The med spa Google Business Profile, run to standard
The last clinic profile I opened had a primary category of "Spa," four photos from the day the sign went up, and a five-star review from March that nobody had answered. The clinic itself was busy. The profile looked abandoned. Those two things sit next to each other more often than you would think, and the profile is what the patient sees first.
Most clinics treat the med spa google business profile as a directory listing they filled out once. For aesthetics searches it is the ranking surface. Someone typing a treatment and a town into their phone gets three businesses on a map before a single website appears, and for a lot of those searches the map is where the decision gets made. I covered how Google picks those three in the map pack post. This one is about what the profile looks like when it is actually being run.
Categories and services, complete and correct
Start with the primary category, because it is the biggest single lever and the one most clinics get wrong. "Spa" puts you in a race with day spas and massage studios. "Medical spa" is the category, and the secondary categories should name what you actually do under it. Then the services list, which most profiles leave empty. Every treatment you perform goes in, named the way patients type it, not by the brand on the device, with a short description and a price range where you are willing to state one. Google uses that list to match you to searches, and a profile with no services listed has told it nothing about you.
Hours matter more than people expect. If the profile says you close at five and the phone rings at 5:20 unanswered, that is a review waiting to happen. Holiday hours get set ahead of the holiday, not after someone has already driven over.
A post every week, with photos of the real place
The standard I hold clinics to is one post a week minimum, and two or three in a market where the other clinics are also posting. That sounds like a lot until you see how little each one takes. A photo of the treatment room with the light on. The practitioner who is in on Thursdays. A seasonal offer with an end date on it. Leave out the stock image of a woman touching her face. Patients can tell, and Google can tell too.
Real photography of your actual room and your actual staff does two jobs. It gives the profile something to show that no other clinic has, and it answers the question every aesthetics patient is quietly asking, which is whether this is a place they would feel comfortable walking into. Profile photos get refreshed monthly. The cover photo should be the room, and the logo goes in the logo slot.
Before-and-after photos need care. They are the most persuasive thing a clinic can show and the easiest thing to get wrong. Consent in writing, no faces without permission, nothing that reads as a medical claim the treatment cannot support. When in doubt, the room and the people are the safer post.
Reviews answered within a day
Reviews are the ranking factor you can influence most directly, and the response is part of the review. Every one gets an answer inside 24 hours, the good ones and the bad ones. The reply is where you get to say the treatment name and the town one more time in your own words, and it is where a patient reading three clinics' reviews sees which one is paying attention.
The request has to be systematic or it does not happen. A text after the appointment, with the link in it, sent by the system rather than by whoever remembers. Clinics that rely on the front desk asking get a review a month. Clinics that automate it get one a week from the same patient volume.
One thing to stop doing if you are doing it. Routing happy patients to Google and unhappy ones to a private form is against Google's policy, and profiles have been flagged for it. Ask everyone the same way. The unhappy review you answer well does more for you than the one you hid.
Questions, answered before they are asked
The Q&A section on a profile is public and anyone can post to it, which means if you leave it empty, a stranger will eventually fill it in for you. Seed it yourself. Who performs the injectables. Whether a consultation is required first. Parking. What to expect at a first visit. The front desk fields these all day, and putting them on the profile answers them for the people who never call.
What running it actually looks like
Most of this is easy. It is just weekly, and weekly is what nobody has time for when the clinic is full. That is the honest reason profiles go quiet. The owner set it up with good intentions in the first month and the treatment schedule ate every month after that.
The fix is a routine somebody owns, rather than a burst of effort. One post a week, on a calendar. Review requests going out automatically. Replies inside a day. Photos refreshed on the first of the month. Categories and services checked each quarter, because Google changes the options and clinics add treatments. Written down like that it is a couple of hours a week, and the map pack rewards consistency over enthusiasm.
The profile is one surface. Behind it there has to be a site that gives each treatment its own page, or the profile sends people to a homepage that lists eight things and sells none of them. That is the architecture side of med spa SEO, and the profile and the site pull on each other. The assessment reads both, which is the place to start when you are not sure where yours stands.
— Kyle Tysvaer, Founder, Insightful Eye Marketing