Google Business Profile for Therapy Practices: Five Fields That Do the Work

Your Google Business Profile is how Google and AI search engines confirm your therapy practice is a real place, run by real people, at a real address. You don’t need to master every feature it offers. For most practices, five fields carry almost all of the weight: your name and address, your primary category, your hours, your description, and the links that connect the profile to everything else you’ve published. Get those five right and keep them right, and the profile does its job.

If you’ve been putting this off because the whole thing feels like one more marketing chore, this post is the shorter list. (And if you still think of it as Google My Business, or GMB, that’s the same thing. Google renamed it. Old habits are fine; old information isn’t.) If you’ve never claimed your profile at all, start at google.com/business and come back; everything below assumes it exists.

Why does your profile matter more than it used to?

The traditional answer is Maps. When a parent searches “occupational therapy near me,” Google pulls its local results from Business Profiles, and a practice without one, or with a neglected one, doesn’t show up in that box no matter how good the website is.

That’s still true. But there’s a newer reason, and it’s the one most practices haven’t heard yet: AI search engines use your profile to decide whether you’re real. When ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s own AI answers cite a practice, they cross-reference what they find. Your website says one thing. Your Business Profile says another. Your Psychology Today listing says a third. If those sources agree, you’re a verifiable entity and safe to recommend. If they disagree, the machine quietly moves on to a practice it can confirm.

Your profile isn’t just a Maps listing anymore. It’s one of the anchor points AI uses to check your practice exists. That’s why the five fields below are mostly about accuracy and consistency, not creativity.

Does your name and address match, everywhere?

This is the one rule that outranks the rest. Your practice name, address, and phone number need to be identical, character for character, everywhere they appear: your Business Profile, your website footer, your directory listings, all of it.

Identical means identical. “Suite 4,” “#4,” and “Unit 4” read the same to a human and register as three different addresses to a machine. “Willow Creek Therapy” and “Willow Creek Therapy Services” look like two businesses. Every variation weakens the cross-referencing that makes you verifiable.

The fix is simple and takes ten minutes: write out your exact canonical name, address, and phone number once. Save it somewhere you’ll find it again. Then check it against your profile, your website, and your directories, and correct anything that drifts. From now on, that saved version is the only version you ever paste anywhere.

Which category should you pick?

Your primary category is the single strongest signal on the profile, and the most common mistake is choosing something generic when something specific exists. Google offers categories like “Occupational therapist” and “Speech pathologist.” Pick the one that names what you actually do. A vague choice like “Health consultant” or “Medical clinic” (when you’re a solo OT) doesn’t cast a wider net. It just makes you a weaker match for every specific search a parent runs.

Secondary categories can round out the picture if your practice genuinely spans them. But the primary category should be the plainest true answer to “what is this practice?”

What should the description say?

Write it the way a parent would search, not the way a conference bio reads. You have 750 characters. The first sentence should say what you do, for whom, and where, plainly enough that it would still make sense if a machine lifted it out on its own. Something like: “We provide neurodiversity-affirming occupational therapy for children and adults in [city], including sensory, feeding, and fine motor support.”

After that, the details that actually help someone decide: your approach, who you work with, what makes your practice the right fit for the family reading it. Skip the mission-statement language. Nobody searches for “committed to excellence,” and no AI engine can do anything with it.

Do your hours actually matter?

More than they seem to. Wrong hours cost you twice. A parent who calls during posted hours and gets voicemail has had their first experience of your practice, and it was a small broken promise. And a machine comparing your profile’s hours against your website’s hours reads a mismatch as one more inconsistency in the entity it’s trying to verify.

Enter your real hours. Update them for holidays and closures; Google prompts you, and it takes seconds. If your hours are “by appointment,” Google supports that too. What you can’t do is set them once in 2023 and let them rot.

What links belong on the profile?

Two things. First, your website URL, entered exactly as it appears on your other listings. Second, make sure the connection runs both ways: your website and your profile should describe the same entity with the same details, because each can only confirm what the other says.

If you’re listed in directories your clients actually use (Psychology Today, your professional association, ASHA ProFind for SLPs), check that those listings carry your canonical details too. Every accurate listing is another source agreeing you’re real. Every inaccurate one is a vote against you that you’re casting yourself.

One more thing worth knowing about this piece of your visibility: it’s the part a website rebuild never touches. Your search rankings can wobble through a redesign, but a strong, up-to-date profile keeps working the whole way through, which is one of the reasons a well-prepared practice comes through a redesign steadier than you’d expect.

What about photos, posts, and the rest?

This is where the profile starts to feel like a part-time job, so here’s an honest ranking.

Photos are the extra with a real payoff. Parents deciding between practices want to see where they’re going, and for a family with a sensory-sensitive kid, a photo of your waiting room or treatment space is useful information, not decoration. Profiles with real photos also get noticeably more clicks and calls than profiles without them. A dozen honest photos of your space, added once and refreshed when something changes, is worth the hour it takes.

The Q&A section is worth a glance now and then, mostly because anyone can post an answer there, including people who don’t work at your practice. Seeding it with two or three questions you actually get asked (“Do you take insurance?”) puts your answer on the record before someone else’s guess does.

Google Posts sit further down the list. They’re a small signal that the profile is alive, and they’re handy for announcing a closure or a new offering. If writing them is easy for you, they help a little. If they’re the reason the whole profile feels overwhelming, skip them without guilt.

Product listings you can ignore entirely; they’re built for retail, not therapy.

None of these outrank the five fields. A profile with perfect core details and no photos still beats a profile with weekly posts sitting on top of a name that doesn’t match the website. Do the fields first. Add the extras in the order above, as far as your patience goes.

The thirty-minute version

Here’s the whole post as an afternoon task: write down your canonical name, address, and phone number. Check your profile, your website footer, and your top directories against it, and fix what drifted. Confirm your primary category names what you actually do. Rewrite the first sentence of your description so it answers what, who, and where on its own. Correct your hours. Then, if you have another hour in you, add real photos of your space.

Put a quarterly reminder in your calendar to glance at it all again. That’s it. Your Business Profile isn’t a marketing channel you have to feed. It’s a public record you have to keep accurate. And in a search landscape where machines recommend the practices they can verify, accurate is what wins.

I’m Kelly. I build websites for neurodiversity-affirming practices, which means I spend a lot of my time thinking about how the families who need you actually find you. Your website is half of that. A profile the machines can verify is the other half, and it’s the half you can fix this afternoon.