Listing fields that quietly cost you calls

January is over and the phone has stopped ringing every ten minutes, which makes the next three weeks the only quiet stretch a local business gets before spring. We spend it on the dullest job on the annual list: opening every client’s business profile and reading it field by field, the way a stranger reads it rather than the way an owner does.

Owners look at a profile and see the parts they set up. A customer sees the parts that answer their question, and the ones that answer it wrongly. The same handful of fields turn up in almost every audit we run this month, and none of them is the field the owner was worried about.

It matters a little more than it did last February. Search results now paraphrase a business as often as they link to it, and the paraphrase is assembled from whatever the machine can read: the categories, the services list, the hours, the reviews. A field left on its default is not neutral any more. It is an answer you did not write.

The primary category decides which searches you are in

This is the field that does the most work and the one most often still set to whatever was picked the day the listing was claimed.

The primary category decides which searches the listing is even eligible for. Secondary categories add reach when they are accurate and cost you when they are not, because a category you cannot actually serve puts you in front of people who call once and never again.

What we do with it:

• Look at the three competitors who outrank you for your main search. Their categories are public. If all three use something you do not, that is the conversation to have.
• Change one thing, then wait. A category change moves the listing, and if you change three at once you will never know which one did it. Write the date down.
• Keep secondaries to services you deliver and want the phone to ring about. A practice that stopped placing implants two years ago should not still be in the implant category.
• Match the category to the money. If crowns and whitening pay for the month, the category should reflect that rather than the thing you trained in.

Services, in the words customers use

Under the category sits a services list that most businesses fill with four entries repeating the category name. It is the cheapest place on the internet to say what you actually do.

Write the procedures out by name. Same day crown, night guard, emergency appointment, implant consultation, not “restorative dentistry”. Put the customer’s word next to yours, because somebody looking for a deep clean is not searching for scaling and root planing, and somebody with a broken cap is not searching for a fractured restoration.

Then put the same list on your own site, in the same words. Two sources agreeing is what makes a fact safe to repeat, and a fact that only exists in one place tends to get replaced by whatever a directory says about you instead.

Hours, including the ones that only exist in February

Regular hours are the easy part. February is full of the other kind: Presidents Day, the school break week when half your patients are away and you close early, the snow day you call at seven in the morning.

The special hours field is the only one of these that travels. If it is not in there, the listing says open, the door is locked, and you get a review about it from somebody who drove across town.

• Set special hours for Presidents Day now, and for the school break week if your schedule changes.
• Decide who updates the listing on a weather closure, and make sure that person can do it from a phone before eight in the morning.
• If you run reduced hours rather than closing, change the hours rather than hoping the phone copes.
• Use the separate hours fields if your category has them, for a service desk or a pickup window that runs different times to the front door.

The fields nobody fills in

These are the ones we find empty or wrong in nearly every audit, in the order they cost you something:

1. The booking link, and whether it books. Half the links we test go to a home page, a contact form or a scheduler that has been switched off. It should land on a page where a time can be chosen.
2. Attributes. Accepting new patients, appointment required, wheelchair accessible entrance, on-site parking, languages spoken. These answer questions a caller would otherwise phone to ask, and some of them decide whether you are shown at all.
3. Photos from this season. A picture of the building in July, surrounded by leaves, does not help somebody trying to find the entrance in February. Shoot the exterior from the road, the parking, the door, the reception and the team, on a phone, this week.
4. The first line of the description. The rest of it gets cut off in most places it appears. Say what you do and where, then the detail.
5. Questions and answers. Anybody can answer a question about your business, and on most listings we open, somebody has, wrongly, some years ago. You can post your own questions and answer them. Start with insurance, parking and new patients.

None of these take an afternoon. The reason they sit empty is that no single one of them feels like it matters, and the cost of each is a call that went somewhere else without telling you.

What to do this month

• Read your listing field by field starting from a search result, not from the dashboard, and write down everything that is wrong before you fix anything.
• Compare your primary category with the three businesses that outrank you, then change one thing and note the date.
• Rewrite the services list in the words customers use, and make the same list appear on your own site.
• Set special hours for Presidents Day and the school break week, and name the person who updates hours on a snow day.
• Take ten photos this week: the entrance from the road, the parking, the door, reception, the team.
• Read the questions on your listing and answer every one a stranger answered for you.

This is an hour of work with the listing open and somebody honest reading it, and it is where every piece of local search we do starts. A business profile that answers the question before anyone has to click is the cheapest asset a local business owns, and in a dental practice it is usually the difference between the call arriving and the call going three doors down.