Making 34 clinic locations findable without cannibalising each other
Lumen Health Group operated 34 clinics whose location pages and Google Business Profiles competed with each other, and consolidated them into a governed local search estate that grew direction requests and booked appointments from organic search.
Measured outcomes
- Duplicate profiles removed or merged
- 56
- From roughly 90 down to one per location
- Direction requests
- +91%
- Aggregate across all locations, month 9 vs month 1
- Appointments booked from organic
- +63%
- Booking-system attributed, months 4 to 9
- Review response rate
- 18% → 96%
- Within 72 hours, sustained over the final quarter
The situation
Thirty-four clinics had accumulated roughly ninety Google Business Profiles between them, created ad hoc by clinic managers over several years. Several locations had three or four live profiles with different phone numbers, and two profiles pointed at premises the group had vacated.
The website carried a location page per clinic, all generated from one template with the city name substituted. Google was choosing between near-identical pages and frequently picking the wrong one, so a patient searching in one suburb was routed to a clinic forty minutes away.
Review responses were handled by whichever clinic manager remembered. Response rate was under twenty percent and several responses disclosed patient details, which was a compliance problem considerably more serious than the ranking problem we had been engaged for.
What we did
Stop the compliance bleed first
We raised the review responses containing patient information on day three, before any search work began. The group's legal counsel had them removed and we wrote a response protocol with pre-approved templates that acknowledge without confirming care. This was outside the scope we were engaged for and we did not bill for it.
Consolidate and claim the profile estate
Duplicate profiles were merged or removed through the reinstatement process, which took eleven weeks and considerably more escalation than anticipated. Every surviving profile was brought under one owner account with consistent name, address and phone data, verified against the group's registry rather than against the website.
Differentiate location pages so they stop competing
Each page was rebuilt around what is genuinely specific to that clinic: the practitioners who work there, the specialisms offered, the transport and parking situation, the languages spoken at the front desk. Templated pages differing only by city name are a duplicate-content problem wearing a local-SEO costume.
Govern it so it does not decay
The failure mode here is not the cleanup, it is the drift afterwards. We handed over a quarterly audit checklist, a single ownership model for profile edits, and a change process for opening or closing a location. The group runs this in-house now.
What we would do differently
The profile consolidation took eleven weeks against the four we forecast, because Google's merge process for healthcare premises with historical address changes is slower and more manual than the documentation suggests. We now quote that phase as a range rather than a date.
“They found a patient-privacy problem in week one and told us to fix it before they did anything we were paying them for. Nobody had spotted it internally in three years.”