verifying the business, keeping information complete and current, responding to reviews, adding photos and videos, adding products, and getting more reviews, and the page says outright that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

    So I do not sell this as a ranking lever and neither should anyone else. It is conversion copy sitting on a surface where a person is choosing between three businesses. That is worth 750 well-ordered characters on its own terms, and it does not need a ranking claim attached to justify it.

    It is fourth in the order I work through a profile, after the categories and the NAP check, which is the sequence I run every time. Fourth, not first, precisely because it is copy rather than relevance.

    The short version

    1. 750 characters, and about a line and a half is visible. Order decides everything.
    2. Most clinic descriptions waste the visible part on a philosophy warm-up.
    3. Service and town in sentence one. Presenting problems in sentence two. The checkable difference in sentence three.
    4. No URLs, no HTML, no prices or offers. Google names all of them.
    5. Rewrite it in the report. A finding produces nothing; finished copy gets pasted the same day.
    6. It is not a ranking factor. It is conversion copy at the moment of choosing, which is enough.

    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 covers the profile and the pages behind it together.