Five Google Profiles Are Worse Than One

A firm with five Google Business Profiles usually did not decide to have five. It acquired them.

Someone set one up for the practice. A partner made their own. An office manager, unable to find the login, made another. A departed associate made a fourth years ago and it is still there, still listing them as current counsel. Somewhere there is a fifth nobody remembers at all.

Every one of them is legitimate in isolation. Together they are a problem, and it is worth being precise about what the problem actually is, because the fix is not "delete four of them."

What goes wrong

They compete with each other. For a local query, these profiles are separate candidates for the same position. Your own records are dividing the relevance you built between them.

Reviews scatter. One client leaves a review on the firm profile, another on a partner's. Neither total looks like the work you have actually done, and the one a prospect happens to find might be the one with two reviews on it.

Stale entries keep speaking for you. The profile for someone who left in 2022 does not know they left. It answers questions about your firm with a person who cannot take the call.

Nothing is authoritative. This is the one that matters most for AI answers. An engine reading five records with different addresses, different phone numbers and overlapping names has no way to decide which is true. Faced with that, and a competitor whose single record is internally consistent, it names the competitor. Not because they are better. Because they are confirmable.

Why deleting four is the wrong instinct

Practitioner profiles are a legitimate and useful thing. A doctor, an attorney and a dentist all have professional identities that patients and clients search for by name. Google supports this deliberately.

And a deleted profile takes its reviews with it. If the partner profile with eleven genuine reviews is the one you remove to tidy up, those eleven reviews are gone. You cannot move them.

So the work is not deletion. It is deciding, on purpose, what each record is for.

What the work actually looks like

Map before you touch anything. Find every profile that exists — including ones nobody at the firm created and nobody can log into. Write down what each says: name, address, phone, category, reviews, who claimed it.

Pick the authoritative record. One profile is the practice. Its name, address and phone become the master copy that everything else on the internet has to agree with, character for character. "Suite 200" and "Ste 200" count as a disagreement.

Decide what practitioner profiles are for. They should point to the practice, sit at the same address, and be clearly about that person rather than a second attempt at ranking the firm. A practitioner profile that duplicates the firm's category and service list is competing. One that describes a specific person's specialty is corroborating.

Deal with the departed properly. There is a process for removing a practitioner who has left, and it is not the same as deleting the listing. Doing it wrong either leaves them listed or throws away the reviews attached to them.

Then fix everything else to match. Directories, association listings, insurance and payer records, the citation aggregators that quietly feed a hundred smaller sites. This is the slow part, and it is the part that actually moves the result, because consistency is only a signal when it is consistent everywhere.

The order matters

Every new listing you create before the master copy exists is one more record to reconcile afterward. It is faster to write the three fields down once, exactly, and paste them from then on, than to fix nine listings that each differ slightly.

If you are about to sign up for anything — a directory, a network, a professional listing — do that first. Ten minutes of writing it down beats an afternoon of reconciliation later.

How to tell if this is you

Search your firm's name. Not on your phone, where Google already knows who you are — in a private window.

Count the profiles that come back. Look at whether the phone numbers match. Look at whether anyone listed still works there.

Most firms who do this find at least one thing they did not know existed.