Group Practices That Rank in Multiple Markets Share These Three Structural Advantages

A solo therapist competing in one city has a single job: rank their one website and one Google Business Profile in their local market. A group practice with four offices in different neighborhoods — or different cities — has a fundamentally different problem.

Each location is competing in its own local search environment. Someone searching for "anxiety therapist in Bucktown" is not looking for your downtown office. Google treats each address as a distinct local entity, which means your practice needs to build relevance signals at the location level, not just at the brand level.

The structural challenges that make multi-location SEO distinct include:

• Cannibalization risk: If two of your offices target the same keywords without geographic differentiation, they compete against each other instead of against competitor practices.
• GBP management overhead: Each office location needs its own verified profile, category setup, service list, and ongoing post activity. Neglected profiles drag down visibility for that location.
• Authority distribution: Your main domain carries authority, but that authority needs to reach each location page through a deliberate site architecture — it doesn't happen automatically.
• Practitioner attribution: In group practices, individual clinicians often build their own reputations. Their online presence should reinforce location-level relevance, not exist in a silo.

The good news is that a well-structured group practice website has a compounding advantage: every piece of content, every backlink, and every review that builds Practice-wide service pages build [domain authority](/resources/therapist/hipaa-compliant-therapist-seo) that flows down to every location page benefits all locations simultaneously. The goal is to build that shared foundation while also giving each location the specific signals it needs to rank in its own market.

The architecture of your website is the most important technical decision you'll make for multi-location SEO. Get this wrong and no amount of content or link building will fully compensate.

The Hub-and-Spoke Model

The most effective structure for group practices is a hub-and-spoke architecture:

• Practice hub (root domain): Your main homepage and service pages (e.g., /services/cbt/, /services/couples-therapy/) build practice-wide authority.
• Location pages (spokes): Each office gets its own URL, typically structured as /locations/chicago-lincoln-park/ or /locations/evanston/. These pages rank for neighborhood- and city-level searches.
• Practitioner pages: Individual clinician profiles live at /therapists/dr-jane-smith/ and link to their primary location page.

What Each Location Page Needs

A location page is not a copy-paste template with only the city name changed. Each page should include:

• The specific address, phone number, and hours for that office (matching the GBP exactly)
• A written description of the neighborhood or community that office serves — not generic filler, but context that demonstrates local relevance
• Which clinicians practice at that location, with links to their practitioner pages
• Which services are available at that specific office (not all practices offer every service at every location)
• A Google Maps embed and schema markup (LocalBusiness, with MedicalBusiness subtype where appropriate)

URL Structure Matters

Avoid putting locations under generic folder names like /offices/ with no keyword relevance. A structure like /therapy-chicago-lincoln-park/ or /lincoln-park-therapists/ includes geographic signals that support local ranking. Choose a convention and apply it consistently across all locations.

The internal link structure should flow from the homepage to each location page, from each service page to relevant locations, and from each practitioner page to their primary office. This distributes authority in a deliberate, navigable way.

Each physical office location in your group practice needs its own Google Business Profile. This is not optional — it is the mechanism by which Google decides which office to show in local Map Pack results for a given search in a given area.

Setup Requirements Per Location

For each office GBP, ensure the following are in place:

• Verified address: Must match the address on your location page and in your NAP citations exactly — same abbreviation style, suite number format, and zip code.
• Primary category: "Mental Health Service" is the most commonly applicable primary category for therapy practices. Add secondary categories for specialties offered at that location (e.g., "Marriage Counselor," "Psychologist").
• Service list: Add the specific services available at that location. Do not list services you don't offer there.
• Photos: Interior photos of the actual office help both rankings and the decision-making of prospective clients who are evaluating multiple practices.
• Business hours: Keep these current. Google penalizes profiles with outdated or missing hours.

Review Strategy Across Locations

Reviews on GBP directly influence Map Pack rankings at the location level. A practice with 80 reviews on its downtown profile but 3 reviews on its north side profile will see asymmetric visibility — the north side location will underperform even if the practice itself is well-regarded.

Each location needs its own review generation process. This might mean clinicians at each office are responsible for asking clients for reviews, or that your intake workflow routes review requests to the correct location profile.

Important: Review solicitation workflows for therapy practices must account for HIPAA and applicable state privacy regulations. Asking a client to leave a review in a way that implies they are a patient can create compliance exposure. Review this process with your compliance advisor before implementing. This content is educational and does not constitute legal or healthcare compliance advice.

GBP Posts and Updates

Posting to GBP signals an active, maintained practice. For multi-location practices, posts can be made at the individual location level — useful for announcing a new clinician joining a specific office or a location-specific event.

In a group practice, individual therapists are often the primary reason a client chooses that practice. Practitioner pages serve two purposes simultaneously: they support the client's decision-making process, and they create additional ranking opportunities in Google search.

What a Strong Practitioner Page Includes

• Full name and credentials: Exactly as they appear in professional directories and licensing databases — consistency matters for entity recognition.
• Specialties and modalities: Written in plain language as well as clinical terminology. "I work with adults navigating burnout and relationship transitions using an ACT framework" communicates to both clients and search engines.
• Primary office location: A clear, linked reference to the office where this clinician primarily practices. This connects the practitioner's page to the location page in a way that reinforces local relevance for both.
• Accepting new clients status: Practical information that reduces friction and is often surfaced by Google in rich results.
• Education and licensure: License type, state, and number where permitted by your state licensing board. This supports E-E-A-T signals (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness).

Practitioner Pages and Local Rankings

A practitioner page for a clinician who works primarily at your Evanston office should link clearly to the Evanston location page. If that clinician has their own professional mentions, profiles, or citations online — on Psychology Today, Alma, TherapyDen, or similar directories — those external profiles should also reference the correct office address.

When a clinician appears in multiple directories with inconsistent location information, it creates conflicting signals that can suppress both the practitioner page and the associated location page in local results.

When Clinicians Leave

Staff turnover is a reality in group practices. When a clinician leaves, redirect their practitioner page to the relevant location page rather than returning a 404 error. Any authority accumulated by that page through links or engagement should be preserved and passed to the location it served.

The most common SEO mistake in multi-location therapy websites is creating location pages that are functionally identical — same service descriptions, same boilerplate copy, different city name dropped in. Google identifies this as thin or duplicate content, and neither page ranks well as a result.

Differentiation Strategies That Work

Each location page needs to be genuinely distinct. That doesn't require writing 2,000-word essays about every neighborhood — it means including content that is specific to that location and could not apply to any other office.

• Neighborhood context: Reference the community the office serves. Nearby transit, parking, the types of clients that office tends to serve, or the specific population density characteristics of that area.
• Clinician roster: Different offices have different therapists. The team section alone differentiates pages if it's accurate and current.
• Services offered: If your north side office offers EMDR but your downtown office doesn't, that distinction creates legitimate differentiation and also helps prospective clients self-select.
• Local organizations and partnerships: If that office has referral relationships with nearby psychiatrists, hospitals, or community organizations, a brief reference creates authentic local content.

The Content Threshold

In our experience working with group practices, location pages with fewer than 400 words of unique, location-specific content tend to underperform — even when the GBP is well-optimized. The page needs to give Google enough substance to understand what this location specifically offers and who it serves.

If you have eight office locations and limited content resources, prioritize the locations in the most competitive markets first. A partially differentiated site where high-priority locations have strong pages outperforms a uniformly thin site across all eight.

Service Pages vs. Location Pages

A common structural confusion: service pages (e.g., /services/trauma-therapy/) and location pages serve different intents. Service pages rank for condition- and modality-based searches. Location pages rank for geographic searches. Both are necessary. Do not combine them into hybrid pages like /trauma-therapy-chicago/ unless you have strong justification — that approach can work in competitive markets but adds maintenance complexity at scale.

Citation building — ensuring your practice's name, address, and phone number (NAP) appear consistently across directories and data aggregators — has a multiplied complexity for group practices. Each location has its own NAP, and inconsistencies in any one of them can suppress that location's visibility.

NAP Consistency at Scale

Before building new citations, audit what already exists. Group practices often have legacy listings from previous office addresses, former clinicians who listed the practice address on their personal profiles, or third-party directories that scraped outdated information. Cleaning up incorrect citations has more impact than adding new ones on top of conflicting data.

For each location, your core NAP profile should be identical across:

• Your website's location page
• Google Business Profile
• Bing Places
• Apple Maps
• Healthgrades, Psychology Today, Zocdoc (if applicable)
• State licensing board directory listings

Building Location-Specific Authority

Beyond citations, local authority comes from signals that are specific to a geographic area. For therapy practices, this includes:

• Mentions or links from local news outlets (relevant if a clinician is quoted as an expert source)
• Partnerships with local hospitals, universities, or employee assistance programs that link back to a specific office page
• Community organization memberships — local chambers, neighborhood business associations — where the specific office address is listed

Industry benchmarks suggest that consistent NAP across core directories, combined with a complete GBP and a well-structured location page, provides the foundation for most location-level rankings. The practices that pull significantly ahead in competitive urban markets are typically distinguished by the depth of locally relevant content on their location pages and the volume and recency of their GBP reviews.

For scalable SEO for multi-location therapy practices, this citation and authority work is not a one-time task — it requires a maintenance cadence, particularly when offices move, phone numbers change, or new locations are added.