Google & Bing Listings

How to manage these profiles

Whilst we are happy to provide guidance, support for this is not offered by us. All listings are the responsibility of the associated organisation.

Your website is not the only location for your operational details, and searches are more likely to reveal data from your Business Profile as part of Google and Microsoft Bing. They use this to influence the search results in their own and other alternative search engines.

Whilst Google is the market leader for searches, Microsoft Bing Searches are the 'default' option for devices running Windows. This means that a good proportion of your patients will be using Bing.

The website has no effect on the information within these profiles so you have to be responsible to keeping these up to date.

Both these profiles may have been automatically generated as part of Google Maps a number of years ago. And it is possible that it has already been claimed, so you may need to do a little digging to locate who has access to these profiles.

Claiming a Business

If you have lost the login details you will need to work with the respective companies to prove that you are actually responsible for the profile that you wish to claim. This is designed to stop rival organisations from acting maliciously.

The most common process is to provide you with an authentication code which is delivered to one of the contact details that is already listed within the profile.

This can be a tricky process, especially if the required contact details on the profile are significantly out of date. But they do provide hints to what they contact details may be to assist you.

They may use:

Email Address
- The code is emailed to the existing email on the account.
  - If you don't have access to this email account and the email is associated with the domain of your website you will need to choose an alternative option for verification as we are unable to provide email services against this domain.
Mobile Number
- The code is sent by text.
Phone Number
- The code arrives as an automated phone call.
  - This call may time out after a few minutes, so if you have a particularly long message for incoming calls or lots of calls queuing you may find it times out before you get to answer it.
  - If this is the case, speak with your phone system provider to see if they can offer any solutions or you may need to try at a time when you can get away with turning off your incoming messages and there be no queue.

Domain verification
- This is when you are asked to apply an entry to the website's DNS settings.
  - This is something that we can help you with and all you need to do is let us know what they wish to be applied to the domain.
The address listed for the business
- They will send you the code by post. We have not known this to be that successful, as it depends which country the mail is despatched from.

Other verification methods are available, and you would need to reach out to their support teams directly.