Short answer
Complete every field in your Google Business Profile accurately, choose the correct primary and secondary categories, keep your name, address and phone number identical to your website, and post and update the profile regularly. Review volume and recency also factor heavily into local ranking, so a genuine, ongoing review process matters as much as the profile itself.
Complete every field, not just the obvious ones
Many practices claim their profile and fill in a name and address, then leave services, attributes, opening hours exceptions and the business description blank or outdated. Google uses this completeness as a signal, and it also directly affects how confidently a prospective patient trusts the listing enough to click through or call. A profile with photos, complete services, accurate hours and a clear description consistently outperforms a bare-bones one, all else being equal.
Get the categories right
Choosing an overly broad primary category, "Medical clinic" for a specialised podiatry practice, for example, can genuinely hurt your visibility for the specific searches you actually want to win. Take time to select the most accurate primary category and add relevant secondary categories that reflect the real range of services you offer, since this directly affects which searches your profile is eligible to appear for.
Keep information consistent everywhere
Your practice name, address and phone number should be identical across your Google Business Profile, your website, and any directory listing you appear in. Small inconsistencies, a missing suite number, an old phone number still listed somewhere, genuinely damage local ranking because they create doubt about which listing is authoritative. This is one of the most common, most overlooked issues we find when auditing an existing profile.
Keep the profile active, not just accurate
A profile that's accurate but static tends to lose ground over time to a competitor's profile that's regularly updated with posts, new photos and prompt responses to reviews. Regular activity is a genuine ranking factor, not just a nice-to-have, because it signals to Google that the business behind the listing is active and engaged. This doesn't need to be a major time investment, a monthly post and periodic new photos are usually enough to keep a profile looking active rather than abandoned.
A simple audit you can do yourself in twenty minutes
Search your own practice name on Google and honestly assess what a stranger would see: is every field filled in, are the photos recent and professional, are your hours accurate including any public holiday exceptions, and does your review count and rating look competitive against the two or three practices you know you are up against locally. This kind of informal self-audit, done every few months, catches the kind of drift, an outdated phone number, a forgotten seasonal hours change, that otherwise sits unnoticed and quietly costs you enquiries.
Handling multiple practitioners on one profile
Where several practitioners work from the same physical location, it is worth deciding early whether to promote individual practitioners through your website's own pages while keeping the Google Business Profile itself focused on the practice as a whole, since Google Business Profile does not easily support representing multiple distinct practitioners as separately searchable entities within a single practice listing. Getting this structure right early avoids the confusion and duplicate-listing risk that often follows from trying to retrofit individual practitioner visibility after the fact.