Chapter 20: Bonus Chapter — Individual Practitioners
20.1 If You Made It This Far, This One Is for You
I know a lot of people buy books they never finish.
What matters is that you got to the end.
So I wanted to put something extra here for the people who did.
This chapter is for doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners, insurance agents, real estate agents and other professionals who genuinely qualify as individual practitioners.[1]
You may be eligible for more than the organisation's Business Profile.
You may be eligible for your own.
And if several qualifying practitioners work from the same location, the opportunity becomes considerably more interesting.
Google explicitly allows qualifying individual practitioners to have this type of Business Profile.[1]
For the right professional practice, that can create more legitimate opportunities to be discovered in local search.
So this is your bonus for finishing the book.
Let's look at what you may have been leaving on the table.
20.2 What Is an Individual Practitioner?
Google describes an individual practitioner as a public-facing professional, typically someone with their own customer base.[1]
Its examples include doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners and insurance or real estate agents.[1]
The important words are public-facing professional.
Eligibility belongs to the individual practitioner, rather than every employee at the business. Google specifically says support staff should not create their own practitioner profiles, and sales associates or lead-generation agents for corporations are not treated as individual practitioners for this purpose.[1]
For a practitioner to create a dedicated profile, Google's current guidance says they should operate in a public-facing role and be directly contactable at the verified location during their stated hours.[1]
That gives us the test:
"How many people here genuinely qualify?"
Everything that follows starts there.
20.3 Imagine a Law Firm With Twenty Lawyers
Let's use a law firm because it makes the opportunity easy to see.
Imagine Martin & Co Solicitors operates from one genuine office.
The law firm has its own Google Business Profile for that location.
Inside the firm are twenty lawyers.
Some deal with divorce and family law. Some handle criminal matters. Others specialise in employment, commercial disputes, property or another area of law.
Now look at the people.
If those lawyers are genuinely public-facing individual practitioners and meet Google's requirements, Google allows the organisation's profile to exist separately from the individual practitioner profiles at the same location.[1]
We may have the firm's legitimate profile plus the legitimate profiles of qualifying individual lawyers.
Stop there for a moment and imagine the potential.
Twenty real professionals who may independently qualify for profiles under Google's own rules.
And this is why I saved the subject until the end of the book.
Once you understand eligibility, verification, accurate representation, the GBP Loop and Bigger Local Visibility, you are in a much better position to see the opportunity without turning it into spam.
20.4 The Practitioner's Profile Uses the Practitioner's Name
The setup starts with the practitioner's real identity.
If Mike Martin is one of several qualifying lawyers at Martin & Co Solicitors, the practitioner's Business Profile should not be called:
Martin & Co Solicitors — Mike Martin Divorce Lawyer
Google says that where several public-facing practitioners operate at one location, the organisation should have its own profile and the practitioner's profile title should contain only the practitioner's name, not the organisation's name.[1]
So the practitioner profile would be based on the real practitioner:
Mike Martin
Google also allows practitioner profiles to include an appropriate title or degree certification, such as Dr., MD, JD, Esq. or CFA.[1]
The principle is the same one we have used throughout this book: represent the real entity.
The law firm is one entity. Mike is another.
Google also says a practitioner should have one practitioner profile rather than multiple Business Profiles for different specialisations.[1]
One qualifying practitioner.
One practitioner profile.
20.5 The Profile Still Has to Represent How the Practitioner Really Works
Now we apply the same business-type thinking we used earlier in the book.
Suppose Mike is a family lawyer who genuinely meets clients at the firm's office and can be contacted there during the hours shown on his practitioner profile.
His practitioner profile can represent that genuine customer-facing location, subject to the normal Business Profile rules and verification process.[1]
The office genuinely represents where Mike practises and meets clients.
Now imagine Steve, another lawyer at the same firm, spends most of his time away from the office visiting clients and attending court.
Google's practitioner guidance says the individual practitioner should be directly contactable at the verified location during their stated hours.[1]
Google separately defines a service-area business as one that visits or delivers to customers and does not serve customers at its business address.[2]
So Steve's setup needs to reflect how he genuinely operates and the practitioner requirements he actually meets. If he meets Google's practitioner requirements at the office and also travels to clients, represent that real operation accurately.
Eligibility comes before the commercial opportunity.
20.6 The Single-Practitioner Exception
There is another important exception.
Suppose Mike is not one of twenty lawyers.
He is the only public-facing practitioner at a location and represents a branded organisation.
Google says that in this situation it is best for the practitioner to share one Business Profile with the organisation, using the format:
[brand/company]: [practitioner name][1]
The larger opportunity appears where there are multiple qualifying public-facing practitioners at one location, because Google expressly allows the organisation to maintain a profile for the location separately from the practitioners' profiles.[1]
Eligibility comes first.
Then we build.
20.7 Now Imagine the Search Opportunity
Go back to our law firm.
One genuine location.
One Business Profile for the law firm.
Twenty lawyers.
Let's say, for the sake of the example, that all twenty independently satisfy Google's individual-practitioner requirements.
You are potentially managing twenty-one legitimate local search entities.
Each practitioner is a real person.
Each has their own professional identity.
Each may have their own area of expertise, customer relationships and reputation.
Each practitioner profile can be completed and managed around that practitioner's genuine professional activity rather than being a copy of the firm's profile.
Now think about the local market.
Someone searches for a family lawyer.
Someone else needs a criminal lawyer.
Another person needs an employment lawyer.
The firm itself may be relevant.
Individual practitioners may also be relevant.
Eligible practitioner profiles create additional legitimate Business Profiles that can be discovered, managed, reviewed and measured.
That creates opportunity.
And if you understand everything in the previous nineteen chapters, you now know what to do with that opportunity.
20.8 Run the GBP Loop for the Practitioner
Treat each eligible practitioner profile as a profile that needs proper management.
Start with Profile Completeness and Mirroring.
Does the profile accurately represent that practitioner? Is the name correct? Is the category appropriate? Are the contact details right? Does the website destination make sense for that individual? If the firm's website has a genuine practitioner page, does it accurately support who that person is and what they do?
Then Pictures.
Use photographs and videos that genuinely help represent the practitioner and their professional environment where appropriate.
Then Posts.
If posts are useful for that practitioner, make them relevant to the work and audience.
Then Praise.
A practitioner with their own customer base may naturally build their own genuine reviews. The same rules from Chapter 13 apply: ask genuine customers, remain neutral and do not incentivise or manipulate the process.
Then apply Consistency.
That is where the opportunity becomes an operating problem.
20.9 This Is Where GBPly Becomes Particularly Useful
Imagine trying to run that law-firm example manually.
The firm's profile needs managing.
Mike's profile needs managing.
Steve's profile needs managing.
So do the other eighteen practitioner profiles.
Different photographs.
Different post opportunities.
Different reviews.
Different profile information.
Different things waiting for approval.
Different things that change.
Different ranking histories.
Different outstanding work.
Twenty-one profiles can create considerably more local opportunity.
They also create twenty-one profiles whose work has to keep moving.
This is exactly the kind of environment GBPly was built for.
The GBP Loop is still the method.
GBPly helps operate it across the profiles.
You can organise the work, monitor the profiles, manage recurring processes and measure visibility without treating every practitioner as an entirely separate manual project.
And the dynamic notification system we discussed in Chapter 19 becomes even more useful here.
A practitioner may need to supply a new photograph.
Another may have a post waiting for approval.
Another may need to provide customer information for legitimate review requests.
Another may have completed everything already.
GBPly's recurring client reminders can be scheduled on a 7-, 14- or 28-day cycle, and the reminder can focus on what is still outstanding.[3]
The system can keep outstanding work visible and keep the relevant people feeding the process.
That is how the opportunity scales.
More eligible profiles without proportionally more chasing.
20.10 Build on the Legitimate Opportunity
The opportunity comes from a business containing several genuine local entities that Google explicitly permits to have their own profiles.
Start with the qualifying practitioners. Use each practitioner's real name and genuine professional setup. Give each eligible practitioner one accurate profile and manage it around the person and the work they actually do.
That gives us something real to build on.
20.11 This Could Be the Most Valuable Chapter in the Book for the Right Reader
For most readers, this chapter will be interesting.
For some of you, it could be considerably more than that.
If you manage a law firm, dental practice, medical practice, financial-planning business, estate agency or another organisation with multiple qualifying public-facing professionals, I want you to look at the business again.
Start with the business.
Who are the genuine individual practitioners?
Which of them are public-facing?
Which have their own customer base?
Which can be contacted directly at the verified location during their stated hours?
Which genuinely meet Google's current requirements?
You may discover that what you thought was a one-profile opportunity is something much larger.
Then the work from the rest of this book starts again.
Create only the profiles that genuinely qualify.
Represent each practitioner accurately.
Run the GBP Loop.
Keep it consistent.
Measure Bigger Local Visibility.
Use GBPly if you want a system designed to help keep all of that moving.
Then measure what happens.
The aim is to make full use of the legitimate local search assets the business was entitled to have all along.
20.12 One Last Favour
If this chapter helped you, or anything else in this book changed the way you think about Google Business Profile management, I would appreciate one last thing.
Please leave an honest review on Amazon.
Tell people the one thing you found most useful.
Maybe it was the GBP Loop.
Maybe it was the way you now think about Bigger Local Visibility.
Maybe it was finally understanding verification, reviews or Consistency.
Or perhaps you reached this bonus chapter, realised that your law firm, dental practice or other professional business may contain qualifying individual practitioners, and thought:
"How did I not know this?"
If that was the part that made the difference, say so.
Reviews help other people decide whether this book is worth their time, but they also tell me which ideas genuinely helped.
And if you have made it through all twenty chapters, thank you.
Now go and use it.
Notes
- Google Business Profile Help, “Guidelines for representing your business on Google”, https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en-GB. Checked 3 September 2026.
- Google Business Profile Help, “Business Profile for service businesses overview”, https://support.google.com/business/answer/10514743?hl=en-GB. Checked 3 September 2026.
- GBPly User Guide, “Client Portal”, https://gbply.net/user-guide/client-portal. Checked 3 September 2026.