🌴 A Note From The Jungle
Happy Halloween! This week we touch on setting up individual practitioners such as attorney’s, doctors, and financial advisors with Google Business Profiles and a look at Google’s What’s Happening feature expanding to more bars and restaurants. Let’s go!
🦍 Ask GMB Gorilla
Hey GMB Gorilla…I’m an attorney and partner at a law firm. We opened a new office location. I recently created a profile for myself there, but was suspended and then my reinstatement request was denied despite sending in everything they asked for. Where did I go wrong and how can I fix it?
Howdy human! You’re probably pretty frustrated - and with good reason. Google hasn’t done the best job of guiding practitioners and their organizations through the best way to establish their presence on the map. The reality is that Google has specific set of requirements for individual practitioners and their firms as it relates to the set up of their Google Business Profiles. Let’s take a look.
Google’s individual practitioner guidelines cover how professionals such as doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents should have their profiles configured. They also cover how to handle solo operators versus those working out of a location with multiple practitioners.
Here’s what they say:
Multiple practitioners at one location
If the practitioner is one of several public-facing practitioners at this location:
The organization should create a Business Profile for this location, separate from that of the practitioner. The title of the Business Profile for the practitioner should include only the name of the practitioner, and shouldn’t include the name of the organization.
Solo practitioners that belong to branded organizations
If a practitioner is the only public-facing practitioner at a location and represents a branded organization, it's best for the practitioner to share a Business Profile with the organization. Create a single Business Profile, named using the following format: [brand/company]: [practitioner name].
Acceptable: "Allstate: Joe Miller" (if Joe is the sole public-facing practitioner at this Allstate-branded location)
In this particular scenario, my guess is you’re creating the profile for you as a practitioner in a way that is out of compliance. You should review the guidelines above to ensure the business name you are using on the profile fits your scenario. Make sure your documentation matches this (and the address), since this is often where denials come from in the suspension appeals process.
We usually advise that a law firm establishes their location(s) profiles where there are multiple attorney’s first, then expands into creating profiles for the practicing attorneys at each location, followed by the solo practitioner locations (if any). You may want to take a step back and re-approach your strategy to getting profiles live if you’re not the only practicing at the location.
Note if you have to create more than 10 profiles at once, you may qualify for bulk verification which makes the process of creating locations much easier and less painful that doing each one individually.
🌴 Jungle Watch
Google’s What’s Happening Feature Expanding to More Bars and Restaurants
The What’s Happening feature is designed to give Google users more relevant and real time information about bars and restaurants they find on the map. The goal of the feature is to help these business drive more foot traffic by capturing impulse actions.
Google’s What’s Happening feature is for bars and restaurants: This feature is only available to Google Business Profiles in the bar and restaurant related categories. No information on whether this something that could expand, but more on that below.
Google determines when and where it shows: While this feature is helpful to user and could be effective for some, Google still determines what profiles it will show on and where it will show within the interface. There’s no on or off button.
Google uses Post and social content to populate: The beauty (and potentially curse) is that Google is using Posts and associated social media profile data to populate the feature. This is great because you don’t have to do any work, but if you’ve ever read an AI overview it could be bad because they don’t always get things right.
We think this feature could expand to other categories: There are other categories, such as entertainment venues, museums, public spaces, and retail stores that could benefit from an additional lever like this on their profile. We stay on the lookout for you to see if it expands and if so be one of the first to let you know.
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🆘 Need GBP Help?
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GBP Reinstatement Service
Recently suspended? Reinstatement rejected? Let us swing in to help!
One Time Fee: $500
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Did You Know? The average gorilla life expectancy in the wild is between 35-40 years. 🦍
Till next time,