Professional Centers and SEO

Google is known to filter out multiple business listings for the same business in the same location. This happens when a practitioner listing (or an individual doctor’s individual Google Business Profile) and the main dental office have a Google Business Profile in the same location.

But we’re curious - what does that mean for multiple dental offices located in the same building? If you’re located in the same professional center does that mean you’ll never rank?

We reviewed all of our SEO clients to try to understand this issue in more detail and the good news is that with good SEO you can avoid being filtered.

Here’s what we did.

We searched the address (without the suite number) in Google and recorded any dental related businesses that showed up in the ‘directory’ or ‘at this place’ section. If they were located in a professional building, we double checked the professional building’s directory to make sure we didn’t miss anything.

After we identified all dental offices located in professional buildings, we used Brightlocal's Local Search Results Checker to check the ranking of those located in the professional building and see if they would be filtered by other dental-related businesses.

We observed that Google does indeed show separate businesses. Even if the competitor dental office was doing nothing for SEO - we’re talking no website, no photos, that kind of thing - they still show up in Google Maps.

It’s not all good news though. After conducting a number of different searches, we observed that Google does tend to favor certain offices in a professional building. The same offices show up regularly at the top time and again.

Google is more likely to show offices with good reviews, photographs and completed information. So keeping your information current is important to getting to the top. Overall, this highlights the importance of engaging in SEO and branding for your dental office. To rank above offices in your high-rise or shopping mall, you need to be at the top of your SEO game.

Questions? We’re always here to help and would be happy to take a peek at how your ranking compares to those in your building.