Note: This article has been updated for 2025. If the concepts here seem to fit with your brand’s marketing challenges, please book a time to chat with me (for free) here.

We’ve written a lot over the years about Local SEO and our longstanding belief that it offers one of the best ‘bang for your buck’ opportunities for business’ to show up in organic search. Our obsession also is self-interested: many of our clients are professional service firms, with physical locations that allow them to maximize the opportunities offered by local search.

Most of the articles on the web offering guidance about local search offer a one-size-fits-all approach to creating a Google Business profile. We’ve written many of these posts over the years.

This post is different.

Specifically, this post addresses a little known edge offered to professional services providers–typically Doctors, Lawyers, personal care providers and others. This unique category of Google Business Profile is called an individual practitioner listing. 

Hold on to your seats, everyone, because we’re about to take a dive into what these are and why you should care.

What are Google Practitioner Listings and Why Should I Care?

If you’re reading this post, you probably are already familiar with a vanilla Google Business Profile. If you’re not, you can see our post about local SEO for Law Firms or take a look at the introductory material from Google itself.

Individual practitioner listings were invented by Google to function in circumstances where certain types of businesses contain (usually) licensed professionals in various disciplines.

Quoting Google directly, 

“An individual practitioner is a public-facing professional, typically with their own customer base. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, and insurance or real estate agents are all individual practitioners. Business profiles for practitioners may include title or degree certification (for example Dr., MD, JD, Esq., CFA).

Other distinguishing features of practitioners might be that they keep their own hours, have a distinct business category (a specialty, for instance, which might differ from that of the larger practice), or may work out of different locations.

The following is the partial list of commonly recognized types of professionals who can create individual practitioner listings. (Thanks to these folks, for the list.) Disclaimer: we have not been able to confirm the veracity of this list from Google.

• Attorneys
• Doctors – any type such as physicians, dentists, chiropractors, therapists, etc.
• Hairdressers (note: Google also said it’s fine for them to work out of their houses).
• Insurance Agents/Brokers
• Mortgage Brokers
• Music instructors
• Personal trainers
• Realtors
• Soft medicine practitioners such as massage therapists, dental hygienists, and registered nurses
• Tattoo artists
• Tutors

So, when and by whom should practitioner listings be created?

As we’ve seen, professional service providers are typical candidates for practitioner listings. But when and how are the best ways to implement their creation? Let’s talk about the two most common scenarios.

A solo practitioner’s office

A solo practitioner is the principal and only practitioner within an office. Law is one field featuring a large number of solo practitioners. This situation presents a conundrum. Ordinarily, the business itself would have a Google Business Profile. For instance, “The Law Firm of Jane Smith.” But, as we’ve just learned, Jane Smith herself could create an additional practitioner listing for herself, as well.

Should she? In other words…

Should solo practitioners have two Google business profiles or just one?

The official answer to this, according to Google, is “one.”

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.

Specifically, Google recommends creating a single Google Business Profile, in the following format: [brand/company]: [practitioner name]. So, for instance, “The Law Firm of Jane Smith: Jane Smith” would satisfy these criteria.

That’s interesting, but what about firms or practices with more than one practitioner, in different areas of service?

Where practitioner listings get especially interesting is within the context of a larger business. 

Let’s take a couple of theoretical examples. In the medical world, for instance,  it is not at all uncommon to find many different types of licensed professionals, all working from one location but performing different roles. For instance, many doctors who specialize in orthopedics or physical rehabilitation work in interdisciplinary environments where their services are supplemented by the work of, say, physical therapists, occupational therapists, or massage therapists. In this type of work environment, each practitioner is both working on a team but, also, providing a unique skill. A massage therapist, for instance, might begin a relationship with a client as a referral from the orthopedist. But, a year later when the same patient is no longer rehabbing an injury but begins experiencing cramping or muscle tightness, they might just want to reach out again to the therapist, rather than anyone else at the firm. 

This is why practitioner listings work so well in professional environments like medicine or law: each practitioner can represent a distinct specialty and category, while still supporting the main business profile.

Now scale that situation across multiple offices and you’ll see how complex practitioner listings can become. A regional law firm with eight offices, or a healthcare group spread across three counties, could easily end up with hundreds of practitioner profiles. That level of coverage can be powerful, but only if it’s managed with discipline. Standardized naming conventions, category assignments, and centralized governance are essential, otherwise you risk a chaotic sprawl of half-complete listings that confuse both Google and potential clients.

Another potential pitfall is duplicate suppression. Google has become far more aggressive about consolidating listings that look too similar, and in many cases will merge them automatically. That means your naming conventions and category assignments matter more than ever. Two practitioners with nearly identical profiles at the same address are likely to trigger a merge, wiping out the advantage you were aiming for. Clear distinctions in name, category, and linked landing page are essential to keep each profile visible.

This typical situation–found in medicine, law, engineering and many other fields–points us to a strategy for the use of practitioner listings.

If each individual practitioner within our practice makes a practitioner listing for themselves–and uses their respective professional category–the likelihood that their office will rank for multiple business categories goes way, way up.

Now you understand the power of practitioner listings and how medium and larger professional service firms can leverage their value.

And don’t forget about reviews. Each practitioner listing can collect its own set of reviews, which can be a blessing and a curse. On the plus side, more listings means more opportunities to build trust signals across different specialties. On the downside, if reviews scatter too thinly between profiles, the main business listing may look weaker than it should. Clients should be encouraged to leave reviews where they’ll have the most impact, whether for the main business profile or a practitioner listing. Just keep an eye on balance across all active listings.

Practitioner Listings and the Future of AI Search

Up until now we’ve been talking about practitioner listings in the context of today’s local search results. But their importance extends into what’s coming next: AI-driven search. Google’s AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and other generative tools are changing how people discover businesses. Ai platforms don’t look for authority corroboration by scanning links but, rather, they source their answers from structured, verified data about people and organizations.

That’s where practitioner listings shine. Each listing is essentially a verified “entity profile” tied to a specific professional, with its own category, hours, and reputation signals. In an AI-first world, that structured data makes it easier for search systems to understand not just your firm, but each practitioner within it.

So… creating practitioner listings is a way to future-proof your visibility in AI-generated search experiences, which are increasingly relying on structured entity data.

A few caveats and suggestions

Hopefully, you now understand the value of practitioner listings in Google Business. Before we go, take note of the following, final caveats and suggestions.

• Using practitioner listings to expand the group of keywords a profile can rank for relies on only using each category once. There should be a primary category chosen for the main business profile. Additionally, each represented specialty should have only one profile created, devoted to it. Which means, by extension, that in the event that a business has more than one practitioner in a given category, only one should be allowed to make a practitioner listing.
• Each business profile created should link to a discipline-specific landing page. To increase the likelihood of ranking for multiple categories, each practitioner should link to a page on the organization’s website devoted to their specialty. In our example above, the Orthopedist should link either to the homepage for the organization or the main topic page devoted to orthopedics. Likewise, the physical therapist should link their profile to a page devoted to physical therapy, etc.
• The title of the Business Profile for practitioners should include only the name of the practitioner and not include the business name.
• When creating practitioner listings, the organization itself should control the practitioner listing and be able to remove it, as staff leaves. This is an important point. Practitioner listings can get very messy for organizations who allow individual practitioners to control/create the listing and, in almost all circumstances, the organization should control its creation and maintenance.
• That control becomes especially critical when practitioners leave a firm or when practices merge. Old listings that remain live can cause real headaches—confusing clients, misdirecting calls, and in some cases even being claimed by competitors. If a firm is acquired, or a team member departs, part of the offboarding process should always include auditing and either updating or removing practitioner listings. Clean listings protect your brand and prevent search results from telling a story that’s no longer true.
• Another potential pitfall is duplicate suppression. Google has become far more aggressive about consolidating listings that look too similar, and in many cases will merge them automatically. That means your naming conventions and category assignments matter more than ever. Two practitioners with nearly identical profiles at the same address are likely to trigger a merge, wiping out the advantage you were aiming for. Clear distinctions in name, category, and linked landing page are essential to keep each profile visible.

Before we go

Local Search is often underestimated, not only in terms of its marketing value but, also, in its nuance. Practitioner listings are one example of a little-practiced local search tactic which confers distinct advantages to, especially, professional service firms. Creating them may not be right in every circumstance—and it does create organizational challenges—but they can always greatly expand the marketing footprint of a brand, if embraced and correctly implemented.

FAQ

1. Do practitioner listings improve local SEO rankings?
Yes—because they expand the number of business categories and keywords a firm can rank for.

2. Can practitioner listings collect reviews separately from the business?
Yes, and those reviews can boost authority, but they should be managed carefully to avoid fragmentation.

3. What happens if a practitioner leaves the firm?
The organization should control listings and update/remove them immediately. Unmanaged listings can mislead clients or be claimed by others.

4. Can practitioners have listings if they work from home?
Yes, if they serve clients face-to-face at their home office, but service-area businesses (mobile massage therapists, tutors, etc.) must follow Google’s home-based business rules.

5. Do practitioner listings conflict with the firm’s main profile?
Not if categories are assigned strategically. Duplication (multiple listings in the same category at one location) can trigger suppression.