SEO for Clinics: The Clinic, the Team, and Every Location on Google

Run a quick count on your clinic. Two locations and six doctors, each doctor seeing patients at one of them.

Under Google’s guidelines, that clinic can have eight profiles on the map, all within the rules. One for each location. And one for each doctor who serves the public, with that person’s name and nothing else. ¹

Now add what exists outside Google. I will use Brazil, where we are based, as the example. In the Ministry of Health’s registry, each location is a facility with its own number. ² At the medical council, the company’s registration covers every location. ³ And each doctor holds their own license with the council.

In the example’s count, that makes at least seventeen records about the same practice. They live in places that do not talk to each other. The site is the only place where the clinic says how they connect. Where you practice, run the same count with whatever registries apply to you.

I opened the top Google results in Brazil for “seo para clínica” (SEO for clinics) on September 14. The nine organic results on page one are about health clinics, with patients. None covers veterinary clinics. ⁴ The top four mention keywords, content, the Google profile, speed, and consistent data everywhere. None of those four talks about doctors with their own profile, about departments, about locations, or about the national registry of health facilities. ⁴

What applies to any health practice already has a piece of its own. Google says its systems give even more weight to strong E-E-A-T on health topics, and that trust matters most. ⁵ In medical advertising, Brazil’s medical council requires the name, the license number, and the specialty with its RQE, the specialist registry number. ⁶ The piece on SEO for doctors walks through those two yardsticks and each doctor’s page.

The medical council rules cited here apply to medical clinics in Brazil. Dental clinics have the piece on SEO for dentists. Here, the subject is the medical clinic as an organization. Several professionals under one name, sometimes several addresses, and someone formally responsible for all of it.

Two records Google must not merge

Picture the counter at the county clerk’s office. Two records come in. One carries the clinic’s name and address. The other carries a doctor’s name, with the same address and the same phone number.

The clerk has to decide whether both describe the same thing. My book SEO de Entidade, published in Portuguese, describes this work. Gathering scattered mentions until you conclude they are about the same subject, and turning them into a single record. This is called reconciliation. ⁷

The book points to two ways to get it wrong. ⁷ Merging too much creates something that does not exist in the world. Merging too little splits the company into weak records, each holding a piece of the truth.

In a solo practice, the first mistake has almost no way in. In a clinic, it has several. The location’s profile gets a doctor’s name in its title. The front desk phone appears on three doctors’ profiles. The team page keeps showing someone who has left.

The book also says whose job this is. Reconciling is the machine’s job, and the owner controls only its cost. Sources that say the same thing lower the cost. Sources that contradict each other raise it. ⁷

In a clinic, lowering the cost has a practical meaning. The clinic and each professional are different things. Each one needs to show up whole, with the same data everywhere.

What Google’s guidelines say about a clinic with several doctors

The Business Profile guidelines have a section called Individual practitioners. The piece on doctors already went through it. For a clinic, four passages from the same guidelines carry more weight.

The first covers several practitioners at one location. The organization creates a profile for the location, separate from each practitioner’s profile. And the practitioner’s profile carries only their own name, without the organization’s name. ¹

The second says who can have a profile. The practitioner needs to operate in a public-facing role. They also need to be reachable directly at the verified location, during stated hours. ¹ Support staff are left out, because the guidelines say they should not create their own profiles. ¹

In my reading, a doctor who comes by once a month, with no fixed hours there, sits at the edge of that rule. Take your time deciding before you open a profile for them.

The third covers departments. A public-facing department that operates as a distinct entity should have its own profile. Its name must differ from the main business’s name, and so must its category. Such departments typically have a separate customer entrance. ¹

The guidelines give the dermatology department of Massachusetts General Hospital as an accepted example. The rejected one is the Apple products section of Best Buy. ¹ In my reading, an imaging center with its own door and its own hours fits the first rule. A dermatology room behind the same front desk fits the rejected example. Google’s accepted example is dermatology too, and what sets the two apart is the entrance.

The fourth applies to anyone with more than one address. In the section on chains and brands, all locations in the same country must have the same name. The category repeats as well when the service is the same. ¹ The guidelines even reject a store name followed by the town, as in “The Home Depot at Springfield.” The location’s neighborhood goes in the address and on its own page.

What decides the order on the map is covered in the local SEO section.

What official registries already record

First, a boundary. This piece is not legal advice. I read these rules the way someone who builds pages reads them. Your concrete case is a question for your regulator.

Each country, and each council or board, has its own registries and rules, so check yours. The example here is Brazil, where we are based, and I read its rules in full. The mechanism they reveal is what matters.

My book SEO de Entidade splits a company’s connections into two columns. The first holds the ones you declare. The second holds the ones that exist only when the other side confirms them, like the council putting your technical lead on record. The first costs an afternoon. The second costs years. ⁸

In Brazil, a medical clinic already has two official records on the outside, published by someone other than the clinic.

The first is the CNES, Brazil’s National Registry of Health Facilities, kept by the Ministry of Health. It sets out to register every health facility in the country, public, contracted, and private. ² A facility, there, is a space where health actions and services take place, and that has a designated technical lead. ²

The lookup is open to anyone. The search box accepts the trade name, legal name, CNES number, CNPJ (Brazilian company registry number), or CPF (Brazilian individual taxpayer number). ² The record shows name, CNPJ, address, phone, facility type, and opening hours. ² It is a record that lives outside the site.

A test search showed the detail that matters here. A university hospital in the interior of São Paulo state shows up with separate numbers. One for the mental health outpatient clinic, another for the blood center, another for the maternal and child unit. ² Each facility has its own number.

The second record is registration with the Regional Council of Medicine, the CRM. CFM Resolution No. 1,980/2011 requires private health care companies to register with the CRM where they operate. ³ The obligation covers branches, branch offices, and every location. ³

The registration application lists the doctors on the clinical staff and the specialties the practice offers. It also carries the name and CRM number of the physician who is the technical lead. ³ Any change goes to the council within thirty days. ³ And the company’s registration certificate must be available to the public, kept up to date. ³

Where to look it up changes from one regional council to another. Cremesp, the council for the state of São Paulo, has a public search of registered medical companies. It searches by name, company CRM number, and city. ⁹ I did not check the other councils.

Whoever answers for this information has a name. Resolution No. 1,980/2011 says the technical director answers ethically for everything reported to the council. ³ CFM Resolution No. 2,147/2016 makes that director responsible for the formal side of how the clinic runs. ¹⁰

Among that director’s duties, two touch the site. Checking each staff doctor’s license and specialist title. And making sure the clinic’s institutional advertising follows the medical advertising rule. ¹⁰

The advertising rule in force is CFM Resolution No. 2,336/2023. Every clinic ad, in a physical or virtual setting, carries the establishment’s name with its CRM registration number. It also carries the technical director’s name, with their license number and, where required, the specialty with the RQE. ⁶

In my reading, the site’s footer is the natural home for that line. One of the top search results does exactly this in its own footer, with the technical director and the company’s council registration. Its article does not discuss the subject. ⁴

Now look at it through the clerk’s eyes. The CNES records the address, phone, and hours of each location. The CRM records the company, the clinical staff, and who answers for it. What the site declares needs to match those records, letter for letter.

I do not claim that Google reads the CNES or the CRM registry, because none of its documentation says so. What I claim is simpler. There are official sources, published by third parties, saying who the clinic is. Where you practice, ask the same question. Which official records describe your clinic, and does the site match them?

How the site says who is who

The clinic needs an official page, at an address that never changes. That page answers who the organization is. The rules for it are in the piece on the entity home.

The team page is the digital version of the sign in the waiting room. And Brazil’s advertising rule has a requirement for that sign. The internal signs that identify the doctors on the clinical staff must be kept up to date. They must show each doctor’s name, CRM number, and specialty with the RQE. ⁶

In my reading, the team page inherits both requirements. The doctor who comes off the sign comes off the page in the same move.

Beyond the text, there is markup. Schema.org, the public vocabulary for structured data, has a type for clinics, MedicalClinic. It lives in two trees at once: it is a medical organization and a local business. ¹¹

Google’s local business documentation asks for one record per location, with the most specific type possible. ¹² And it asks for that record’s URL to be the one for the specific location. ¹²

That leaves the delicate part, the link between the clinic and its team. The vocabulary offers three paths, and each one expects a different type on the other end.

The employee property describes someone working for the organization, and it expects a person. ¹¹ The member property accepts a person or an organization, with a way back called memberOf. ¹¹ And the type for the doctor as an individual, IndividualPhysician, sits in the organizations tree. ¹¹

That last detail decides the markup. A doctor marked up as IndividualPhysician is, for the vocabulary, a medical organization. The link to the clinic comes from the doctor’s side, through the practicesAt property. ¹¹ A doctor marked up as a person links to the clinic through employee or member.

Decide what each page describes before you mark it up. The person’s page marks up a person. The doctor’s own practice, when it exists as a separate business, marks up an organization. In my reading, mixing the two repeats in the markup the mistake of merging too much.

The CRM has no field of its own in the vocabulary. The physician type has a field only for the US provider identifier, usNPI. ¹¹ For the CRM, what remains is the generic identifier property. ¹¹

For departments, the vocabulary has the department property. It links an organization to one of its departments, with its own URL, logo, and hours. ¹¹ Google uses the same property for local businesses, with the name in the format store name plus department name. ¹²

The book leaves a warning that applies here. You declare to disambiguate, never as a shortcut to ranking. ⁸ The code itself belongs in the article on structured data.

Specialty and practitioner, each page with its own question

Picture two receptionists at the same front desk. Both repeat the same sentence to the same patient. The patient picks one and ignores the other.

Google describes a similar process for pages. When it finds several pages that seem the same, or with very similar main content, it clusters them. Then it picks the one it sees as the most complete and useful to represent the group. ¹³ This is called canonicalization.

The industry calls the symptom cannibalization. The mechanism with documentation behind it is clustering.

In a clinic, the risk shows up in a predictable way. The cardiology page talks about the cardiologist. The cardiologist’s page talks about cardiology. The two end up with the same core.

Each page needs a single question.

The specialty page answers who treats that condition at this clinic, at which location, and how to book. It lists the doctors with that specialty on record and links to each one’s page.

The practitioner page answers who this person is. Name, license number, and specialty, which in Brazil means the CRM and the RQE. Which locations they work at, and on which days. It links back to the specialties.

A doctor who works at two locations has a single page, with both locations listed. Two pages for the same person, one per location, create exactly the near-identical pair Google clusters.

The specialty page also raises a registration question. In practice, it advertises a specialized service of the clinic. In Brazil, CFM Resolution No. 2,147/2016 requires whoever heads or supervises a specialized service to hold the specialist title, registered with the CRM. ¹⁰

In my reading, a specialty page with no RQE holder in that area is a question for your regulator before launch. In Brazil, that is the CRM.

The links between these pages carry context from one to the other. The mechanism is in the piece on internal links.

One page for each location

A clinic with more than one address has one more decision to make. Three different documents point the same way.

The Business Profile guidelines ask for a phone number or a website tied to the individual location. ¹ They forbid more than one profile for the same location, even across different accounts. ¹ The structured data documentation asks for the URL of the specific location. ¹² And in Brazil, the CRM registration covers every location. ³

That is where the location page comes from. Full address, the location’s phone number, hours, and directions. Which doctors see patients there, and on which days. And the establishment line your rules require, which in Brazil means the CRM registration and the technical director.

That line can change from one location to another. Resolution No. 2,147/2016 lets a doctor serve as technical director of up to two institutions, even when they are branches of the same practice. The rule itself provides for exceptions. ¹⁰ In a network of three locations, the count may call for more than one technical director.

The hours published on the page need to match the official registry record and the Google profile. In Brazil, that registry is the CNES. The same goes for the phone number.

The location page answers a question about place. It does not repeat the specialty pages. It points to them.

The clinic sheet

Take a sheet with three columns: what the site says, what Google shows, and what the official registry confirms. Set aside an afternoon.

1. Open the public registry of health facilities. In Brazil, that is the CNES facility lookup. Search for each location by name or CNPJ. Copy name, address, phone, and hours, without fixing anything. ²
2. Look up the company’s registration with your medical council. In Brazil, that is the CRM in your state. Write down the number and the technical director of each location. ³
3. List the Google profiles, one per location and one per doctor who serves the public. Flag location profiles with a doctor’s name, doctor profiles with the clinic’s name, and profiles of people who have left. ¹
4. Open the team page. Check each doctor’s name, license number, and specialty. In Brazil, that means the CRM and the specialty with the RQE. ⁶
5. List the specialty, practitioner, and location pages. Next to each one, write the question it answers.
6. Circle every mismatch between the columns. Two pages with the same question get a circle too.

Each circle is identity work, and it comes before any new content.

The decision that stays with you

From today on, when someone proposes SEO for your clinic, ask for the map first. Who is the clinic? Who sees patients at each location? Who answers for each address?

That map needs to match the official records, which in Brazil means the CNES and the CRM. Where it doesn’t, the difference shows up everywhere the machine looks.

Start with the facility registry lookup, the name of each location, and the sheet beside you.