What Google Business Profile actually does for a private practice (and where most therapists get it wrong)

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a free listing that represents your practice on Google Maps and in Google's local search results. It shows your opening hours, your reviews, a handful of photos, and a way to call, message, or visit your website, all before a potential client clicks through to anything else. For a lot of therapists who have never touched it, that is the whole picture: a free entry that sits alongside a map pin. The detail that matters is how much weight that entry carries at the exact moment someone is deciding who to call.

The three mistakes almost everyone makes

Never claiming it at all is the most common. Every business location that appears on Google Maps has a listing whether or not anyone has claimed it. Until a therapist claims and verifies theirs, Google or previous patients can populate parts of it, and the therapist has no control over the categories, hours, or information shown.

Claiming it once and never updating it is the second. A profile set up years ago with the practice's original hours, an old phone number, or no photos at all quietly falls out of date while the therapist assumes it is "sorted" because it exists. Google notices staleness. An unmaintained profile is treated as a weaker signal than an actively managed one, and stale information actively costs bookings when someone calls a number that has since changed.

Duplicate or conflicting listings is the third, and often the least visible to the therapist themselves. A house move, a change of practice name, or a rebrand can leave a second, older listing live alongside the current one, with neither fully correct. Google has to guess which one is authoritative, and a potential client who lands on the wrong one gets an old address or a disconnected phone line.

Why reviews carry more weight here than almost anywhere else

A handful of Google reviews sitting directly next to your listing does more persuasive work than a page of testimonials on your own website, for one simple reason: the reviews are visible before anyone clicks through to anything. A searcher scanning the local pack sees a star rating and a review count attached to each result, and that number is often the deciding factor in which listing gets a click at all. Testimonials on your own site are read by people who have already decided to visit it. Google reviews are read by people who have not yet decided anything.

This is why a profile with three or four short, genuine reviews consistently outperforms a beautifully designed website with none. It is not that the website's testimonials are less credible. It is that they arrive too late in the decision to influence whether someone clicks through in the first place.

What a properly maintained profile actually looks like

A handful of concrete things separate a well-run profile from a neglected one. Accurate business categories, so the profile surfaces for the right searches rather than a generic catchall category. Correct, current opening hours, updated whenever they actually change, including holidays. A small number of real photos, the practice space, the building exterior, nothing stock or generic, since real photos are one of the clearer trust signals available to a searcher. And a pattern of responding to reviews, even briefly, since a profile that shows the practitioner engaging with feedback reads as active and attended to, in contrast to one that has clearly been abandoned since the day it was set up.

Why this is maintenance, not a one-time task

The instinct with a Business Profile is to treat it like a form: fill it in once, tick the box, move on. In practice it behaves more like a living part of your online presence. Hours change. New reviews need a response within a reasonable window to look attended to. Photos age. Categories and services worth highlighting shift as a practice grows or specialises further. A profile set up correctly and then left untouched for two years looks, to both Google and to a searcher, notably different from one that has had light, regular attention the whole time.

This is the part most solo therapists underestimate, not the initial setup, which is usually straightforward, but the ongoing few minutes a month that keep it accurate and active. Treated as a maintained asset rather than a setup-and-forget task, it consistently pulls its weight; left alone, it slowly drifts out of date in ways that are invisible from the inside and obvious from a searcher's side.

If you want this handled properly, both the setup and the ongoing management, our add-ons cover exactly this: a one-time Google Business Profile setup, and Growth or Full Stack tiers that keep it actively managed alongside your website.